Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.
With Lemmy, doesn’t it follow that similar communities on different instances will simply dilute the userbase, for example !technology@lemmy.ml and !technology@beehaw.org. How do we best use lemmy as a (small c) community when a topic can be split amongst many (large C) Communities?
This is an earnest question, in no way am I suggesting lemmy is inferior to reddit. I’m quite enjoying myself here.
It wasn’t always like that on Reddit… how did /r/technology beat out /r/tech? There’s hundreds of examples of similar and competing sub names.
One naturally gets more popular. One post on one gets more traction, more people link to it, more people end up subscribing to that one. When new people search for a tech sub they naturally go for the one with all the subscribers. It’s a self-perpetuating loop.
It’s really no different on Lemmy. Since everything is interconnected and when you search “technology” both communities show up… one will eventually get bigger and become THE place. It’s already happening.
It’s not really as big an issue as people think. It’s just that Lemmy is still in early days and the de facto communities aren’t quite established yet. Give it a little time.