When I grew up I could call local telephones without the area code. Now I can't. I managed.

Those are two different communities. The same as they would be on Reddit. Literally different names.

Communities are hosted on one a synced with others. So technology will be the same on all servers as long as they haven't defederated each other.

I've had the same thoughts. I'm new to this like a lot of others so there is a learning curve but I have the same fears you do, that I will miss much of what is out there because I don't know what is available. For example, do I have to be subscribed to the Technology community on every instance?

My biggest fear for Lemmy is that it is going to end up being walled-off silos. I think we are already seeing that in motion with Beehaw defederating lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. I won't comment on whether that was the right move or not (leave that to wiser people than I) but ff that happens across the platform it could become horribly fractured.

Not sure what the future will bring but I am hopeful that new features will evolve as more people get involved.

Fragmentation is certainly a problem if you’re looking for Reddit-style cohesive communities, how much of a problem it is remains to be seen in my opinion. The risk with trying to do things the Reddit way is that one or two large instances become dominant and you’ve just got Reddit all over again.

One potential solution that I’ve been turning over in my mind is the concept of “meta communities” - collections of smaller related communities across the fediverse that can be subscribed to and interacted with as if they were one. Users could potentially vote on a smaller community being admitted into the meta community, or there could be some other requirement. It could even be done locally by the user through a browser extension. It’s not perfect but it’s maybe something to explore.

But they are not "duplicates". [email protected] is about Solarpunk technology etc.

And even for "technology" communities on general purpose instances: the naming is completely arbitrary and also on Reddit there were always communities with overlapping thematic areas.

The problem is not that there are different communities with somewhat overlapping themes (which is absolutely unavoidable) but some strange sense of FOMO because they happen to be named similarly. But that is just a mind-set issue that is IMHO very un-healthy.

This software is so new, and it has lots of potential.

I can see someone building an extension that aggregates many versions of the same sublemmy into one feed seamlessly, and then the feature being added to the main lemmy code.

This will evolve and improve the more we use it.

There's 2 things to consider.

First since this is all relatively new there's a bit of a gold rush for starting communities, eventually a couple of major communities across instances will emerge for different topics and those will stick, this will make things a bit less impractical from the point of view of an average user.

Second is if we ever get functionality on lemmy to create the equivalent of a multireddit, where you can group as many communities as you want into a single curated view (either for yourself or shared to the instance) then this becomes a non-issue.

IMO this is just a temporary problem - as communities establish themselves one will eventually become dominant. E.g. /c/[email protected] might become the dominant technology community, while others die out or stay small.

I think things will more or less settle over time. I do think there will still be different communities with the same name that serve different purposes, similar to worldnews vs. USnews vs. news vs. anime_titties on Reddit. Over here, each one can be called news, but just be on different servers.

The main goal of these sites is link aggregation. It wouldn't be overly difficult for a federated server with its own /c/Technology community to see other posts from other communities linking to the same thing and combining the discussions into a single view.

The tricky part there is moderation, but even that's manageable by allowing moderators to remove content from a federated view within their own instance, it'll just be difficult when a small instance is dwarfed by a larger one.

Bluesky is working on a fix. They have a global identity system where you can move all your data (posts, likes, followers, blocks) to another instance if you get banned. The only thing that changes is your handle.

Once "multi-reddits" have been defined and implemented in kbin that shouldn't be an issue. I don't know what'll happen with lemmy, but it would probably be in its interest to implement it too.