For example, I want to join a Today I learned community but when I search for it, I come across 4 of them on different instances.
What do you guys do when you see this? Join the one with the most users, join all of them?
For example, I want to join a Today I learned community but when I search for it, I come across 4 of them on different instances.
What do you guys do when you see this? Join the one with the most users, join all of them?
I think defederating is easier said than done, and besides, what if one community is very well behaved and helpful and another is toxic and awful? You throw out the good with the bad in that case.
I think instead the user should be able to choose to combine similar communities, similar to the ‘multireddit’ concept. Then they can get lemmy.ml gaming and beehaw gaming in the same feed.
To help with discovery, a curated list could be created, and perhaps communities from that list could be suggested as time goes on. This does require some kind of centralisation but it would be down to the instance owner to decide to subscribe to it.
To me the trick isn’t consuming similar communities, but cross pollinating to them. Like if you want to comment on a new game trailer do you copy and paste the same thing into ten threads?
I don’t think putting the responsibility of combining them on the user will work well. That might be great for power users but your average user will want to join an instance and get a news community with whatever news communities are well behaved.