Lemme explain with subreddits.

You have /r/tech and /r/technology, right? Different subreddits, different communities. Somebody posts something on /r/tech and crossposts it to /r/technology. You’re subscribed to both. You now see the same link twice.

That’s exactly what’s happening here, cross-posting to different communities. It’s still the wild west out here, but I would expect a lot of these communities to solidify behind 2-3 “winners” over time, with the smaller ones becoming more niche.

People are coming from Reddit where they posted to every relevant subreddit, and they’re doing the same here. It is unnecessary because of how the fediverse works, they’re just trying to maximize engagement.

On reflection, I think this might be a good idea, at least to start with: The main rationale within the fediverse for having multiple communities on the same topic is if they have different approaches to moderation (like r/askHistorians vs r/askHistory on reddit). But before new communities have worked out those different approaches—and before users have become familiar with them—we’re all kind of going by trial and error.

If everyone just subscribed and posted to the biggest community and ignored the rest, we’d never get the chance to see which mod teams we prefer. But if we start out posting the same content everywhere, we have the best chance to compare how different communities treat it. Then we can stay subscribed to the communities with the best dynamics, and unsubscribe from the rest.

You post from your instance, but the post will appear in the instance that hosts the community you posted to. I’m not seeing these duplicates, but I don’t use the app you’re using - I just use the web interface. Could you give an example of where you see this?

I suppose it’s a bit like the Wild West at the moment, with everyone figuring out the rules as we go along.

I suppose there are a few explanations for this, helped by the fact that it is very easy to share a post between instances and communities (it makes more sense with the latter where there is crossover, eg a band is playing at a festival and you post to the band community and then copy that to the festival community):

a) it’s just someone who doesn’t understand how instances work. A polite message would seem to be in order.

b) it’s someone using Lemmy to promote themselves or a product (either doing it by hand or possibly using some kind of bot). Everyone’s mileage might differ on this but, to me, that looks like spam and should probably be removed. I imagine when we have robust (any?) moderation bots that is the kind of thing that would ping up on their radar. For now, if you think it looks spammy, report it.

However, I haven’t seen any examples so can’t really go into more detail on that.

Growing pains.

Federated environments lead people to create the same content on different instances.

Some people will then cross post between those instances.

On top of that there has been some issues with environments not being in sync with one another. So some people are creating threads on multiple instances to ensure that information exists across as many instances as possible.

Think of it like how people forward emails without checking who was on the original recipient list.

Are you sure you’re not on All via Everything? Which would show the version retrieved by lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw etc as individual rows.

É complicado mesmo…