The content on all the communities seem different.
Why didn’t the “copycats” get the “this community name has already been taken” message?
It was bad enough at The Other Place finding one overlooked sub about one of your interests.
Now you have to find every single community in every single instance if you hope to talk about your topic?
I mean, look at this:
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world
No Stupid Questions@kbin.social
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.ca
No Stupid Questions@mander.xyz
It’s a sticking point because it’s new to people who only have experience with reddit after it became more mainstream. Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc. and how they all work together isn’t a super simple concept. For all the shortfalls of a centralized social media website, the prevention of multiple separate communities having the exact same name is convenient and simple. It prevents duplicated posts. You want to capture all of the traffic in one place. That’s why link aggregation sites and blogs exist, so in order to do that you have to subscribe to all of them. But then there’s a pretty significant chance you’ll see the exact same post cross-posted to the other 3 communities…which would annoyingly bloat your feed obviously.
Except for when those communities have names that aren’t intuitive in any way, or the intuitively named communities are full of off-topic content.
I’m not going to say that reddit is the bastion of how to properly run a website. Clearly r/trees r/marijuana r/earthporn so on and so forth is super unintuitive, but until the concept of how the fediverse works becomes more common knowledge, we’ll have to help new members along. It’s taken me a little more than a week to even get remotely comfortable with how it works.
I only just learned today that I can’t see content from users on instances like lemmygrad because the instance that I joined has it blocked. I didn’t even really realize what I was doing at the time. Fortunately it’s something I also would have done, but my point still stands that its not something that’s immediately apparent or intuitive.
And you can’t see content from Facebook on Reddit, or from Twitter on Instagram.
The part that’s unintuitive is that you can see content from users on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml.
I think that magnifies the point I was trying to make as well. Not many people understand that lemmy.world and lemmy.ml are two separate “websites” in the same way that Facebook and Instagram are. They’re both associated with Lemmy and there’s no “Lemmy.com” per se.
Even doing this for a month now I still forget that a lot and treat posts like Reddit posts. Being a Kbin user, I have to constantly stop myself from replying to questions about Lemmy and app suggestions for features that I already have thanks to script mods. And that’s even with mods that highlight the post isn’t from Kbin!