Not really. I usually just check the subscriber count and pick the larger one. Unless if they’re about the same, then I’ll sub to both. Just means I’ll see more content. Might be a bit of overlap sometimes, but not always.

I don’t like it as well. People have to realize that Lemmy needs active members who are NOT part of the Nerd/tech bubble because they bring in a other type of content. I don’t know enough about the feediverse protocols to know wether it’s possible but what would help is if there where something like grouped communities consisting of multiple communities which are all about the same topic. Then you could search for e.g. “Cats” and it’s shows you this grouped community which subscribes you to all cat content. I know that there are web based tools which already do a similar thing for a transfer from Reddit to Lemmy but those Groups would have to be integrated into Lemmy itself to be user friendly.

Honestly, I can see why some people find it annoying but in my experience so far it’s been fine. Do a sweep on lemmyverse, sub to all the communities around a given topic, never really think about which one it actually came from when I see a post in my feed.

There are some quite niche topics that have been unnecessarily split, essentially just because people want to be in charge rather than joining forces, but that’s people for you and railing about it isn’t gonna get us anywhere. From an end-user pov, subscribing to multiple has been fine.