That's a legit issue with these federated social media sites. The whole idea is to avoid one entity having too much power, but it splinters the discussions and the communities in a way that inhibits them.

How do we know a better gaming discussion isn't happening some place else?

How does a company interact with fans and grow its brand without spamming every single gaming community on the fediverse?

Not sure what the solutions are, but maybe that's the point? We're trying to usher in the older days of internet communities. Smaller, closer forums.

So from what I've seen.... Yeah. There are a lot of redundant communities sometimes with the exact same name scattered across the different fediverse instances. I have noticed that many of those are new within the last 2-3 weeks which is probably attributed to the reddit exodus, maybe with some more time these communities will mature and aggregate a little bit to make it easier on new users.

For now I have subscribed to many small and fragmented communities and I view them all at the same time on my "home page" with the wefwef webapp

I have the same problem. I dont mind the app, it's similar enough to RIF, but the fragmented communities are confusing, especially since they already are much smaller than their reddit counterparts. I mostly subscribed to specific and thus less populated content, like certain games and had no interest in the big places like r/gaming, but the comparable lemmies I found look fairly empty.

Then again, I would argue that right now most users are still on the fence and only early adopters made the switch, I'm curious to see how it'll evolve within the next 6-12 months.

You can certainly just join the biggest one, but if you want to catch more similar stuff, join several c/gaming across a few instances. While they are seperate, when you browse your subscribed you won't really notice I guess.

This is a good question! I don't know enough to answer correctly, but answering wrong will likely have someone correcting me ;)

I believe each instance will have local posts/comments, e.g. a local version of /l/gaming but there are 3 methods of viewing posts: local instance (all communities/posts for users on that instance), all (all communities on all instances), or communities (all instances, but specific community). I suspect filtering will improve to bring better ways of filtering and sorting, but it's going to be dependent on the lemmy app, mobile app, and potentially custom mods on an instance.

yes , you can have many communities with the same name. One on each instance. You have two mode of scrolling in lemmy, local instances and federated (connected ) instances. You can also comment in other instances. Although , be careful when you post and comment in other instances . You basically are like a tourist visiting another country . Rules and culture are different between lemmy instances. I see instances just like countries with their own laws and culture. Some countries blocks other and some make alliance and free trade and travel visas. Some instances are free for all, others are more authoritarian. Some are more conservative , other are more liberal , some are communist.

None of them are the one true "gaming", they all are on difference servers run by different people. This fragmentation is annoying at first, but I usually just go for whichever one has the most subscribers/is most active. Later on there will probably come features for merging/migrating communities.