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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.
There’s a couple reasons why I use subtitles all time. Firstly I’m getting older and can’t hear as well with background noise. If my wife is banging around in the kitchen I can’t hear dialog from the TV. With subtitles on I don’t have to mess with the volume.
Another issue is media producers (TV and film) have this idea they need to blast you out of your chair with sound effects and music. So if you turn up the volume enough to hear the dialog clearly, you’re going to get blasted by everything else. Trying to manage that with the volume control is damn near impossible. Interestingly I’ve noticed “dialog boost” appear on occasion in sound track options from my streaming provider. I use it when the option is there. That kind of indicates a global problem.
An issue related to sound leveling is actors used to come out of theater where they learned to annunciate loudly and clearly. It seems actors don’t get proper stage training anymore and now it’s okay to mumble and fail to annunciate. A decent director should never allow that.