I also struggle to see the issue here. People will subscribe to the various communities across instances, and they’ll quit the ones they don’t like, thereby making the best ones rise to the top, just like it works across subreddits of the same topic.

I guess the concern is discoverability? On mobile web, Beehaw’s homepage show “Local” (not sure if just Beehaw or all instance). It’s true that it’d be good if the default was “All”, so discoverability isn’t fragmented.

Maybe some functionality could be added to enable redirecting your local instance community to the more popular one? Is there any downside to something like that?

I don't think this is a problem. It's the same on reddit where you can have multiple gaming subreddits or multiple news subreddits. Eventually the communities will consolidate.

My proposed solution to this issue is a way to group subscribed channels. Like if I sub to x number of Games communities I wish I could drop them all in a folder labeled Games so I could browse all of those posts in one spot.

UI would be like Communities -> Subscribed (All) -> "Individual" folder hierarchy containing w/e you want.

I think the main solution is to have an easy way of searching for existing communities before deciding to make you own. browse.feddit.de seems to be a good step in that direction to me.

I'm just trying to subscribe to as many of the duplicates as I come across for communities I see and like. I suspect eventually some will become the most popular ones and 'win' the unofficial title as the 'main one' if the overall user base continues to grow. Am I right in thinking it also depends on which instances your 'home instance' continues to federate with (IE admins don't block) or have I totally misunderstood and overcomplicated how it works in my mind?

If I'm understanding this whole thing correctly: an instance that your 'home instance' (where you signed up) has federated with might host a larger user base for one community, but if their admins blocks your home instance or vice versa, you lose the ability to interact with that community(?) I would think this means ideally you want your home instance to host the community that 'wins' so you're less likely to lose access, right?

So if hypothetically for whatever reason lemmy.world or lemmy.ml blocked the other, users who signed up on lemmy.world would lose access to the communities hosted on lemmy.ml and vice versa. So duplicates would still pop up if the most popular community is hosted somewhere your home doesn't have access to, right? I'm far less likely to create multiple accounts just to access an unofficial 'main' cat community than I am to just click 'subscribe' on any available sub with the word 'cat' in it.

It’ll sort itself out. Kinda like how you could have a bunch of different subreddits about the same thing (r/gaming vs r/games vs r/videogames, for example) but one always bubbles up to be the biggest main community. Similar will happen here. There’ll be many instances for the same thing, but eventually there’ll be “the one” that becomes the unofficial official one.

Yeah I this is my biggest problem, and there's always like 30 people saying "it's not a problem, it's a feature!"

Either they are in denial or I'm just completely incompatible with federation.

Why would I want 100 fragmented communities for the exact same thing? If I wanted to consume content from all of them sure, I could follow all 100 but that is so tedious. Plus what if I wanted to interact with them? I'd have to ask the same question 100 times!

The first site to figure this out def has the biggest chance of being “the one” right now