Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.

This premise on which your question is based isn’t actually true though. There’s /r/technology and also /r/tech. There’s /r/DnD and also /r/dndnext. As of recently, for some reason there are like 35 nearly identical amitheasshole subreddits with different names.

I feel like what you’re observing is just that reddit communities are mature, people have had time to gravitate to whichever community is more active or has better quality moderation and so there is generally a “winner” sub with more participation because… unless there’s a major problem with the bigger sub it tends to be more interesting than a less well-tracked sub.

Lemmy, in contrast, is still fairly wild-west. Most communities are not very active and have only a few subscribers. If a competing community with an overlapping topic appears, folks are willing to subscribe to it just in case it takes off. If Lemmy continues to retain a healthy number of users, I expect in most cases that consolidation would set in unless there were major differences in moderation policy or something else that splits the community into factions that align across server or community boundaries… and over time you’ll see a similar layout of one or two dominant communities and a long tail of tiny ones that few pay attention to.

It’s a very good thing to avoid what happened on Reddit that a big istance is moderated by people that don’t think democratically and rule against other people’s will deleting posts and banning everyone they don’t like.

With federation, you can choose the instances and communities you like the most, the ones with better moderation and so the kindest one will probably prevail :)

Follow both and just post to whichever one you prefer? Eventually certain communities will tend to coalesce, but it isn’t a terrible thing if there are multiple options either.

I suppose having similar communities split across multiple instances is the essence of a federated system. People will gather in communities they feel comfortable.

But yes good question overall from what i can tell the more posts one community gets the more attraction it will pull. Reddit would of been similar in the early days when multiple communities existed for the same thing.

It would be really nice if communities could be connected right at instance level.

So if you have c/abc on instance 1 and c/abc on instance 2, and you subscribe to either of them, it would, by default, subscribe you to both (assuming that both instances agree to such a cooperation).

Something could also be arranged within communities, especially when it comes to posting. Such as, when posting, to be able to select multiple coms to post to, but it would still be just one post you could edit or delete, and have all the comments in one place.

On Reddit I would sometimes struggle with which sub to post to, and I don’t like posting to multiple ones or crossposting if I can avoid it.