I think you’re misunderstanding the purpose of decentralization. We don’t decentralize in order to keep communities small. We decentralize so that normal people, the non-billionaires, can host Lemmy.

Let me explain. It starts with a simple premise: social media owned by companies can and will enshittify. If not right now, then they will in the future.

From this premise, we conclude that the only way to produce a healthy, self-sustaining social media is by having the people own it rather than a company. But this leads to a challenge: only companies and billionaires have the money to be able to host large social media sites. A large site requires a large server, and that requires a lot of money.

The Fediverse sidesteps this issue by only requiring people to have small servers, to keep costs low. But then that introduces a new problem, which is that small servers can’t host the sheer number of people required to promote discussions and communities. So, the Fediverse makes a second innovation: have the small servers communicate with each other and share information, so that as a collective, the sum of the small servers becomes large enough to host a healthy community of users.

We federate across multiple sites because if we were to all pile into a single site, it would overload that site, and the poor chap who’s running the server would have a terrible day trying to keep the site running.

The issue you’re noticing (having multiple communities of the same topic) isn’t really the intention of federation. That issue is just because a bunch of people from Reddit tried to make the same communities all at the same time without checking if the community already exists. The expectation is that, over time, communities with the same topic will consolidate, exactly as you predicted.

It’s no different than Reddit with the exception that the main container for the posts isn’t a singular thing. There are many containers that can all contain the same posts simultaneously, and talk to each other to also share votes and comments.

This post isn’t on my instance, but I am able to see it, and comment all the same and everyone else on any other instance that sees this post should be able to see my comment as well.

It’s easier to think of it as having 2 layers of subreddits. The first layer is the instance you’re on; the main site you log into and peruse the content and functionally the same as “reddit.com,” but spread out over multiple servers and even controlled by different admins. The second layer is the communities themselves, which are functionally the same as subreddits.

Yeah, as big as Reddit’s namespace for subreddits was, Lemmy’s is another dimension bigger because you can have one community per name per instance. This feels daunting and possibly confusing at first. But honestly Reddit wasn’t much better. In fact, I think Lemmy’s approach solves certain issues that Reddit’s approach created, such as:

r/actual_subreddit u/PM_ME_YOUR_GANGLIA registers r/nerves, then neuron enthusiasts come in to talk about the latest in sensory meat, except u/PM_ME_YOUR_GANGLIA is a terrible person who runs the sub like a complete asshole. So u/teh_whizzz opens up r/actual_nerves or r/nerve_tissue or whatever and that becomes the actual place for nervous system affectionados to hang out…until the meme spam becomes excessive and then r/nerve_memes has to split off…you know what I’m talking about.

There’s no reason for that to happen on Lemmy, because if the mods at !nerves@lemmy.ml won’t quit dipping their infected foreskins in the punch bowl, someone can open !nerves@lemmy.world or !nerves@sh.itjust.works. Eventually most traffic will move to the “actual” one that isn’t run by skid marks. Newcomers who think “I wonder if there’s any communities about nerves” will use the search communities feature, then check out the most popular one.

In the big Reddit Exodus 6 months ago, a lot of people joined the platform, created various identical communities on various instances…most of which went on to gain no traffic whatsoever. Everyone searching for communities ended up going with The Popular One for whatever topic.

Or, even if there are simultaneous functioning communities, this means one of two things: folks will end up subscribed to both, maybe the mods maintain slightly different aesthetics or house rules so they’re both useful in different ways, or the same posts get made to both so you only need to be subscribed to one.

Then, what if the instance a popular community was on goes offline? This can, has, and will continue to happen. The community can coalesce again on a different instance and keep right on tranglin.

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To a certain extent it splits the audience, but that’s the intention behind federation - to allow communities split across instances to talk to one another.

The main reasons for doing this are:

1. It keeps server costs down. Bigger servers require bigger money, and the people running these servers are relying on donations, they’re not billionaires that can just keep expanding forever.

2. It prevents all our eggs being in one basket - if a server goes down, only the community on that server goes. All the other communities can continue, and may even have cached content from the downed server.

3. It prevents the same power imbalance thar Reddit have. If a host starts acting malicious, the community can move to a different instance.

Yes, and I don’t understand how anyone thinks it’s sustainable. Inevitably, 1 instance will rise above the rest, and become the only one that matters. But due to the ever growing number of instances, and user’s insistence that federation is the way forward, it will take years before anything palatable appears.

Even though, it’s a risk, for example !rpg@ttrpg.network and ttrpg@lemmy.blahaj.zone are two communities for the same niche which despite having different ambiences split the communities.

That said, you can follow both (they’re small so you can follow more than on reddit) and if one has a moderation/culture not pleasing you, you can move to the other one.

Fundamentally, not different from reddit having different guitar communities under different names as the main onc became a shithole.

You can also close a community to redirect it toward another one in order to limit duplicates

Yes. And some people post to multiple communities and you get the same post twice unless your app handles this.

@droning_in_my_ears it’s okay, you’re just still thinking in the old way (so are some of the commenters in here). Once you get your head around this, you’ll see it.

You could have 2 different communities with the same niche and the same or similar name but different insurances and the subscriber numbers will be split across them. I think this is damaging to growth because it spreads active users.

Okay here’s what you’re missing: the active users are active in multiple of them at the same time. Where something is hosted no longer matters.

Take my news as an example, I subscribe to world news on my own instance kbin.social and on lemmy.world, on beehaw, and on lemmy.ml. When I view my Subscriptions I see all of them in my daily feed and I vote and comment in all of them.

And on Kbin we have Collections (like multireddits) which means I also have a multi news feed with news communities from dozens of communities on many different instances.

The beauty of it is, if an instance gets ruined by a Spez-like figure it doesn’t matter because federation.

So generally users will consolidate around the instances with the most active communities thus making those instances have a lot of control

You do at the moment see a lot of reddit-like behaviour with users clustering in .world, but this is not actually a problem and confusion about “where everyone is” is just a growing pain. Communities will grow or shrink or develop, find their place in the fediverse ecosystem.

Others have pretty well covered how multiple communities serve different purposes. I’m going to cover why that isn’t a problem.

When you first decide to follow a community on Lemmy- either as a brand new user or an experienced Lemming branching into a new subject, there’s going to be a few ways you find a community.

The most obvious is a search, which will list the various communities. You’ll check the few most active, and either subscribe or skip each one. Multiple communities isn’t a concern because every Lemmy client will aggregate them in your feed. When you decide to start posting, you’ll have a decent feel for which one(s) are a good match for your content. The downside is cross posting, which is still a problem that needs to be solved.

The next option, mostly used by new users, is a direct link. Someone tells you about a specific community. You follow the link, read the posts, and decide to subscribe. Other, similar communities don’t matter- the person sending you the link already filtered it down for you.

I do sometimes wonder if it would have been good if the structure was federated. So have everyone recieve a magazine/community when one is made and link to it. sorta like the old news groups but like kbin.social.news and lemmy.world.news

You’re missing the concept of federation between instances.

I take it you know how federation works and your phrasing is just odd

Yes there is some splitting and fragmentation, but that is not always a bad thing. Take “World News” as an example, an instances like beehaw and lemmy.ml will have very takes and comments on an article if it was posted to both of them - and this is good.

If you set your lemmy app to browse by all, rather than local or subscribed, you should be able to see posts from many different insurances.