Yeah, that's kind of where I'm at. I want a community for my football club, but there are already 3 across multiple instances - which one do I join?

Would much better understand if each 'subreddit' was something that was federated and could be defederated and users all moved to another instance.

But right now, it's just too fragmented.

I'd try to join place that has lots of people, ignoring all the ideological fights or other kinds of backstage dramas and focus on football, people who like it.

I second the other comment just made in reply to yours. I also want to add that this would kind of happen on Reddit as well where occasionally there’ll be more than one community for the same topic. Sometimes it’s different themes (there’s standard mature f1 and there’s the f1 that just wants to shitpost and meme). Sometimes one community exists but hasn’t gotten enough attention or growth moderation so people join a more well managed one. Sometimes one community exists for general purpose discussion and one for more specific stuff (like cycling vs randonneuring)

I feel like similar things will happen in the forum fediverse (it’s what I call the fediverse alternatives to Reddit). There’s going to be a period of thrashing and churn. And then it’ll settle down with each community having its own vibe and we members get to try it out and settle where we want.

> I want a community for my football club, but there are already 3 across multiple instances - which one do I join?

I would use the community browser at https://browse.feddit.de/ to find the most populated and active community, and stick with that one. If the other 2 aren't very active, maybe make a post in those communities letting them know there's a more active community at X.

Your second paragraph isn't exactly right.

The largest instances have a little duplication so there are something like 3 large gaming-related communities, 3 large world news communities, etc. This is not generally the case, for many topics communities on particular instances either "win out" so to speak in terms of subscribers or duplication doesn't exist.

You described two features that are in the works:

- There are some ideas of "grouping" communities/subreddits to better dedup but still allow crossposting and discussion.

- There are some ideas of introducing moderation tools (currently the only tool is "defederation").

Most of this has not been developed as the 2 developers behind Lemmy were working on a "get paid to introduce milestone features" basis before the Reddit refugees came over. I expect this friction to iron out over time.

Your second paragraph is exactly why i created programming.dev. Having general purpose instances really fragments the community and just makes things confusing. And putting the software name in the URL is just dumb, for many reasons. I will never need to explain programming.dev to a single person, it’s clearly there in the name.

I can confirm that programming.dev is a very nice instance.

I hope that the threadiverse will consolidate into a bunch of themed instances instead of the current state of having 200 different Reddit clones.

I think this nails a problem with federation more than the novelty of following communities from your instance. I was subject to these politics on Mastodon too. Politics hurt ActivityPub. There, I said it. It’s the elephant in the room.