Im joining in on the reddit ditching thing, and was kinda worried at first that i wouldnt be able to like use it the way i did reddit as it feels like a whole new place, but after engaging with posts and people and actually being a part of lemmy rather than being lurk mode all the time i was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to become a member of the community, theres a reasonable amount of subs (or whatever the other word for em is) that fit my interests, enough linux content and shitposting for my liking, and the overall random posts made by people equally fed up with Leddit. (also i admit i used reddit a little cus there was this post on the fedora sub showing how to fix a sound issue i been having after a recent update)
So if I create the community “beerpong” on my instance feddit.de you can subscribe to it, it will go in to your feed like it was on yours. You can interact with it just as if it was on yours.
But you or someone else could also create the community “beerpong” on your instance lemmy.one. If you view communities on other instances than your own there name will show up differently. Since I’m on feddit.de the community shows up as “asklemmy@lemmy.ml” on my screen to indicate which community exactly it is.
So if you will there could be “duplicate” communities. But imo that’s not really an issue. On Reddit you essentially also have duplicate communities. They have slightly different names. There is r/publicfreakout and then there is r/actualpublicfreakout. You might think that two communities could have the same name on lemmy but they actually can’t if you understand that the full name of a community is the combination of the community name and the instance it’s running on.
So this is NOT asklemmy. It’s asklemmy@lemmy.ml
I get that there are similar subreddits but not a ton of overlap. Subs will merge or redirect to the one with more traction. Hearing there’s possibly a asklemmy on each instance, makes it feel like a bunch of factions instead of a community. When I was adding communities to follow, one instance seemed to focus on entertainment (books, movies, music, etc) and that made sense. I initially thought that each instance had a “theme” and people would be directed to follow the community on that instance.
Some instances might just focus on a topic. And I agree that makes sense.
On Reddit all the subs are community run too. So if two subs merge or redirect or something that is just because the mods of that one sub decided to do so. It’s not like reddit is forcing anyone or making those decision. Nothing stops you from creating r/askreddit2 and decide to not merge it with the “main” askreddit.
The same thing is possible here. And give it some time. At some point I hope that certain communities for a topic will establish themselves with good rules and good moderation over others and then there will a natural flow towards those well established communities and there will be less overlap. It really is exactly the same situation here as it is on reddit.
do I have to make a new account on each instance to interact? can someone have my username on another instance?