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?
Embrace it, my homie. Think of lemmy use as more of a multireddit. Subscribe to things you prefer, then view it through that tab. So what if there’s a dozen posts about something big? It’s that way on reddit, facebook, and twitter for sure.
That’s the benefit of federation. You get to see all of what’s out there once you get used to the way it works. You’ll have less of a stranglehold on information because nobody can bogart a single community name. My edc community might restrict politics, but the one on beehaw might not, and the one at feddit might encourage it directly.
It’s much harder to accidentally fall into an echo chamber here with news. Not impossible! But harder. You’d have to choose to do so usually.
I know it seems weird, but trust the principle that underpins federation. It will settle out within a month or so of the migration. And it’ll be fairly democratic, with communities becoming popular based on how they function rather than name camping.
This is a culture shock for us r/efugees, but it is going to be so much harder for our communities to be ripped apart because of it.