Yeah I don’t agree with that either considering that any Joe Blow could essentially snipe a community either with an unpopular instance federating and posting garbage (which mods on other instances can’t even remove) or by using a popular instance to create that duplicate community and then posting content there that even more people are likely to see and siphon away from an already established community.

Second option is also a bad idea, the less guardrails the better.

My solution is one I’ve discussed with many people on Lemmy now. What we need are topics or in other words, the ability for reposts on followed communities not to be seen more than once. If that feature also allows for federating the actual repost to where by default all comments to to the same thread, that would be perfect.

This enables people to post to a main community and a niche community at the same exact time without spamming members who follow both communities. Then the main community gets alerted of the niche communities existence and the niche community benefits from the content.

That way we develop this sort of hub system that’s really nice where the general communities like a gaming community aren’t just generic, they feature posts from all niches in that sphere and alert you to new stuff you might enjoy. That’s my rant.