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

  • Hangglide@lemmy.world
    938·
    1 year ago

    There is nothing stopping the fediverse from checking with other instances to see if a name is already in use. That would be a pretty cool feature to avoid a whole bunch of duplication.

    • can@sh.itjust.works
      44·
      1 year ago

      They’re not duplicates. Remember /r/games and /r/gaming? Both with unique moderation styles? Well now they don’t need different names.

      • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
        9·
        1 year ago

        Yup, this is just as easy If you notice one of the “nostupidquestions@fucknuts.com” communities is always posting edgy bullshit, you unsub and go on your way. No different than unsubing from “Actual” or “True” variants on reddit.

    • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
      241·
      1 year ago

      Yes there is.

      It’s decentralised. There’s no central authority.

      Even if lemmy imposed that restriction, you could just fork the code and remove it.

      • PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world
        22·
        1 year ago

        Wait, he’s got a point though: Why not something like this:

        A user wants to create a new community. He enters a name, then the system checks and informs that “the fediverse already has a community by that name +here and +here.” The user may still create this same community on this instance - or he might say, hey cool thanks, and go subscribe to (one of?) the existing ones instead.

        • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
          2·
          1 year ago

          This would only help if people creating these communities were not aware that communities with the same name exist on other instances.

          Even if this feature did discourage someone from creating a new community, some other fief lord would be along shortly to create it.

          I did feel the same way about multiple communities initially, but now I’ve been here a while I realise that it’s just not a problem - just subscribe to all of them, that’s the solution.