What are you guys doing when there's multiple communities for the same thing across instances?

Sub to all of them and wait for all but one to die out.

It would be nice if there were an app or plugin that would aggregate them into one heading or folder. So that on the user end all of the Gaming@ Lemmy.lm Gaming@ Beehaw, etc etc just show up under #Gaming on the users end. It would also improve the longevity of the smaller ones since we can already post across instances.
That said I'm an idiot and not even remotely sure how that would get set up :).
- I am going to say something that is highly uninformed and based on a comment I think I read but, isn’t that what kbin does?
If there is not already a way to combine communities into a single feed, surely there will be soon.
- I feel like the challenge with that is that is going to be moderation. (well, the challenge is always with moderation)
I just sub to the most popular one assuming it'll be the one to win out.
Yeah, this is pretty much what I expect to happen
- This is the way

Hadn't seen https://browse.feddit.de/ before. Thanks for that!

Start beef. Survival of the fittest.

Fuck beehaw. All my homies hate beehaw.
- !gaming@beehaw.org > !gaming!gaming@lemmy.ml
- Buzz buzz, bee nice
- Is this just going along with the other comment, or did beehaw actually do something hate-worthy?

I join the biggest one

Because communities on Lemmy are still in their infancy I join all of them (at least the larger ones) and will wait to see which of them gather traction.

Same!

Subbing to all of them, contributing where I can, and seeing what happens :)

Same thing I did on reddit, use the more popular one.

I like the idea of different communities. A single giant "community" like reddit feels too big. Effectively no one can participate and the only content you see is the least common denominator. Ideally we'll continue to see at least a few popular instances and not just conglomerate back to one giant instance. I think what needs to happen though is a better integration of local vs federal instances. There should be a toggle within a certain community page to see versions from other instances.

I like the idea of different communities. A single giant “community” like reddit feels too big
This is a good point. Some users prefer being in a community with a lower number of subscribers. Not everyone wants to post in a community with a million users so having big and small communities for the same thing isn't necessarily a bad thing. It gives people the choice to decide which one they want to participate in.
- Right, I don't know if anyone would want to post in a super giant community like reddit. Your post just gets lost in the void, content gets completely dumbed dumb, and no one knows anyone because there is too many users. This was a huge of appeal of the old time forums which got killed with reddit. I think the internet is going to fundamentally change.
I think it depends on the community. For entertainment stuff like videos, anime, memes, etc. I'd prefer a bunch of smaller ones. But hobby type communities, where you aren't only looking at newest posts, I'd rather one big organized community.
For instance, if I want to buy some new headphones then is would be a pain to have to look through 6 different instances for a stickied reccomendation thread.
That's actually a great point. Haven't really done much posting on reddit for the past couple of years but really enjoy the more intimate feel of lemmy atm. We'll see how it all pans out but I yearn for the old phpbb days of the internet :D
It is surely going to be a bigger time sink and possibly more effective skinner box if I have to click back and forth between half a dozen different communities to follow different threads on stuff like breaking news or game/event threads.
I think this will ultimately be polarizing, but I also kind of think it will have a lot of really interesting side effects as it scales.
- Well you don't HAVE to go on every community to see what every single community says about something though. You can just have the couple communities you follow and check those. Likely there will just be a couple of big communities for each topic, not dozens. What might happen even is that you have certain instances specializing in certain topics. You might have left wing and right political instances for example, so you'd just check the 1-2 instances you follow.
  Each instance would effectively become analogous to the old time forums.
  Like I said though, there is also the possibility of merging content from different instances into a single page.

I’m hoping this gets addressed with a super-community / “multi Reddit” type feature eventually. But that wouldn’t really address how posting works. You would still need to drop it into a single community. But maybe it could encourage spreading content around similar communities.

You can add your post to the tagged Lemmy communities by tagging them like so: @!community@lemmyinstance.
@prolifetips@lemmy.ml
Shout-out to @mrpresidenttom@mastodon.social for posting this tip.
*Edit: don't forget to start it with the ! And type slowly. A drop-down list will appear as you type.
*Edit 2: I think I'm doing it wrong because I'm not seeing it post in the linked community, but here's the post I this from.
- That potentially makes things very simple to kind of 'instantly cross-post' w/ a multi-reddit type setup

I choose the one with the most subs. Multiple 'new' posts of the same thing will irk me.

They should treat it like hashtags on mastodon.

Anyone can post to a #communityname. Local mods are responsible for content from their instance. If an instance doesn't weed out shit posts, other instances can stop importing its content.

I think defederating is easier said than done, and besides, what if one community is very well behaved and helpful and another is toxic and awful? You throw out the good with the bad in that case.
I think instead the user should be able to choose to combine similar communities, similar to the 'multireddit' concept. Then they can get lemmy.ml gaming and beehaw gaming in the same feed.
To help with discovery, a curated list could be created, and perhaps communities from that list could be suggested as time goes on. This does require some kind of centralisation but it would be down to the instance owner to decide to subscribe to it.
I think defederating is easier said than done, and besides, what if one community is very well behaved and helpful and another is toxic and awful? You throw out the good with the bad in that case.
I think instead the user should be able to choose to combine similar communities, similar to the 'multireddit' concept. Then they can get lemmy.ml gaming and beehaw gaming in the same feed.
To help with discovery, a curated list could be created, and perhaps communities from that list could be suggested as time goes on. This does require some kind of centralisation but it would be down to the instance owner to decide to subscribe to it.
- To me the trick isn't consuming similar communities, but cross pollinating to them. Like if you want to comment on a new game trailer do you copy and paste the same thing into ten threads?

I sub to them all, and then order the communities to fight each other. The last community standing is the winner. Surprisingly, none of this has ever happened yet.

I just keep an eye on all of them.
Eventually this whole thing will sort itself out and the snowball effect will see some communities get bigger while others fall to the wayside. It's a natural progression.

Join all of them of course.

I'm joining all of them for now. I figure eventually I'll have a favourite for each topic and then just keep that one, or maybe I keep them all except the one filled with trolls.

I just subscribe to both of them, the more mindless scroll content, the better >:D

I just subscribe to all of them. And I feel it's worth pointing out that this was a thing on Reddit too. I often saw the same post on two or three different subreddits I was subscribed to. Eg. I was subscribed to both CanadaPolitics and Ontario, so Ontario politics stuff often appeared twice. Three times if it was local Ottawa news that made provincial and national headlines.

Offtopic, but how do you search for communities on lemmy? I am facing a bit of trouble getting started. Any help would be really appreciated

Look at their activity, if cannot determin which is the most likely to survive, I sub them all and wait.

Eventually one will become the biggest/most successful. Give it a bit of time.

Same thing that made, for example, /r/technology bigger than /r/tech on reddit.

I’ve been joining all of them. I might pare down if I need to at some point, but I want to try to catch all the discussion on a topic.

all, why not?

As a new mod of c/Alberta, the community for the province is much larger on Lemmy.ca.

However, that's also simply because people are more likely to subscribe with how much more focused the instance is on Canada, so it's a given more people will join it.

Honestly, so far, while I've been trying to get the Alberta community here up and running, I have no issue with the one on Lemmy.ca existing. If anything, I hope that the communities can co-exist because perhaps it'll become the case where certain instances will develop their own cultures in the same way some Peertube instances do. We even have the Lemmy.ca communities relating to the province in the community sidebar to encourage people to take advantage of the federated nature of Lemmy.