As a new reddit exile, I may be misunderstanding this.
In theory something like a !gaming community could crop up on multiple large instances, especially during the mass exodus while instances are getting hammered with spikes in volume.
If that’s the case, we’ll have fragmented communities across instances. Is there any way besides subscribing to each of them to combine them into a sort of multi-reddit type aggregation? Or is this considered a temporary (albeit important to adoption) problem during the crazy stages?
It’ll sort itself out naturally. One will become dominant, and it’ll be your link factory
Honestly, the Reddit approach is pretty similar. Reddit had /r/gaming and /r/games, for instance, with the two communities offering pretty much the same content. Same thing with /r/baseball as the large baseball subreddit and /r/MLB as a mostly empty subreddit filled with people who figured baseball would use the same naming convention as /r/NBA or /r/NFL. Eventually, one of the ones wins out. We just have to remember that Lemmy communities have two names before and after the period, so while the initial name can be duplicated, the initial name plus the instance cannot.
It’s similar to the early internet where site.com was different from site.org.
This was my first thought. Reddit had both r/DnD and r/DungeonsAndDragons. It was fine
/r/me_irl and /r/meirl
/r/hiphopheads and /r/rap
This isn’t new
Really the protocols can develop “trending” type functionality for popularity, and “aggregate” groups (tag-based, explicit lists of groups, whatever) for which sub…lemmy’s are basically “the same”. lemmy.world/aww, lemmy.aww/aww, etc. Lemmy may not do it, but it’s doable.