The content on all the communities seem different.
Why didn’t the “copycats” get the “this community name has already been taken” message?
It was bad enough at The Other Place finding one overlooked sub about one of your interests.
Now you have to find every single community in every single instance if you hope to talk about your topic?
I mean, look at this:
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world
No Stupid Questions@kbin.social
No Stupid Questions@lemmy.ca
No Stupid Questions@mander.xyz
They’re different communities on different websites, though. Trying to force them all into one space is erasing all communities but one, just for the sake of having to see an @website.com address, or for pretending you’re not missing out on something when you ignore 99.9% of posts and comments that end up in the space.
1 million users discussing a topic spread out across 1000 communities of 1000 active users leads to more vibrant and meaningful discussions on that topic than having 1 million of them all crammed into one place, shouting and competing for slivers of attention. And no one will miss anything of deep value in the 999 other communities, because people will cross-post the good bits anyway.
For the record I don’t think what OP describes would be right. But I am certain there are better ways to mesh together disparate feeds into one and have all discussion at least be cross-referenced - something better than just crossposting. Because while
May be true, it doesn’t hold true at smaller scales; a hundred users spread out across ten communities of ten active users each is pretty much a ghost town.
Indeed, there’s a viability threshold for a community, and it’s probably on the order of 100 active users. Having them spread out isn’t doing any of them any favours.
But that points to the need for and importance of discovery tools. Community tags, better search, better federation tools, better back-linking and cross-posting tools, user-defined lists, etc. The Misskey/Calckey “Antenna” saved-search feature would actually be very powerful in the threadiverse, particularly if coupled with community and post tags, and would really improve the visibility of new or undersized communities to those who are looking for them.
But forced amalgamation across independent and independently operated websites definitely isn’t one of them.
I don’t think it should be forced, but I think some kind of option for “amalgamation” should be available, either user-side (multireddit-esque thing, etc.) or community-side.
If communities want to amalgamate, they can just collectively choose to use a different community. Negotiate mod status for the immigrating mod team, and abandon the old instance. With small communities, this is feasible. With large ones, it’s not, as a significant number of members won’t want to amalgamate. And they shouldn’t have to.
At the user level, lists and antennae would give users a lot of power to shape their streams.
I think a lot of users on Reddit (including some who gave migrated to kbin/Lemmy) haven’t experienced a lot of the forum and IRC era of the internet.
As you’ve mentioned, “fractured” communities can actually be beneficial since each contribution is that much more valuable and nuances can actually exist between the similar communities. It allows things like the instance I’m on where I know I’m more likely to get a Canadian perspective in the communities on lemmy.ca versus other instances. To me that’s a huge feature over centralized platforms where those nuances would get drowned out.
Yeah let’s get to that million first before splitting everyone. It’s really not helpful in the current state.
And there are actually options besides “this is how it currently works so it’s good”. Like some kind of federated communities/magazines where when you post to one it’s posted to all of them. And I’m not saying it would be technically easy to implement, I have no idea, but I’m saying there are always room for improvement.
Near-identical communities/magazines with the same exact goal isn’t practical.