Otherwise, if we have a lot of medium sized instances but the most popular communities are hosted on just a few huge instances, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of distributing load across many instances?
If that’s the case, how do we solve the cumbersome user experience of having to subscribe to the same community over and over again across a ton of medium instances?
Duplicate communities are good. Reddit’s biggest problem was that a group of mods would take over a topic and prevent all opinions different from their own. Here you can just jump to an alternative community.
That would really depend on the community and I would argue that it is easier to take up your concerns with the admin of the instance, if a community is being mismanaged, than it would be on Reddit.
I had r/europe and r/worldnews in mind. Both communities had been hijacked by mods who turned them into echo chambers.
I’m unfamiliar with /r/Europe, but /r/worldnews did have some decent alternatives, such as /r/neutralnews. But most people seemed to flock to /r/worldnews, probably because of the name.
So lemmy having multiple communities with the same name could help with that, but there’s still the natural human tendancy to go to the more popular community. I know I prefer to go to the larger one much of the time, unless there are multiple sufficiently large options, in which case I’ll generally go with the smaller one first.
I wonder if this level of abstraction will mean a long-term sustainment of the golden days that past social platforms have had in early adopter periods. Specifically I mean platforms that predate Reddit, eg. Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, even FB in the pre-genpop days. Prior to that is before my time of early adoption (MySpace, LiveJournal, Friendster), so I have less historical context.