I understand that a user on any instance can subscribe to any community in the fediverse, but I have been a bit confused when searching for communities to join. Sometimes there are communities on different instances, with the exact same name.
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Do these communities talk to each other at all, or are they completely separate, with a different host, posts, mods, subscribers etc.
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Should I just join the largest (and presumably, most active) one?
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Is there anything in place to discourage communities of same name, but different instances, from “competing”?
Yeah it's a bit of a weird situation, isn't it? Same names but different communities. I actually think this is a bit of a barrier to new users. It's not an intuitive situation and doesn't immediately make sense. I think it adds to the "this is all too confusing" problem that is inherent in the fediverse.
Eh. Most people will just see posts from the more popular one in their feed and subscribe from there. Or search for something and they'll pick the top result which is going to be the larger one.
It's not really much more confusing than say /r/Tech vs /r/Technology. Or /r/offmychest vs /r/trueoffmychest etc
One will get big, the other will die. Give it time
I think the opportunity is more interesting though for apps to provide a federated multi-community experience seamlessly. E.g. a/technology shows me an intermingled feed of all the c/technology communities that my home instance federated with