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’m new to this, so some things might be a bit off or explained weirdly.)
No, actually. Because different instances are able to federalize with each other, essentially creating a link which will show content freely between them such as communities, posts, and comments. If you set your feed view from local to all, you should then see stuff from federalized instances. Now sometimes an instance can refuse to federalize, such as if thd one you’re using disallows NSFW content for example. There are also some times that I don’t understand yet (prolly cuz I’m a scrub) that federalization isn’t perfect, such as when you can access a community but not their posts, this I completely don’t understand and might be a mistake of some sort. Lemmy is definitely a bit more complicated than Reddit, but I believe that this is more a problem with user expectations/unknowingness than it is a design problem.