Why? Automod is just a tool, the issues people have with it is how overzealous the mods using it are. If you’re moderating a community with 10,000+ people you can’t expect to filter and manage everything yourself, so a bot scheduling posts and filtering potential spam/low effort content is necessary.

I’m aware that people are slowly grouping up to one specific community per topic but I don’t think this means there isn’t an issue with communities being fractured. Using a third party tool to gauge which communities are popular also isn’t a great solution. Just searching Linux shows:

• !linux@lemmy.ml
• !linux@lemmy.world
• !linux@sopuli.xyz
• !linux@programming.dev

I don’t think each one of these communities has a different audience. It’s the same audience, but there isn’t an obvious answer for which one to visit or post in.

Competitions where individuals or teams try to solve complex programming problems as fast as possible. Websites like Codeforces even have weekly online competitions and leaderboards. It’s great for learning problem solving.