The lemmings are a squeaky bunch.
There’s definitely a difference with scale.
On reddit, I was never on the default front page or /r/all. I was subbed to a hundred niche communities.
On lemmy that’s harder in 2 ways. The first is the critical mass you need to keep a community active, and the second is fragmentation.
For instance, I was super active in the scuba and underway photography subreddits. Not only is the community tiny here, but which scuba sub do i go to? With multiple instances, there’s no default community named “scuba.”
https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=scuba
All of them are inactive, seems like it’s not a very discussed topic here
It would be neat if same-topic communities somehow could somehow merge into a single community view via federation. There are probably some downsides to what I’m considering, but it seems like it could help alleviate fragmentation while allowing the “same” communities to be hosted across multiple instances. If one instance defederated from another, the community posts in that instance would be excluded from the combined view.
Maybe even a simple opt-in/out of a combined view for communities that truly want or need to stand alone. Not sure if this goes against the core concepts of federation or not. It seems like a nice compromise at a glance, if it could be implemented well.
PieFed already has such Categories of Communities, it’s a really nice feature. PieFed has a lot of such things actually - like hashtags, the ability to block all users from an instance without requiring admin approval, YouTube embeds, etc.
Unfortunately PieFed is not quite ready for the masses as its more foundational features aren’t finished yet, like much of the times a Notification won’t point to whatever caused it for whatever reason, and it lacks user tagging, and search options.
But it’s nice to see these kinds of features functional already!:-)
Communities should just consolidate. Happens regularly, the electric vehicle did recently, you can see it on !fedigrow@lemm.ee
