The content on all the communities seem different.
Why didn’t the “copycats” get the “this community name has already been taken” message?
It was bad enough at The Other Place finding one overlooked sub about one of your interests.
Now you have to find every single community in every single instance if you hope to talk about your topic?
I mean, look at this:
No Stupid [email protected]
No Stupid [email protected]
No Stupid [email protected]
No Stupid [email protected]
There is no “the community”, though. These names don’t “belong” to any one specific group of people, there’s no “there can be only one” mandate.
As an example of why “there can be only one” is a bad thing, there’s /r/StarWars and /r/SaltierThanCrait over on Reddit. When the Disney Sequel trilogy came out there were some Star Wars fans who liked it and some who didn’t, and it became such a contentious subject that those who didn’t like it were literally driven out of /r/StarWars and had to create /r/SaltierThanCrait so that they could discuss their opinions without being downvoted into oblivion or outright banned. Why should they have had to give up the name StarWars, though?
Another example is /r/Canada and /r/OnGuardForThee, which was a similar sort of schism - /r/Canada got “taken over” by right wing moderators and those who weren’t of that particular political bent ended up having to make a subreddit with an unrelated name. Why should one group and not the other get to name their community “Canada”?
You make good points. I think name squatting and squabbling over who is the “real” community was prevalent on Reddit, and the way it works here fixes that.
But I still think that a downside of decentralization like this is splitting the activity up, sometimes unnecessarily, and making discovery of new communities just a bit harder. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but I think it’s an issue that will have to be addressed either by Lemmy UI updates or third parties.
There are feature requests in both Lemmy and Kbin’s issue trackers for “multireddit”-like functionality, that might help when implemented.
It would help, but frankly I think there needs to be more - both because it would be helpful and because, up to this point, Lemmy is mostly following in Reddit’s footsteps in terms of features.
Consider a “multipost” option, on top of the existing crosspost. Multiposting something to another community would push the post as-is (no edits allowed) there, then collate all comments across all communities it had been multiposted to into one comment section displayed on all of them. The original community each comment chain originated on could be marked on the parent comment, and child comments could automatically be routed so they originate from the parent community of the chain.
Just spitballing here, but something like this would help bridge the gap a lot more than just a multireddit port.
Those two spaces had differing stances.
There also the case of InterestingAsFuck as opposed to DamnThatsInteresting, because why the fuck does “Fuck” have to be in the title?
But then there’s shameless karma-farming duplicates, like ComedyCemetery and ComedyNecromancy.