A user checking out one of these URLs does not want to filter only local post on that instance.
On all instances, this url should mean “show me all /c/piracy on all federated instances”
If you really mean /c/piracy only on that instance, then add something to the url.
The current convention breaks the most important aspect of federation and makes its vestigial appendage.
The current way has user asking question /c/piracy, but on which instance ?
So now they’ll all join the same instance . You wouldn’t post anywhere else since no one would every see it.
It’s a recipe for centralization.
I think this is obvious to most users, were deal with “voat with extra steps” here
This is going to happen a lot as Lemmy grows. There will be more communities with the same name over different instances. Though the full canonical name is the actual name of the community, not just the prefix name. For example !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !piracy@lemmy.ml are two different communities with two different names.
There’s no federation wide rules about reusing the prefix name of a community. You can have as many repeats as people create. In other words you can’t duplicate names on a particular instance, but the entire Fediverse doesn’t care because it differentiates by instance name. It’s just the nature of how the decentralized architecture works.
I have a number of duplicates I subscribe to and it’s transparent when I look at the front page of subscribed communities. However I have to look at each duplicate individually when selecting a community to view. An option to look at communities in groups would be helpful. I think that’s a reasonable feature to incorporate. It could be as simple as adding a checkbox to select more than one community to view at a time.
I don’t think it will ever be possible to physically merge communities across multiple instances at a base level. It’s likely something that exceeds scope of design.