The content on all the communities seem different.
Why didn’t the “copycats” get the “this community name has already been taken” message?
It was bad enough at The Other Place finding one overlooked sub about one of your interests.
Now you have to find every single community in every single instance if you hope to talk about your topic?
I mean, look at this:
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world
No Stupid Questions@kbin.social
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.ca
No Stupid Questions@mander.xyz
You don’t have to. You can, if you want. You have options in your life. You could always just go plant tomatoes instead. 🍅
This is how the world works. On Reddit there were multiple subs that covered the same topics, but the mods developed different cultures and vibes through moderation tactics and sub policies.
If you want a car, there are different companies who all provide one but with different options. Same goes for ISPs, TV networks, restaurants, and schools.
It isn’t at all a new concept and I’m not sure why people coming from reddit continue to get stuck on it. Subscribe to them all and as they mature unsub from the ones that develop into something you don’t feel like you need.
Posting to all of them will be easier when cross posting is possible on Kbin (it is already possible on Lemmy) but developments like that often take time.
Adding an edit as I’ve thought a bit more: I think it’s important, for those coming from reddit, to truly understand why the Fediverse exists. The intention is to be open source. To ensure that there is no single source of power. There are ‘unlimited’ options (instances, magazines, etc.) to ensure that it cannot be swayed, corrupted.
This is why people are coming from Reddit - you are seeing what happens when one corporation has the power and sets the terms.
I think it’s lovely to dip your toes here, ask questions, and see if you’d like to stick around. But please do understand the intention is not to be Reddit 2.0. We should not try to turn it into that.
It isn’t at all a new concept and I’m not sure why people coming from reddit continue to get stuck on it.
Because having communities with an identical name on different instances will fracture the community. Given the hallmarks of the fediverse this is practically intended, to my understanding, but it is bad for initial growth and coherence of posts. This happened on Reddit as well, of course it did, but the way instances are completely separate and communities can have the exact same name compounds the issue.
Because having communities with an identical name on different instances will fracture the community.
They’re different communities on different websites, though. Trying to force them all into one space is erasing all communities but one, just for the sake of having to see an @website.com address, or for pretending you’re not missing out on something when you ignore 99.9% of posts and comments that end up in the space.
1 million users discussing a topic spread out across 1000 communities of 1000 active users leads to more vibrant and meaningful discussions on that topic than having 1 million of them all crammed into one place, shouting and competing for slivers of attention. And no one will miss anything of deep value in the 999 other communities, because people will cross-post the good bits anyway.
I think this answer is the most accurate. People get too hung up same names on different servers. There will always be multiple versions of a community whether they have the same name on different servers or whether one of them snagged the og name and others prefixed with Real_x / True_x. Imo I like it this way better because there’s less favoritism to the one that comes first / people can’t universally squat on a community name
I think the key for people who are confused about this is that it’s necessary to consider the part after the “@” to be just as much a part of the community name as the part before it. There’s no such thing as a community named “No Stupid Questions”, with no @whatever after it, because all community names inherently include that portion.
As an alternative solution there are issues for “multireddit”-like features, this issue for Lemmy, and Kbin has one here.
There are 5 different forums on the internet about this topic.
You don’t have to join all or any of them. But they are each available to you.
“That’s the way of the world” is usually said by Ayn Rand types who don’t care about anyone else or know how to make things better.
Also, they paint the questioner as some nutter obsessed with finding every single byte about a topic.
And, no one is “stuck” on anything, we notice a defect and want to find a solution.
So think about this. Suppose you’re making a community for, say, Ukrainians who have taken refuge in the USA.
What kind of person shrugs off their need to find each other and says “Suck it up buttercup”. Or makes fun of them for asking.
Yes, there are inconvenient and irritating ways of handling the problem. Shrugging it off just tells me what kind of person you are, but it doesn’t improve anything.
Now, what we could do - crazy, I know, hear me out - is think of a way to conglomerate all the content from diverse instances with different policies into one community where anyone can hear everyone else.
Two kinds of people in this world. The ones who start asking mocking questions, and those who put their heads together.
I think you’ve lost some perspective here. You asked a simple question, and people explained how it works.
Do you want to group all the communities together? Take it up with the W3C Social Web Working Group, who own the standard for ActivityPub. It’s a group of people, make your concerns known and maybe they’ll agree with you and change it. I don’t think they will, because I don’t agree that this is a problem that needs to be solved, but I’m not part of that group, so I guess that doesn’t matter.
In the meantime, why are you reacting like this to the helpful people who answered your question?
you fundamentally misunderstand lemmy. These are all independent communities, hosted by different admins.
Which is stupid.
Of course you’re welcome to that opinion but it’s a fundamental design feature of the fediverse.
There’s no central point of control. Anyone can create an instance and create their own “No stupid questions” community.
There are obvious benefits if you’d care to consider them but if not it’s fine if the fediverse isn’t for you. There’s always reddit I guess.
There is nothing stopping the fediverse from checking with other instances to see if a name is already in use. That would be a pretty cool feature to avoid a whole bunch of duplication.
Yes there is.
It’s decentralised. There’s no central authority.
Even if lemmy imposed that restriction, you could just fork the code and remove it.
Wait, he’s got a point though: Why not something like this:
A user wants to create a new community. He enters a name, then the system checks and informs that “the fediverse already has a community by that name +here and +here.” The user may still create this same community on this instance - or he might say, hey cool thanks, and go subscribe to (one of?) the existing ones instead.
This would only help if people creating these communities were not aware that communities with the same name exist on other instances.
Even if this feature did discourage someone from creating a new community, some other fief lord would be along shortly to create it.
I did feel the same way about multiple communities initially, but now I’ve been here a while I realise that it’s just not a problem - just subscribe to all of them, that’s the solution.
I mean, are you really that concerned that you might miss some random question on one of the less popular ones?
It’s an example. If there are multiple instances of a thing do I need to subscribe to all of them? The answer is yes. It’s different from Reddit but there are pro and cons.
The answer is no. You don’t NEED to subscribe to all of them. If you want to make absolutely sure you don’t miss a single thing everyone says on that topic, then maybe you do. But if you are just interested in electric cars, you can just pick the most active one of the one with the most subscribers. Even on reddit there were both /r/electriccars and /r/electricvehicles.
If you want them all I guess.
Its a downside but also a power.
For example, if No Stupid Questions@kbin.social tomorrow decides to add a rule “No Post about cats” there are still others you can subscribe to that won’t have that rule
