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So I'm assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?
Is there a way to find/pick the "right" one, or should it just be based on whichever has the most users?
New to Fediverse (here and Mastodon), still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing.
From what I understand – which can be wrong! – a couple of different things may cause this:
It's a bit confusing, and unfortunately it causes fragmentation.
Also note that in a federated network fragmentation is not bad and this is the shift in thinking everyone needs coming from facebook/twitter/reddit.
Those networks didn't talk to each other so you had to fight a battle to get everyone in the same place for the best experience. This centralized power and data and allowed people to exploit you.
In a federated network, you get the content whereever you are and everyone has incentive to share. Duplicates create a robust ecosystem that cannot be taken down by 1 power hungry individual.
There is no reason to have a single community for any topic.
I agree with your point of view and its advantages. Of course it's also a matter of degree. One can imagine the situation where there's one "copy" of a community per server, or even per person; now this is absolutely unrealistic, but there's a continuity of cases from that unrealistic situation to the present situation. Somewhere along that continuum, fragmentation becomes more negative than positive.
agreed, its a balance like most things