[Closed] Moved to !fedigrow@lemmy.zip

Duplicates are a minor issue. That said, solution #2 (multi-comms) is considerably better than #3 (comms following comms).

The problems with #3 are:

• Topics are almost never as discrete as the author pretends them to be. Often they overlap, but only partially.
• Different comms have different rules, and in this situation rule enforcement becomes a mess.

There's no good solution for that. On the other hand, the problems the author associates with #2 are easy to solve, if users are allowed to share their multi-comms with each other as links:

• a new user might not know which comms to follow, but they can simply copy a multi-comm from someone who does
• good multi-comms are organically shared by users back and forth

Additionally, multi-comms address the root issue. The root issue is not that you got duplicate communities; it's that communities in general, even without duplicates, are hard to discover. Also note that the root issue is not exclusive to federated platforms, it pops up in Reddit too; it's a consequence of users being able to create comms by themselves.

About #1 (merging communities): to a certain extent users already do this. Nothing stops you from locking [!pancakes@a.com](/c/pancakes@a.com) with a pinned thread like "go to [!pancakes@b.com](/c/pancakes@b.com)".

This is a minor part of the text, but I feel in the mood to address it:

I post once to gauge interest then never post again because I got choice paralysis

The same users who get "choice paralysis" from deciding where to post are, typically, the ones who: can't be arsed to check rules before posting, can't be arsed to understand what someone else said before screeching, comment idiotic single-liners that add nothing but noise, whine "wah, TL;DR!" at anything with 100+ chars... because all those things backtrack to the same mindset: "thinking is too hard lol. I'm entitled to speak my empty mind, without thinking if I'm contributing or not lmao."

Is this really the sort of new user that we old users want to welcome here? Growth is important, but unrestricted growth regardless of cost is cancer.