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It's fine for news, tech and memes but none of the niche subs that I loved are here. I really miss the sub for my city.
Why not create it?
Can one simply create an arbitrary community on any lemmy instance? I wonder how lemmy handles multiple communities of the same name, across multiple instances.
yeah, that's kind of an issue. Many communities exist more than once on multiple instances. Then again, this can also be a benefit. Maybe one of them isn't to your liking -> choose another one. Or one of them goes down -> there's a backup.
They're separate but you can connect to communities across instances. I would recommend posting to [email protected] to give it some attention so others are aware it exists.
What does connecting them do?
Sorry, connecting might be a bad way to explaining it. You can access communities on other Lemmy instances (as long as they're federated together, which they probably are).
lemmy handles it like email does. The full community name (like your username) has the domain included.
So you can have [email protected] and [email protected], and those are totally separate communities.
The same way Reddit handled communities that had nearly identical or similar topics:
One gets popular, the other doesn't.
I am new to Lemmy, but from what I can tell you can create an arbitrary community, as long as the server allows it. Same name on different instances are treated as totally separate entities. In my opinion, as a new user, I think that is highly non optimal as it creates a fragmented set of users for a given topic. If you go to feedit.de and search for technology you will see a number (seems about 10 or so) different communities with the exact same name. It is up to you to go to each one of them and figure out which one, or ones, you want to follow.
Will people come?
If you don't make it, they definitely won't come, so might as well make it, right?
Yes. Just keep posting. You might not get any responses for a while but keep posting news, photos, etc.
If you just create it and leave it empty, you probably won't go anywhere. If users come and see at least one person is regularly posting, it's much more attractive.
From what I see, Lemmy is growing and it may, eventually, grow if you create a local community for a city / region. My advice for anyone that would like to create a new community is to ensure you are creating content on a regular bases until there are enough other people to also contribute, with the knowledge could be a while (weeks / months????) before others discover it.
No time like the present to make it yourself!