Do I understand correctly that I have to subscribe to 5 different NoStupidQuestions on 5 different instances?

You don't have to. You can, if you want. You have options in your life. You could always just go plant tomatoes instead. 🍅

This is how the world works. On Reddit there were multiple subs that covered the same topics, but the mods developed different cultures and vibes through moderation tactics and sub policies.

If you want a car, there are different companies who all provide one but with different options. Same goes for ISPs, TV networks, restaurants, and schools.

It isn't at all a new concept and I'm not sure why people coming from reddit continue to get stuck on it. Subscribe to them all and as they mature unsub from the ones that develop into something you don't feel like you need.

Posting to all of them will be easier when cross posting is possible on Kbin (it is already possible on Lemmy) but developments like that often take time.

Adding an edit as I've thought a bit more: I think it's important, for those coming from reddit, to truly understand why the Fediverse exists. The intention is to be open source. To ensure that there is no single source of power. There are 'unlimited' options (instances, magazines, etc.) to ensure that it cannot be swayed, corrupted.

This is why people are coming from Reddit - you are seeing what happens when one corporation has the power and sets the terms.

I think it's lovely to dip your toes here, ask questions, and see if you'd like to stick around. But please do understand the intention is not to be Reddit 2.0. We should not try to turn it into that.

No, just subscribe to the most active one.

you fundamentally misunderstand lemmy. These are all independent communities, hosted by different admins.

It's fine.

As the philosopher Macho Man said "The cream rises to the top"

It'll take time but eventually everyone will merge into one major one unless some admin/mod shenanigans.

At least I think.

Everyone's going to say No, and "just subscribe to the most active one", but if you're a 'Fediverse completionist' and want to ensure that there's not a single thing you miss anywhere at any time, then the answer is Yes.

It would be cool if from your subscribed communities, Lemmy would let you group the ones that are the same but are on different instances.

So if the same article is posted on two or more of the grouped communities, then it would merge the comment sections into one.

So? Reddit has about 10 sizeable Subs that are just a variation of "Ask Any and All Questions". That's not even counting speciality subs like "MedicalQuestions" or "ITQuestions" or "DermatologyQuestions" or "AskTrangender". Or the different language ones like "FragReddit" (German). In the end 1-3 will become the major ones, all will be a bit different and everyone will find the ones they like most.

If I send an email to support@microsoft.com, it should be copied to support@gmail.com because it is the same thing, right?

Lemmy isn’t Reddit. It has similar capabilities, but it is fundamentally different. Think email or web hosting, not one stop shop.

No. You don't have to. But if you want to throw a wide net and not just wind up with a singular place with a unified mentality, it's good to have multiple places focused on the same topic. For perspective.

Ask yourself if you subscribed to /r/tech or /r/technology or both or neither (or /r/pics, /r/pic etc., whatever you jam is) and you will have your answer.

A community name is just an address, both on Lemmy and on Reddit. It never mean that that address had the exclusive rights to a topic.

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You have stepped through the Looking Glass, Alice. Welcome to the MultiFediverse.

I mean, are you really that concerned that you might miss some random question on one of the less popular ones?

You don't have to if you don't want to. Subscribe to the one you like best, and help grow that one.

Personally, I find myself only subscribing to and browsing communities on the local instance. The idea of the Fediverse is cool and all, but it's just way too much information for one person to process.

Some of these duplicate communities are just placeholders. But sometimes, the differences are obvious, where one community Is populated by jerks or modded by power-trippers.

Over time, the more popular community will become clear by the number of subscribers. (Or the real, topical one will give itself a different name to avoid confusion with the jerks).

Just subscribe to the most active one, just like with copycats on Reddit.

There are 5 different forums on the internet about this topic.

You don't have to join all or any of them. But they are each available to you.

They don’t get the message that a similar community already exists because they are on separate instances. Due to defederation, it’s possible that not all of those communities will be visible from all other instances. This is one reason why it’s useful to have the same community across multiple instances.

A client that aggregated like communities would be nice.

I think there will probably be a natural selection of which one prevails. But each instances may have different rules and different mods. So follow and unfollow the few that have what you like. It would be nice in the future though to ability to create aggregate subs or find aggregate subs like a multi-subreddit for a given topic.

That's the nature of a decentralized service. With time I think we can work out the kinks.

For now yes, but over time probably no. Multiple communities around the same subject are created on different instances. They'll compete to become the most active one. Then everyone will subscribe to that one, and it will grow even more. However, if over time you don't like that one any more (e.g. don't agree with the mods) you can start a community with the same name somewhere else and compete again to become the most active one (or not, and stay small if that is preferred).

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the whole fediverse requires a more effort on your part than reddit ever did. i hate reddit now and left permanently, but i know that the fediverse will never be able to replace reddit and reddit will continue to flourish.

Just let it settle organically.

I have been subscribing to the one with the highest population. Maybe that's a stupid approach, but I'm a stupid person, so it's working for me atm.

No, you choose which ones the best for you.

