So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?
Is there a way to find/pick the “right” one, based on whichever has the most users?
New to Fediverse (here and Mastodon), still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing.
From what I understand – which can be wrong! – a couple of different things may cause this:
It’s a bit confusing, and unfortunately it causes fragmentation.
Also note that in a federated network fragmentation is not bad and this is the shift in thinking everyone needs coming from facebook/twitter/reddit.
Those networks didn’t talk to each other so you had to fight a battle to get everyone in the same place for the best experience. This centralized power and data and allowed people to exploit you.
In a federated network, you get the content whereever you are and everyone has incentive to share. Duplicates create a robust ecosystem that cannot be taken down by 1 power hungry individual.
There is no reason to have a single community for any topic.
I agree with your point of view and its advantages. Of course it’s also a matter of degree. One can imagine the situation where there’s one “copy” of a community per server, or even per person; now this is absolutely unrealistic, but there’s a continuity of cases from that unrealistic situation to the present situation. Somewhere along that continuum, fragmentation becomes more negative than positive.
agreed, its a balance like most things