This is what it is in fediverse. Multiple instances can have same communities.

If I’m looking lulz communities, I just subscribe to those with most users, because most likely it will be more active.

If I’m looking for tech or something useful, I subscribe to most of them, and then filter them after some time. Not all communities will fit your style, and you will have to choose with which community you are more compatible.

moreover, the number of subscribers you see in search result represents subscribers from your instance only. It is very noticeable when you on a small instance. I.e. this number is not a solid criteria either.

to be fair, you can make "infinite" subreddits too. I can make showerthought, thoughtswhileshowering, deepthoughts, jackhandy, etc, etc right now.

clearly in your screenshot, one has risen to the top, so there you go, check done.

As others have pointed out, this is just a natural-- and arguably desirable-- consequence of federation with a reddit-style format. However, I think the problem it causes could be somewhat mitigated by each platform implementing a feature to allow users to group magazines/communities manually-- and share them between instances and (ideally) platforms. Kind of like how Twitter did with "lists". (I think that's what they called them.)

From what I understand – which can be wrong! – a couple of different things may cause this:

• People don't know they should check whether a community already exists, before creating it.
• People search to see if the community exists, but it doesn't appear in the search results of the instance/server they live in.
• People see that a community already exists, but they aren't happy with it and create their own.

It's a bit confusing, and unfortunately it causes fragmentation.

You look at each community and decide for yourself if it’s one you want to follow. Just like in Reddit when you had gaming, games, truegaming, etc, each one will have different people, different rules, different kinds of conversations, and different levels of activity.

I feel like we need a FAQ to link people to. This is one of those topics that new users post ever few days.

I wish mods would close these threads and point people to the FAQ.

Oh which client is that ?

I think this is kind of a larger problem with the fediverse, and ultimately why it won’t displace Reddit.

If I subscribe to a community called music, as a user I expect to see all posts from the fediverse. Instead what we get is posts from a specific instance. Duplicate isolated communities is not user friendly.

Fediverse atm just feels like a complicated reinvention of forums.

Personally i like this. I think it gives the opportunity for each individual instance to flourish or fail.

My only fear is repost issues. Someone could obviously post to ALL those instances if they wanted to and they are perfectly within their right to. But if you’re subscribed to all of them you’ll see all instances versions of that post lol

Just join them both and forget about it.

Just sub to the ones you want and set your feed to home. You'll only see the single ones you subbed to. And you're right, these are same names in different instances/servers. Completely normal.

I think this is something clients/frontends can fix by grouping together communties of a similar name.

This is a natural part of the Fediverse and no bad thing.

Eventually we'll have multicommunities where you could group all the similar themed communities together into one feed and it won't really matter which one the post is on.

For example, Slide is being ported over to Lemmy and still has multireddits coded in. I presume it will be easy enough to switch this over to communities. I imagine quite a few Lemmy apps will have the same features eventually.

So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?

Generally speaking, yes - but also, this is something that will likely fade over time as specific ones stand out. Currently, the plurality is a result of no developed community for that niche existing; as communities settle and grow, less of that sharding will take place unless there's a crisis in the 'main' one.

I'm not really sure how it is with Lemmy but kbin displays the instance URL within the magazine search. Maybe you can check the URL of those communities to see it more clearly, but yes, those should be all from different instances. Whether you want to subscribe to the biggest or all of them is up to you, just like you could have subbed to various kinds of subreddits for the same topic.