Nothing, and that prevents one instance to claim a specific community. Time will filter out the best of those similar communities.
Lemmy
Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
I’d like to see a live replication kind of thing. So if you’re on !games@lemmy.ml it can merge with !games@behaw.meh and they super federate and advertise that this group exists, replicated, on four or five lemmy servers and the client tracks that every X hours and knows what the failovers are.
Solves some of the fragmentation issues and the backup/archive issues at the same time. Might even help with load balancing a bit if we have some kind of routing algo on the endpoints.
I know all the contributors have a lot more bigger fish to fry this week, but I'd love to see this eventually implemented - this would be a huge quality of life feature that I think would really sell the platform to new users dipping their toes with Lemmy.
We are early days. Competition breeds innovation. The best communities will filter to the top
Yes, also what could possibly be the alternative? Federation but with unique community names that transcend what instance you're on? What would be the point?
What was stopping people on reddit? You could make /r/Tech, /r/Technology, /r/TechNews, etc
It's a bit muddy right now but a clear winner for each topic will win out and become "the" place for that topic. Give it time, let people figure things out.
One good thing about multiple communities based on instances is you can have regional communities based on what instance they are on. /c/politics on lemmy.ml is technically neutral, but we all know its meant to be American politics, so opening a /c/politics on lemmy.ca even though it has the same name would serve a different purpose and be centered around Canadian politics instead.
Overall though I definitely think a multireddit type solution needs to be created for this, that way similar communities could be grouped together and mass subscribed to all at once.
I subscribe to r/tech and r/technology but it would be nice for there to be multi server communities. Matrix found a way to do it
It's annoying that you have to subscribe to all of them.
I'd welcome a feature to subscribe to a community and all known (to my instance) communities with the same name.
It you have two friends called "Tom" do you also save both their phone numbers under the same entry in your contact list?
Nope, but I do use tags to group people. "Family", "Close Friends", "Coworkers", etc. Does Lemmy have something like this? Like the OP, I don't want to dig through 20 instances to find the "best". Just show them all in one dump. The "winner take all" style won't appeal to the masses at all.
You will quickly realize that there isn't a "best". Each serves a different niche related to the instance it is on and you will just have to see which ones you prefer. This isn't Reddit and it is also not supposed to be Reddit. Better get used to it :)
I think Lemmy should be it's own thing. Similar to Reddit but not a full-on replacement. I do think an aggregated feed of similar communities on a topic ought to be a feature, but I think, hell, if 80 different instances want to host a politics, funny, fediverse then let them do it!
The reason why I don't want there to be a "definitive" worldnews community is that only one group of mods/admins have all the say over what's allowed for that worldnews. The other "worldnews"es can fill the niche where one is missing, perhaps critique of certain regimes is discouraged on one but encouraged on another. Perhaps posts about identity politics is talked about on one but is completely banned on another. Perhaps another world news is dedicated to making jokes and memes about current events, while another strictly allows only serious and on-topic discussion.
Sure, a mechanism to allow all these worldnews communities to appear under one page would be good as a feature suggestion, but to make any rule about "one definitive" lemmy community on a topic defeats the purpose.
yes, i agree : there should be an option to subscribe to the 'global' community or only to the 'local' community