Lemmy

I partly agree, duplicate communities is something that needs to be addressed somehow.

popularity is actually the solution to this specific problem. as things get more popular they will have been loaded up already.

you're only able to have this issue at all because it's new

Ok, but question: If anyone can start up a Lemmy server, how do you expect existing servers to know about the new ones without someone explicitly making the connection?

There's no central Lemmy mainframe that every server is connected to. There are no hardwired or mandatory connections, and there shouldn't be. I'm the face of that, what alternative solution do you propose?

Only the very first user to subscribe/search for a new community needs to do this. It'll just appear for everyone else on that instance from then on.

And the devs are working on a solution to make this happen more automatically.

Segmentation was a problem on Reddit too. Anyone could make a sub with a similar name to compete with another. Users on lemmy will probably slowly gravitate towards one or two big communities for each topic. It's just early days.

Yeah I can appreciate the goal, and I can deal with many of the minor technical issues but this seems like a killer for me personally. The small community is already massively segmented due to the model, and I don't see it getting better if each new person that joins up is on their own random instance and there's no common way to cross them all and to dedupe magazines.

But anyway I don't want to be too negative as I realise this is all fairly new but think I'll leave my account active so I can try this again in a while but it's not for me yet.