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Bacteria are essential for many ecosystem services but our understanding of factors controlling their functioning is incomplete. While biodiversity has been identified as an important driver of ecosystem processes in macrobiotic communities, we know much less about bacterial communities. Due to the high diversity of bacterial communities, high functional redundancy is commonly proposed as explanation for a lack of clear effects of diversity. The generality of this claim has, however, been questioned. We present the results of an outdoor dilution‐to‐extinction experiment with four lake bacterial communities. The consequences of changes in bacterial diversity in terms of effective number of species, phylogenetic diversity, and functional diversity were studied for (1) bacterial abundance, (2) temporal stability of abundance, (3) nitrogen concentration, and (4) multifunctionality. We observed a richness gradient ranging …