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.
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.
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Can you explain how conflicts can arrive with hashtags? I thought the whole idea is that they just let you tag content with its topics
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It could be done at the community or post level. I think because of the Mastodon backend Lemmy already supports hashtagging posts. But yeah my idea is that tagging communities would make it easy to merge communities with similar scopes
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I suppose that’s possible, but I don’t really view it as a serious problem that sometimes words overlap.
I would definitely consider that a serious potential issue, if for no other reason than so many communities will likely find a use for tags based on the nature of the community structure.
For example, I could see a ton of communities having tags for things like modposts, new member intros, meta topics, memes, questions, reviews, how-to’s/tutorials, guides, etc. and that’s just for broad post types that would apply to thousands of communities.
I think letting users manually make their own multi-lems, perhaps with the ability for communities to sort of team up to make uber-lems of closely related communities to help users discover more of them…but sub, unsub, multi, and un-multi as they see fit…is likely the best approach.
I’m not talking about communities having tags for posts, I’m suggesting communities could apply a hashtag to the community itself so that it would be easy to combine view of many communities with the same tag.
To use a Reddit example, imagine if r/gaming, r/games, and r/patientgamers all had “#videogames” applied to them. Then if you tried to view a multi based on which subreddits had #videogames, all three would show up in that multi.
But one thing to consider is how divided it would be. Let’s say I wanted to browse martial arts so I go to #martialarts. Now what about people adding stuff like #MMA or #karate. None of these would show up in #martialarts. Seems like hashtags would be even more divided than communities to me
The idea is that one community could apply many tags. So if you have karate communities from several Lemmy instances, browsing a multi-feed of #karate would show all of the communities you e subscribed to where the mods tagged their community with #karate. But the mods could also additionally tag their karate sub with #martialarts, and then it would show up in multi-feeds filtering on that hashtag as well
The hashtags could be very useful for finding communities you might be interested in though.
Yeah hashtag congregation would be provlematic. It should just be a many to many table, each community should be able to add another community to have their posts shown and vice versa