Over the past few days, I’ve witnessed a remarkable surge in the number of communities on browse.feddit.de. What started with 2k communities quickly grew to 4k, and now it has reached an astonishing 8k. While this exponential growth signifies a thriving platform, it also brings forth challenges such as increased fragmentation and the emergence of echo chambers. To tackle these issues, I propose the implementation of a Cross-Instance Automatic Multireddit feature within Lemmy. This feature aims to consolidate posts from communities with similar topics across all federated instances into a centralized location. By doing so, we can mitigate community fragmentation, counter the formation of echo chambers, and ultimately foster stronger community engagement. I welcome any insights or recommendations regarding the optimal implementation of this feature to ensure its effectiveness and success.
It’s an interesting idea, but there are implementation details that need to be fleshed out. IE what if an instance has a community with a misleading name? IE /c/trees. If it’s not implemented carefully, you could easily end up with an automated multireddit mixing posts about arboriculture and cannabis, for example.
It might make more sense to allow mods to tag communities, and then let people browse content from communities matching certain tags? IE every weed community could add the tag “cannabis” and then the users could have an option to see content from all federated communities discussing cannabis.
I got a few ideas:
Let people make their own multi-communities, then publish them. The multis would get a separate category in search.
Let community moderators decide to join a list. For example:
This is what the old Star Trek subreddits seem to be trying to do over here. I believe r/StarTrek, r/DaystromInstitute, and r/Risa have combined into Star Trek here.