I don’t understand. Reddit is exactly the same, it has thousands of different subs, many with overlapping content, many duplicated because someone didn’t like the mods, yet I don’t recall people saying reddit was broken because of it.

Why is Lemmy suddenly broken just because people naturally do the same reddit thing here?

Can’t we just ask for a feature like multi-reddit that lets users aggregate different subs into the same feeds (like sort of collections) instead of trying to reinvent the wheel?

I’ve been thinking of and experiencing the community duplicates, finding multiple communities with the same name and being unsure which to pick. I usually end up picking one with most users and/or content but there’s always doubt, am I picking the best one?

I really like the idea of posting to tags and the tag gets aggregated across instances and you can view all the posts. I don’t know enough about the fediverse yet to know if this is a good idea or possible even. But I’d definitely like some sort of transition to having easier to access content and more ease in finding new topics/communities/tags.

Thanks for this post.

So, let’s say you have a community about video games, and they tag themselves #Gaming. Then you have another community about video games, and they tag themselves #Games. Then you have a community about boardgames, and they tag themselves #Games. Then you have a community about tabletop RPGs, and they tag themselves #Gaming.

Now you’ve got two communities discussing the same topic in different places, and both of them are also getting posts about similar but unrelated activities shoved down their throats.

Weren’t tags already proposed and being evaluated?

Yeah the fragmentation isn’t great, but people usually flock together. For instance, you have multiple subreddits for franchises like Pokemon, but over time people will only use the most active or the most specific sub (each PKMN game has its dedicated sub). Plus I believe I’ve read somewhere that communities could be merged in the future. So if we don’t have two or more stubborn mods, that don’t want to work together everything should be fine, probably.

Tags is a cool idea to help users find posts or communities on specific topics.

But taking away the different communities on the same topic is misunderstanding one of the key benefits of the fediverse over Reddit. I might want to talk about horses in a different way, with different people, operating under different rules, to the way others might want to talk about horses. The fediverse allows that, without having RealHorseTalk and RealRealHorseTalk nonsense.

Better UI and categorisation tools, yes. That’ll help make sense of this for new users. But don’t take away an actually positive aspect of the fediverse just to make it look more like Reddit.