One of the biggest issues I’m having trouble getting past with Lemmy is not knowing which communities to subscribe to.
An example, if there are like 10+ different communities for “technology”, do I really have to subscribe to all of them just to get the same experience I would have gotten on /r/technology?
Is there a way to “clump” these communities together so I can just subscribe to one “multi-community” that houses the posts from all of them?
Things organically change over time; at some point the clustering you talk about might still happen. Actually network theroy predicts it will happen
You start with a false premise:
An example, if there are like 10+ different communities for “technology”, do I really have to subscribe to all of them just to get the same experience I would have gotten on /r/technology?
r/technology was never the only technology subreddit. There was retro, retrotechnology, who knows perhaps something like bambootechnology, cartechnology, etc. So you never had that experience. You had the same experience you would and do have here, except there it was tinted with a veil of capitalism to keep you submissive. What you are seeing now, is the normal, always has been (insert “always has been” meme). The “big pharmas” of the internet are actually the outlier.
As for the task of “clumping” those communities, I’d surmise in the “content fetching” form that would be the task of a community aggregator, like lemmy itself if eventually a “lists” feature is added, or if communities are allowed to follow each other. Or, if we keep the cross-aggregation separate from the content posting, so that it’s possible to do both or either witout requiring a super VPS, maybe a webring could do it. I remember webrings from the 90s. They were cool.
Think these “fractured” distributed communities are the new normal we need to embrace moving forward. It seems like we’ve been conditioned to think in terms of corporations and monopolies for too long, and maybe, just maybe, a more “splintered” approach could work better.
Why does everything need to fit in one uniform or under one roof? Humanity is diverse, and we have diverse experiences.
Wanting more diverse experiences and perspectives is exactly why its beneficial having large amounts of people concentrated in one community. People want to be able to interact with a large amount of people, in one place where they can get the benefit of the collective knowledge and experience.
Ive commented on this before. I call it towns. A town has multiple communites. Its basically a multireddit but work with me here.
Towns are tied to your account on your instance. Its only use is to group communities to be easier to read.
Clearly there’s one problem with “lemmons,” you’d always have to be on the lookout for The Lemmon-Stealing Horse!
