no, each server (kbin.social, fedia.io, lemmy.world, etc.) can have their own communities, since there is no centralized server that manages community names it would be impossible to track which servers already have a community with the same name
yes, that’s the beauty of the fediverse! this post explains how you can do that. you can also view and interact with posts from other federated social media sites such as Mastodon if you are interested in that sort of thing
The big issue would be to get everyone to sign up for something like that though. Since things have been running for a while without any sort of checks like that, it would be difficult to switch to that system now (do you merge communities with conflicting names, do you let them change their name, do you let them delete the community, etc.). Plus there’s the whole nature of the fediverse where every instance can be customized to the creator’s needs (so one instance might want to be on that database and others might) and it just becomes too much work to get everyone on board.
Maybe I’m wrong and someone will eventually implement something like this and people will want to use it, but I very much doubt it from what I’ve seen of the fediverse so far
It wouldn’t be impossible to track. Decentralized databases are a thing. Honestly blockchain would be useful here. Never thought I’d say that.
The big issue would be to get everyone to sign up for something like that though. Since things have been running for a while without any sort of checks like that, it would be difficult to switch to that system now (do you merge communities with conflicting names, do you let them change their name, do you let them delete the community, etc.). Plus there’s the whole nature of the fediverse where every instance can be customized to the creator’s needs (so one instance might want to be on that database and others might) and it just becomes too much work to get everyone on board.
Maybe I’m wrong and someone will eventually implement something like this and people will want to use it, but I very much doubt it from what I’ve seen of the fediverse so far