To be fair, what do you expect people to talk about?

5-12 comments covers most topics for a given article/meme. Any more than that, and it starts to just become a repeat of what someone else said.

Do you want to read 10 copies of “lol that meme is so me!”

I always thought it was wild that your average thread on Reddit could garner thousands upon thousands of comments, with the vast majority of them being repeats of something someone already said.

Then factor in that those same comments are in the next thread, and the next one. That’s not engagement, that’s insane!

The comments here are far more sparse, but they still cover all your bases. You still get the interesting info dump from some expert or hyperfocused individual who’s done a bunch of reading, you still get a humorous pun or joke, and you still get the “well, actually, this is wrong because…” just, now, it’s like 1 of each type instead of a thousand people all trying to crack the same joke in one thread.

Edit: to clarify, I mean 5-12 top level comments

Join both?

I like alcohol. That doesn’t mean every bar should merge into one big bar. Sometimes, despite two identical themed bars serving the same drinks and having similar clientele, you can have a cracking time in one and a shit time in the other.

Sometimes, that’s due to the staff (or mods in terms of Lemmy), sometimes, that’s due to particularly fun customers being in that day, and sometimes it’s just your mood on the day.

Having multiple communities for the same topic is a feature, not a bug. It also prevents a community from being strangled by 1 or 2 bad mods as another community can be made in response. Unlike the Reddit model, where there is 1 community for 1 topic, and if it has bad mods, well, you’re shit out of luck.