It’s a little daunting to me that in some cases there are 2 or more communities between the federated alternatives; what’s the best way to corral these? I had thought I could perhaps subscribe to Lemmy instances on kbin; is that correct? If so, how? Thank you in advance.

Edit: Well, this is sort of embarrassing but when I was searching for the other communities, I was accidentally searching threads instead of magazines and of course not finding anything so that’s the answer as to HOW to subscribe [when it comes to kbin]. My point stands, though, that having so many communities is a bit cumbersome. I guess I will let it percolate a bit and see how it feels.

  • @KoboldCoterie
    11•1 year ago

    It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have multiple communities for the same topic. Cross-posting content is much cleaner on Lemmy / kbin than on Reddit; if you’re subscribed to multiple communities and something is cross-posted between them, it will only show up in your feed once, so you can safely cross-post to your heart’s delight without worrying about spamming people.

    Having multiple communities gives people options. Maybe one of them will eventually establish itself as the authority on that topic, where people congregate - and that’s fine, but even if not, having alternatives means that if something happens to one of them - the instance shuts down, for example, or even just has an outage, or the mods decide to go crazy and start changing the rules or banning people, or an instance defederates, everyone can just adjust their attention to one of the other alternatives. Compare this to Reddit where when users of a given sub disagree with moderator decisions, they have no real recourse but to try and rally under a new sub with no real reach.

    Edit: To add to this, if you cross-post something, it shows (on every community you post to) which other communities it was cross-posted to, so this can be a useful way to inform people reading from one community that the other communities exist, so they can subscribe to them, too, if they want to.