this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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I found fishing for (and following) hashtags on Mastodon effective but Mastodon was also in much better shape to receive the waves of Twitter exoduses.
Lemmy lacks effective tools to organize a feed. I think many people recreated their favorite subreddits as communities but the userbase was too small to support them. Being able to create "multi-reddits" to group related micro-communities together to help mitigate the ghost town feeling as you raise the probably of at least one of them having something new to talk about.
Re-reading your post before I hit submit.... I think I am just repeating what you are saying!
What I was saying:
I think the solution is "meta instances" or "meta communities" or "meta aggregators".
A community or instance that aggregates the smaller communities.
And some way for smaller communities to submit content to that aggregator.
Like, I'm browsing my instance's "all". I find a good meme that suits my "programming memes" interest. So, I submit that post to the aggregator.
Essentially like cross posting, but a community of all crossposts and everything is treated like it's on the original instance.
But as a primary feature. Where it's easy to "submit to aggregate subscription" or whatever.
But then we would get every instance with their own meta-community, and it's just a complication on top of communities and instances.
The trick is to have meta-meta-communities to aggregate the aggregators :)
Putting a list of similar instances and communities in the sidebar would help a ton. Yes, there is a list of communities on every instance, but I'm not scrolling through a hundred rows trying to determine which I might like based on the names.
I think naturally, Lemmy will gravitate to fewer, more generalized communities instead of many little hyper-specialized ones.
I'd love to see more smaller communities, tho. But, how to group communities?
Geographically is one way, if you want local news and banter.
By interest is another, if you want YouTube news/content but not Twitch news/content. Or just more generally "streaming content"?
It is an impossible problem to solve easily.
And the risk of any instance suddenly going offline is very real. Which means, gravitating to a more technically adept or well funded instance makes sense.
I feel like the current federation separation system isn't going to work. Or it's going to be "good enough" for a good while, but not really click.
Idk if separating "user instances" and "content instances" is better. Then some sort of "meta instances" that everyone actually interacts with.
Content instances can more specialise in the content they provide.
User instances specialise is currating their users.
And meta instances link users to content.
But then, that massively overcomplicates things. And who is going to want to run a user instance? Or a meta instance? Or a content instance? All require investment and work.
I think that would have been a healthier start, to focus attention and generate some liveliness, but people's preconceived notion is "Reddit" so that's where community creation went.