The redundancy is somewhat the point. While one instance may have a dominant version of a community which is visited by people of numerous instances, other instances having local versions promotes decentralization, and helps smaller instance form their own culture.
The decentralization is good because it ensures a single power mod, cabal of mods, or crooked admin situation can not unilaterally ruin everything. Users can just jump ship to a different community that is run by different admins and mods.
Smaller instances having spaces where their own memes and in-jokes is good to create a culture for that instance to help give some different flavor and helps that specific instance grow. This feeds into supporting the variety of smaller communities on that instance, allowing them a chance at traction rather than existing in a void.
If you want both communities, just subscribe to them both and let them appear on your feed.
I find cross posting between the communities here kind of annoying tbh. I end up getting a lot of duplicate posts because I subscribe to both like OP suggested
In the feed, or rather the API endpoint that populates the feed, it is up to the client to combine duplicate; there's no cross post data attached to the post objects until you click into a post.
I'd like to see multi-reddit type functionality, so you can see each of the communities as one feed. And the ability to subscribe to that multi-lemmy.
Plus deduplication. One entry in the feed that covers all cross-posts (with some way to pick which comment feed you want to see - or hey, maybe combine them).
And besides, there’s a good chance that eventually only one or two truly survive, so chances are it won’t be a problem in the future. Enjoy why you live in the bleeding edge, where everything is new and still settling
It fractures good discussions and fosters more social bubbles.
What we'd need is a sort of mirroring by willingly crossposting and, by that design, share the conversation as a whole and not as a pointer to the original + local discussion.
Especially annoying with tech news scrolling past 5 identical posts because we have 5 different types of r/technology or c/technology (too lazy to link a specific one...)
I don’t necessarily see fracturing as a bad thing. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t find the askreddit discussions with 10,000+ replies to be particularly high quality. At least, no higher than what were found in much smaller threads. Fracturing can help make threads less overwhelmingly large. In addition to the other reasons why the redundancy can be a positive.
I understand why seeing ten different versions of ctechnology would get old, but that’s only when scrolling by ‘all’. Scrolling by either local or subscriptions will for the most part fix that. A downside is if you are subscribed to multiple ctechnology communities, in which case having a “multireddit” style feed would be nice. I think the Voyager app may offer that, I actually haven’t tried it out.
But when it comes to browsing ‘all’, seeing duplicates from different instances is a far sight better than having a centralized site where ‘all’ is dominated by low effort rage/horny/stupid bait.
I only filter by subbed and (to not miss) also wanna see all the tech news I can get so I will sub to multiple.
I would like a design like crossposting but instead of either or the other make it a feature.
With your feedback in my mind I'd propose this idea:
Share the discussion as a user to another community like crossposting. As a visitor/browser of the communitx it was posted on, you can now set a switch to either see all content discussed by all communities in one post (and somehow federated to all other instances) or filter by a specific one because one instance is always the toxic one.
If a mods decides it doesnt fit, he doesnt delete/take down the post but instead defederates the instance from this one post.
With that design it should combat spam posting the same post as it can't be spoofed.
It would also respect user blocked instances.
Sort of a federated post in the fediverse.
I don't know how that would be solved in lemmy nor the fediverse protocol but it sounds plausible as a standout feature.
I don’t design or implement features, but sure on a user end I’m sure there are many possibilities for fine tuning. I understand the desire to make a feed act just a certain way, I had used Apollo for Reddit and heavily taken advantage of its filter and organization features.
I don’t think that level of streamlining should be the default on the federation level, as OP mused by merging the communities themselves. The existence of duplicate communities is a feature of federation.