I’ve noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like ‘cats’ will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list.
A: could we figure out a system to let our communities know about the duplicates as a sticky so that users can better find each other?
B: I think this is the best solution, could a ‘super community’ method be developed under which communities can join or be parented to under that umbrella and allow us to subscribe to the super community under which the smaller ones nest as subs? This would allow the communities to stay somewhat fractured across multiple instances which can in turn protect a community from going dark if a server dies, while still keeping the broader audience together withing a syndicated feed?
Doesn’t that go against Lemmy’s philosophy? I see where you’re coming from, and I agree there should be some way to find all related communities. But putting them all under the same umbrella makes all depend on the “meta-community” and its administration.
Well yes and no. I think the point is to avoid 500 arbitrary half dead Cat communities, or to help users find there niche for their town or interest so you aren’t left with multiple dead communities reposting questions all over the place hoping to find the community with the answer by sheer dunb luck while also thinking that Lemmy is dead.
Finding out that the official photography sub lives on glasgow.xyz is a big ask. So maybe it would be a good start to keep things fractured but allow an easy way to group them into a feed like the way multis work. Looking at my subscribed list is a horror show right now and I shudder to think of the infighting when three growing communities butt heads trying to spam each other’s users to grow there own. If I can organise my coms into categories and folders that would be a start. Maybe creating feeds by tag? And subscribing to tags?
Regarding the 500 arbitrary half dead Cat communities, I wonder about expecting hosts to monitor the communities they are hosting and removing them or archiving them in some way when they die. And if a host is not doing so, that could be considered poor moderation on their part. Not a complete solution, but maybe of help?
I think something like this would probably be done user side, maybe with some option to share it, much like the “multireddit” feature of reddit. Each individual community is still moderated and run by their mods and local instance, but the user can choose to aggregate multiple mags/communities together.