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 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.