• !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
• !nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca
• !NoStupidQuestions@kbin.social
• !nostupidquestions@lemmy.ml

can you subscribe to all of them? yes. do you have to? No. Lemmy is still new, overtime people will gravitate to particular ones and the others will wither away

Pretty much, but i I think as the apps and front ends mature, we’ll be able to set up personal “multireddits.” I don’t mind signing up for the multiple communities because I understand why or is that way. However, do think the instances are forming more from simple load distribution and less from the types of deep seated shared interests that may have been predicted. The result is that there are more communities than expected that might benefit from being "collated", but that will be a pretty personal decision.

isn't activitypub stuff basically open?
so you could create or comission your own platform/ interface that can synthesize posts from all sorts of places and could even do things about duplicates?

thats the benefir of the open source data model and apis - someone can probabledevlop the features you want - eventually.

the current platforms probably all look a bit like pre existing forums / aggregators or social media . butthats just a starting pont, the future could be much weirder ways of compiling displaying and creating posts. and in theory it can all interoprate (within reason, and outwith federation blocks)

i probably have no idea what i'm talking about though . . . i've certainly not even queried a single activitypub api personally

I'm only subscribed to the most active one, I don't like it and I wish if it was possible to merge and migrate communities

have to

Why would you think that?

You don't have to. You can. You can also only subscribe to one of them. Did you subscribe to every single subreddit covering a specific or non specific topic? Is it an issue that you get content from ~4 different communities / magazines of similar content? Why make it harder than it is?

Can we get some multicommunities that can include some of most active for a given community across whichever instance they're in that can be subscribed to at once?

Or does that feature exist already and I just don't know about it? There were multireddits before. Not quite the same use case, but similar concept.

If you want them all I guess.

Its a downside but also a power.

For example, if No Stupid Questions@kbin.social tomorrow decides to add a rule "No Post about cats" there are still others you can subscribe to that won't have that rule

No, you don't have to subscribe to any of them, much less all of them.

There's gong to be multiples with a given name because they each exist on their own instance. Instances are mini reddits that can talk to each other, not the same site.

You want redundancy, it's one of the biggest benefits of federation and decentralization.

Just subscribe to everything what's the problem?

Nope, you don't have to subscribe to any of them actually. Look, I'm not subbed to either nsq and I'm good.

You can, but eventually most people will likely congregate in the 1-2 most active ones.

There are multiple communities because these are all different servers, which don't coordinate community names with each other.

There are some feature proposals on the lemny issue tracker that try to address this issue in different ways...

You dont have to, but thats the most obvious thing to do if you enjoy that kind of content.

I don't understand why some people have an issue with this but maybe is due to the way I have browsed Reddit for years, do with Mastodon now and plan to keep doing with Lemmy though I still haven't finished setting it up. I like having different "home pages", much like in Mastodon I can browse my following feed, the instance feed and the federated feed depending on the kind of content I want to look at that moment. Or all of them in succession if I want to check it all. When I was in Twitter I had to use lists to resemble something like this.

Reddit was even better for this if you took the time to set it up: if you suscribed to every single thing that caught your attention no matter your level of interest in it your suscribed feed ended up being clogged by the most popular subreddits among your suscribed communities, so you wound up missing out on some interesting posts in your more niche, slow communities. My solution was to only suscribe to the smallest communities where I didn't want to miss a single one of the posts (for example staples like GameDeals or some other minor communities I was temporarily fixated into, like say a specific videogame or themed subreddit -I unsuscribed from those when I got tired of them). Then, slowly and naturally while I browse keep heavily heavily curating the general feed by using the filter/block function, getting rid of anything that didn't interest me or wasn't good for me (in whatever way you want to interpret it, for example filtering ragebait subs) or often innocuous big subs I was tired of seeing or whose whole shtick had grown old. The result was a smaller suscribed feed I could quickly check daily with the reassurance that I wouldn't miss out on anything from those communities and a general feed that was always interesting to me but with the potential to show any kind of new community for me to decide to keep or filter away.

For real? I didn't know this is how it worked. I don't even know how to find those other instances. Do they just come up automagically or do you have to specifically search under those other instances?

This is bad.

Subscribe to all of them and enjoy.

"That's the way of the world" is usually said by Ayn Rand types who don't care about anyone else or know how to make things better.

Also, they paint the questioner as some nutter obsessed with finding every single byte about a topic.

And, no one is "stuck" on anything, we notice a defect and want to find a solution.

So think about this. Suppose you're making a community for, say, Ukrainians who have taken refuge in the USA.

What kind of person shrugs off their need to find each other and says "Suck it up buttercup". Or makes fun of them for asking.

Yes, there are inconvenient and irritating ways of handling the problem. Shrugging it off just tells me what kind of person you are, but it doesn't improve anything.

Now, what we could do - crazy, I know, hear me out - is think of a way to conglomerate all the content from diverse instances with different policies into one community where anyone can hear everyone else.

Two kinds of people in this world. The ones who start asking mocking questions, and those who put their heads together.

Why would you have to do that? I doubt you read every post on the Reddit subreddit, so you don't have to try to read every one here.

I mean you can, but there are instances I don't want to be federated with because of some of the content they host (which is moot for this discussion and I'm not thinking enough into whether they're any of these four). In those cases, I wouldn't want to subscribe to those specific communities. Kind of a guilt by association thing. Shitty, but it's how the system works.

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Now you have to find every single community in every single instance if you hope to talk about your topic?

no