It doesn't matter almost at all which instance a community is on. People could just unite the different scuba groups into one. Basically any they see fit. I'm not sure the decentralization really causes this effect. Or does it make it too difficult to find communities? I've been plenty able to find communities from various instances, at least.

[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

If people have to follow breadcrumbs to find which of the dozen groups is active, if any, very few people are going to join.

On reddit, if you wanted to find a sub for airbrushing, you would type in /r/airbrush. That was it.

On Lemmy, there's no central location for communities, but even worse is that most of the big instances WILL have a community with that name - it'll just be a dead community that someone started but never took off, so there's a bunch of false leads.

[–] Tuuktuuk@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 hour ago

You aren't wrong with that :)

The problem exists, although its scale isn't as big as it first seems. On Lemmy you can write "Airbrush" and join the biggest of the communities. It's quite visible that this is what is happening in several communities. One starts growing and then that's what people choose to join, etc.