If I understand Lemmy correctly, you can create duplicate communities on different instances. Isn’t this kinda counter productive because this may lead to less user interaction in those communities, because the user base gets split up between competing communities.
Is there a way to fight this division of the (small) userbase or is this effect even desired because it leads to more tight knit communities on the different instances?
I suspect it doesn’t really matter - users can see all of the communities across all of the instances when they search, and they can choose which ones are of interest to them.
it matters a lot. if something is happening you want a quick overview of big discussion and not jump between a bunch of 10 small discussion rooms.
Reddit also has a bunch of homogeneous subs. Not a problem.
meirl and me_irl come to mind. Yet they both developed their own feel and personality. Not sure if that will be the same here.
One of the communities will naturally become the biggest and the others will be focused/backups. This happens with reddit itself as well.
Reddit has the same situation with subreddits. People will just gradually conglomerate into the largest 1-3 groups, save for the ones that can’t get along with anyone who will go form their own little echo chambers.