I notice that when I search for communities I see the same community has been created on multiple instances. I could subscribe to all of them but I’d much rather it be one larger community. Does any else see this as an issue or find this frustrating? If so, have you done anything that’s made it easier to deal with or have any ideas of how it could be improved in the future?

Personally, I’d love to see all the content merged and have the instance tagged on the post, similar to using flair on Reddit.

I think we’d see better adoption of the fediverse and Lemmy if this could be fixed because the largest complaint I see is the lack of content. There’s a lot of content here, it’s just spread across multiple instances. Just my two cents though…

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[–] MysticKetchup@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago

It would be nice to have clients that could merge several communities for convenience, but ultimately I don't think this is that big of a problem. People will generally gravitate towards the largest community and that will take over as the default. And even on Reddit there would still be splinter communities for people who didn't like the direction of the main community, sometimes even overtaking the old subreddit

[–] SNEWSLEYPIES@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No.

There's no need for monoculture - especially on a platform that aims to be decentralised.

Look at it this way - if some town has three gay bars, three metal pubs and three old-man real-ale pubs, it's not an issue for the LGBT community, the metal community or the drunk old men; they're just different places to drink. Possibly the drunk gay old metal fans might get confused, but they sound awesome and are likely welcome everywhere.

...actually, thinking about it, I bet the drunk old men probably do have an issue with all eight of the other pubs they don't go to. But that's just them.

[–] shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol 3 points 1 year ago

The drunk old men understand that the more bars there are, the harder it is for their wives to find them.

[–] aeki 1 points 1 year ago

And if one of the pubs closes, there are 8 others to choose from.

[–] aeki 1 points 1 year ago

I thought it was a problem, but instances can fail, and it's good to keep things distributed. I don't want to centralize topics to specific instances.

On the other hand, we do need to make it easier to aggregate content from different related federated communities, for example with community meta tags that can be made accessible through curated lists. The users could link to specific listings and subscribe to them.

I think there are multiple ideas around this that are more informed than mine, but I'm on mobile and unwilling to look it up right now.