Fediverse

Let's say there's a group of people in your hometown who like dogs. They will talk about dog thing this, dog thing that, probably something local. Now you travel to another town and they too have a group that likes dogs. They will talk about dog things too, but probably it'll be different dog things that are also specific to their location.

You have the option to join both dog communities without physically traveling from one town to another. You can even choose not to join a dog group in another town that only like to talk about dog fighting for example.

There is no "tech savvy" required here. You signed up in a town that has communities there, you can see communities from other towns, and you can choose to join them all, some, or none. It's up to you.

Anti Commercial-AI license

you can just subscribe to them all. that way, if one instance goes down, or dies out, or makes nonsensical moderation decisions, you still have the others. it's not a bug, it's a feature!

Other people have already given more than enough answers, but welcome! I'm glad you're here 😊

Subscribe to all of them. It won't be a problem.

It's like if you followed #s of the same thing on Instagram, twitter, mastodon, bluesky, and whatever the equivalent of # is on Facebook, then a reddit sub with the same name. Different populations and user bases, but that's a good thing.

There's some degree of consolidation that happens, particularly when one community is on a bigger instance and would be better served by being hosted elsewhere. But there's not really any barriers to using multiple. If you crosspost, you have better chances of it being seen anyway, and you'll get access to any responses. If you're wanting to comment, then the OP that crossposted is going to get your response no matter which ones it's in.

Only drawback is that your comment in one won't show in the others unless you copy/paste it. Which is perfectly valid if you want to, but most people would see your comment eventually anyway, so the conversation will still happen if it would have in the first place.

I kinda had issues adapting to it myself, but now I tend to prefer it when communities are spread out, because every instance has its own vibe usually. So you get different kinds of discussions than you would if there was only one community on one instance.

Some subjects end up needing a single community just to make it easier to find, but it's pretty rare imo.

U can always just subscriber to multiple

PieFed can do this, but Lemmy cannot. There is no official app support for PieFed yet, though testing is underway with Thunder so perhaps soon - for now check out PieFed.social in a web browser, and see the Topic areas, or the new user customizable and shareable Feeds. e.g., Arts & Crafts.

The biggest issue with merging communities is how are rules and moderation handled? There's no consensus on what the solution to that is.

Hey,

Welcome to Lemmy.

You can have a look at the list of active communities, there is a pinned post on !communitypromo@lemmy.ca

https://lemmyverse.net/communities?order=active can also help with finding the most active community on a topic. You can use the house icon on the right to set your home instance (lemm.ee in your case) to be redirected to it when you click on the links.

Well, that's part of the decentralisation with its pros and cons. And that's what i enjoy about the Verse (lemmy, mbin, piefed...)

• cons : multiple communities with the same name. People are dispersed.
• pro : no centralised decision for all the Verse. Several flavor.

You can chose them based on :

• the number of comments and posts.
• the moderation team by checking the modlog of their community. Do you agree with their value ? How is it managed ?
• people. Do you fell well there ? Or do you prefer there ? Only time can tell you :)

Another idea :

• Use an app that support multi-communities
• Create a Piefed account so you can benefit from multi-community : feed. Create a feed, and put those similar community in one place. On few cross-post, they also regroup comment in one place. It's still a new software but i enjoy it a lot. :)

Consolidation sometimes happens, but sometimes doesn't for certain reasons, such as a community being abandoned, or different visions for a similar topic.

Personally I would recommend picking the most popular community or the one that seems to appeal to you the most, and only posting in that one, while staying subscribed to the others (if they are active) to keep abreast of that content and be able to participate in the comments if you desire.

Yes and no, this topic comes up fairly frequently, and generally...nobody knows the best solution forward LMAO

piefed.social is a Lemmy "competitor" and is intended to be fully interoperable, but in practice it hasn't matured yet and it's interoperability with the Lemmy-verse is decent but has its quirks

But a big thing there is they have a multi sub type feature to combine comms like that

But some people also like the multiple comms, because they can have different viewpoints and culture.

Like lemmy.ml is a huge Tankie instance and their c/memes comms moderation skew towards censoring of comments and posts critical of Russia/China/NK and allows political memes

Where as c/meme on .world have banished most political memes directing them to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world instead