Asklemmy

I personally like the idea of a linking bot that would cross post automatically accross communities and deduplicate things posted by the same user on both.

You could also just cross post things with relevent tags and crosspost then in relevent communties

Two perspectives, Viewer and Poster. Posters create new threads, Viewers view and possibly comment.

Two access methods, direct and indirect. Direct means entering a specific community. Indirect means browsing content which is aggregated in your stream from all your subscriptions.

Viewer, indirect: It does not matter wether your cat content comes from 1 or 100 individual sources *, it gets aggregated anyways. **Super communities can not help with this use case.

Viewer, direct: If a Viewer visits communities directly then yes, fragmentation is an issue. Super communities can help with this use case.

Poster, direct: The only access method for Posters, since they cannot create content indirectly but have to decide where to create it, and wether only in one, or in multiple communities **. Posters have to make that decision regardless wether the communities are grouped to a super community or not. **Super communities can not help with this use case.

In conclusion, community grouping can improve the experience for direct Viewers, but has no effect on indirect Viewers or Posters. We can also differentiate between server-side grouping (which seems to be the proposal) and user-side grouping (aking to multi-subreddits: users compile arbitrary lists of subscriptions into one, new feed).

*) Depends on how exactly aggregation is implemented. It could be that posts in small communities with less absolute traction have a lesser chance to be streamed. Or it could be the relative size of the community is accounted for. How to know?

**) Multiposts in similar communities can create another, related issue for Viewers indirectly browsing content, as they now see duplicates in their stream.

Personally I feel the entire point is it should be done like that. Like it was in the 90s. Every little cats community can be out there and independent from each other; communities, identities and administration can remain separate. For discoverability, rather than make it part of the platform which would eventually induce dark incentives towards the kind of consolidation that happened with Reddit in the first place, well, why not also do it like back in the 90s? There used to be the webdirectories, as well as the webrings (in Yahoo, Geocities, etc) that served as an independent discovery system.

I kind of like the idea for B. I'm not sure how to determine who the authoritarian figure would be to decide which 'cats' get to be in 'super cats'. Could some be excluded from the super group if they're pro-dogs/racist/etc? Is that against the whole idea?

Any update on this?

I couldn't find any comment from the devs. Was there one?

There is an extra problem, not mentioned here. When there are subs with the same name, it is actually impossible to know of choose which sub I am posting to. Like here.

There absolutely needs to be a good way of finding communities here on lemmy, that would probably mitigate the problem a bit. I also like your sticky solution linking to similar communities, but it would be great if this happened automatically (or semiautomatically) when creating communities. As in: oh you are trying to create a "technology" community on your instance? Did you have a look at these ones with the same name on federated instances?