So which one is actually official one? I can't describe what "official" mean here, maybe the one that actually came from reddit or the one with more subsscribers or one with more activity ?
Also Why there are multiple copies of same community in different instances? Isn't the whole point of lemmy is that it is federated?
Yeah, it's federated, meaning you can subscribe to each of them and post to whichever one you fancy. If you want to post to multiple, it's a good idea to use the cross-post feature.
Having only one singular official community would be rather bad, as then the respective server owners and moderators would have central control like on Reddit.
But won't it be a good thing to create another community after an already existing community gone bad instead having multiple at the same time?
Also won't there will be an fragmentation of users issue? Won't it lead to not a single community grows big because it's users are scattered across different instances?
It's not like you can stop people from creating the same community again. Just join the one with the most active users. It's also not like this isn't happening on Reddit too, the subreddits there just have slightly different names instead of the same one on a different instance.
I mean, these communities do get created when someone feels like there's a reason to. There's just no council or whatever regulating when and where a community gets to be created, so any user on any instance can decide to open up and promote their community.
And frankly, I have no idea what the precise effects are. When you subscribe to all of these, it won't really be much different from just one big community in that sense. It may mean, though, that someone new accidentally joining only one of the communities will not be presented all the content they want, yeah.
On the flip side, having it split is kind of cool, because you can decide to only subscribe to 2 out of 4 communities, if you only want half as much of this content in your feed. Or you can decide to subscribe to all of these, but not to the one on angry-instance.net, because you don't like the tone of the discussions in that one.
Also won’t there will be an fragmentation of users issue?
when you can follow, subscribe to, post to, or comment on any community on any instance, there’s no fragmentation
when followers know there are plenty of options, it also prevents any single community from becoming too big or overbearing – and since the instances are all privately owned, the only thing you gain by growing your community bigger than everyone else is increased server load
Sometimes the mods of overlapping communities will discuss merging, usually initiated when one of them notices there is little engagement in their own. But the general consensus in the Lemmy admin/mod population is that having overlapping communities on different instances is a net benefit.
I like to think of instances as countries. Each instance has its own rules and culture, and that affects how the communities are moderated. For example, the beehaw.org instance is heavily moderated compared to lemmy.world. Continuing with our example, the Technology community on beehaw.org will be moderated differently than the Technlology community on Lemmy.world.
So each instance has its own reason for existing. Another example will be https://lemmynsfw.com/ which is an 18+ instance. Basically, when you register in an instance, you become a citizen of that country.
So in summary, each instance has its own rules, its own policies, its own culture, and the moderators of the community that is that instance are bound by them. So unixporn@lemmy.world is not the same as unixporn@lemmy.ml.
Frankly, I welcome multiple unixporn communities, as the largely singular community on reddit was too strict, in my opinion, and many screenshots went unshared as a result.
I thought it will be like various communities will be on various instances and lemmy connects them, not a single community scattered across multiple instances.