The admin from lemmy.directory actually stated that his instance tries to fetch all communities from everywhere in order to build a directory, it's not meant as an actual, general instance.

They're different communities with the same name, because community names don't have to be unique between different instances. I get that subscribing to two different communities with the same theme is annoying when you could save time and subscribe to one, but having backup communities is a blessing when the instance shuts down or mods start power tripping. A "multireddit" feature that can combine multiple communities into one subscription feed would keep subscribing convenient without forcing only one community to exist per topic.

This is the biggest confusion and obstacle to me.

They're supposed to have the same content, but may have different moderation.

A great example - /r/gaming vs. /r/games on Reddit (or /r/truegaming). All basically the same thing, but they have different moderation styles.

they are different communities with different content

this is one of the most confusing things about lemmy

I'm actually subscribed to both of these and will see if they both survive or if one of them becomes the 'main' tech community

True, it's not a good method for small communities, especially if you are in a smaller instance. It's enough tho for popular communities.

yeah. no kidding. i have another post out there decrying the same thing. and the maddening behaviour is maddeningly different between the web ui and apps. there are edges like this in mastodon but they don't seem as obvious or constant

This is an issue on Mastodon as well, and the way it was solved there was by adding a browser extension which did the rewriting.

It was something about the fact that those are completely different websites that can't talk to each other, I think.

You're not wrong, but kbin is early beta at this point. Personally I prefer it compared to the lemmy instances that I've visited, but it's still far from "done."