I’ve been on Lemmy for 10 days now and I really enjoy it. The federation is really cool, but compared to Reddit it does have a downside: fragmentation of communities.
I think it would be really cool to be able to combine the feeds of the community Random_topic@example_instance_1 with Random_topic@example_instance_2 etc.
This could work well for reading, but I realize that posting is more difficult. So when posting you should be able to choose on what instance you want to post to the Random_topic ‘community group’.
What do you think?
There’s an open GitHub ticket for something analogous multireddit’s: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818, but as you note that’s really just a read-only view.
People talk about community fragmentation like Lemmy invented it. There are TONS of duplicate and overlapping communities on Reddit. There’s /r/tech and /r/technology, /r/DnD and /r/dndnext, a zillion aita clone subs. Dupes are everywhere.
IMO what we need to manage community dupes is actually better community discovery. What makes duplicate communities less of a problem in Reddit is that when a community has good mods and starts to accumulate membership, it gets pushed up the search rankings in a snowball effect. Other subs grow less active and the well-manged one dominates. Remote community discovery is so poor on Lemmy that it’s a total tossup which option you find in the results… which currently makes the dupe situation a “problem”. But it’s my belief that if community discovery was better, dupe communities would mostly naturally aggregate into a few well run options.