this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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The federated nature of the fediverse with all it's implications.
An instance hosting a community might
Communities can have the same topic, but differ in
I think it's good to have some redundancy both as a backup and to have some choice. As with all things fediverse, we don't need to find a consensus. Those who like to have one big instance or community can join the biggest. Those who prefer some diversity can spread out and create duplicates. Reality will most likely always be something in between.
Another approach could be to ask: Why are communities split? If you're right and there's really no good reason, then how comes this phenomenon occurs so often? Maybe the prevalence of the phenomenon hints at reasons which exist, but are not well understood.
Communities can also look like they have the same topic on the surface level, but be completely different when in the context of their own instances. The obvious example is "news" or "politics" or other "real world things" communities on separate country-focused instances, but also "news" on an art instance could be dedicated to "art news" or "writing news" in a writing specific instance.
Or the distinction could be more subtle, like a tech community on slrpnk could focus towards more eco-friendly viewpoints to news about tech compared to a general purpose instance's tech community. Or Beehaw, for example, seems to lean on more "serious" talk and discussion (or I imagine it would given it's history, I avoid visiting too news-heavy communities due to vaguely gestures at everything) compared to, say, .world which really seems to embody Reddit's free-for-all vibe.
Good point, thanks for spelling it out. I was only vaguely aware of what you just described.
That seems to be something unique, tied to the federated structure. Could be confusing for people coming from monolithic platforms. They may not realize what they are seeing.
I kind of get this, but:
Also possible, but in most cases a large majority of community members can certainly agree on some compromise.