For what it’s worth, I’m VERY much for this.

One of the pain points for those coming into this to fill the Reddit void is fragmentation. Beyond being a huge improvement in usability, information would be shared much more easily this way. For someone who spends a lot of time in IT/tech related subs, that’s very important to me.

I like the general idea of merging communities, but I'm not sure if I like the idea of it being automatic. What if instead communities could apply "hashtags" for their community, and then you could efficiently browse multiple communities at once. For example, I'm subscribed to a few different TTRPG communities across a few different instances, but what if each of those communities was tagged "#ttrpg" and then I could browse #ttrpg instead of browsing any of those individual communities.

Cross-instance "multireddits", that are also automatic and topic-based. #1113

TL;DR: The suggestion is to implement an automatic multireddit feature in Lemmy that displays all posts from communities with the same name across federated instances. It aims to promote decentralization, avoid echo chambers, and ensure high availability. Community moderators would have the option to opt-in or opt-out their communities from being displayed. There are discussions about potential issues such as community name collisions, duplicates, abuse, and practical implementation. Some propose using a new link format, while others suggest providing users with a list of related communities.

How will this help the posters reach the fragmented communities? Will they just pray that everyone is using the the aggregator?

Hmm, I don't disagree with the fragmentation but that's the nature of any new social platform. It's also been proven out that eventually one or two communities for a topic will become the dominant one with the others falling into disuse.

Attempting to merge communities early or artificially will cause moderator strife as minor disagreements balloon. Especially in a multireddit community where no one mod(team) has absolute control.

I don't have a reason from a technical point of view, but from a social one. Forcing communities and instances together early will only cause strife. After a few years where two communities have a track record and proven 'behavior' would the multireddit not cause issue.

I am working on a multi lemmy manager that Id love to get some alpha testers to.

I see very little discussion about the implications of this for moderation, and it feels to me like they get very sticky. With traditional human-curated multi-reddits, you as a subscriber must engage with the idea that you are choosing to aggregate multiple communities into a single feed, which is intuitive enough, the subscribed feed already works that way.

But by making it automatic, the software hides the fact that it's pulling together discrete feeds from communities with different rules and different moderators. This feels very awkward to me. I'm all in favor of traditional multi-reddits, which can be used to create this sort of feed for yourself. I'm still on the train of "duplicate communities will sort themselves out if community discovery is made much easier and popular communities reliably show up at the top community searches, mostly irrespective of what instance the search was performed on" (obviously defederation takes precedence here).

Sounds like something. I don’t know enough about the tech to provide a meaningful comment but I can see the problems you’ve mentioned and something doing these lines sounds like it could be a good solution.

I don’t think I’m understanding this right cause it sounds like you’re trying to make it more fun by adding more rules. If there are 20 groups that are all about pickles that’s fine they each like running things their own way. Eventually one group gets popular and that’s where the majority goes. I think your frustration could better be solved with something like tags where groups could choose to associate certain tags words that makes search easier like tag: pickles-fermenting-homemade-cucumbers and that could clear up search from people just wanting to share pickle Rick memes.