Yes the fragmentation is a feature not a bug. There are dozens of reasons why people might want to leave a community and create their own alternative version. With blackjack and hookers.
Combining communities should be a front end feature... Allow users to merge their views if they want. But it should not be enforced at the backend or federation level.
Eventually there will be third party apps which can do this merging in their interface if someone wants it.
This seems like a devisive topic.
The fragmentation is not a feature to me, but something I view as detrimental.
I like the idea that tags could facilitate a sort of one-to-many and many-to-one relationship structure, where a pickle community could say it is related to "Canning" and "Cucumbers" among others, and potentially populate in the feed of someone interested in prepper stuff or in the feed of someone interested in vegetable gardening. I'm sure I'm not using the DB terms correctly but they feel indicative of the modular structure this could allow.
I like this flexibility better than the idea of a consolidation of subs into one themed silo, but I could be misunderstanding the structure of the mulit-reddit proposal if it allows for this.
Or just make it user-side. Let users create their own feed combinations. They'd still have to select a specific instance for posts.
Feeds would be consolidated but posts and comments will still be federated. And one user will be unaffected by how another user organizes their feed.
That seems like a good solution. Let me subscribe to a half dozen different game comms and put them together into one "games" list that shows up with pretty much the same interface as a single community, so I can browse just "games" content that I have subscribed to.
The thing is that say i want to see all the pickle content across the lemmy-verse, i want to just be able to subscribe to an umbrella "pickles" category and get all the c/pickles content from any instance my instance federates with without worrying that i missed a community or something. If there are 20 groups but i only know of 1 or 2, odds are that i'll miss the biggest ones with a bunch of pickle content that i want. And I don't want to have to manually go through, search for all the biggest instances, and subscribe to each pickle community one by one. Plus, say a new instance is started and it's pickles community blows up. I'll miss it because i already searched through and subscribed to all the pickles communities that were available when i joined. I'd rather default to subscribing to all the c/pickles communities my instance sees, and then if one instance is posting stuff i don't want to see i could manually exclude them
Tldr I guess it depends what you think will take more effort to do manually. I think having to manually find and subscribe to every community i want from across the lemmyverse (and periodically run the search again to find new communities) would be way more work than subscribing to every c/pickles my instance can see and manually excluding the instances or instance-specific-communities i don't want content from
I'm new to the whole concept of federation, so please let me know if I'm missing something fundamental, but with your proposal (subscribing to all c/pickles) works for when each instance has the same general rules for posts, but what about when one c/pickles on some server is actually about... dildos? (like r/trees was about pot, and r/marijuanaenthusiasts was about trees)?
Wouldn't your feed be polluted with pics and reviews of dildos when you want wholesome and healthy pickle recipes?
I think that approach is needlessly complicated and would confuse people more than help them. There should be a way for individual users to merge the feeds from multiple communities in a multilemmy if they specifically choose to.
But I don't see any way to create such multireddits/multilemmys automatically because there is no objective categorization. Everyone is going to have a different opinion about which communities fit together and which ones are similar but different enough to keep separate. Instead of forcing a generalist solution that makes everyone unhappy, just give people the tools to build their own solution that works best for them.
thanks for using Leebra!
go to feed...
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.
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