What we’re really lacking on the ui end is a way to see groups of identical communities that are on different federated platforms. Hence the idea of a dom-lemmy. The way it would work is lets say you search for a cat community called “cats”, there’s at least dozens of them out there already. Instead it would return the cats dom-lemmy, with the option to either drill down to a specific instance, or to merge all sub-lemmys called cats into a single view
I don’t disagree with the idea, but your terminology needs a bit of tweaking lol.
Dom and sub lemmy? 🥵
This is definitely something being discussed: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113
I personally don’t really stress over finding the different communities. I just subscribe to the ones that have a critical mass of users or - if there isn’t a community with a lot of users - I just subscribe to the one local to me. If there isn’t one local to me, I just randomly pick one.
That isn’t where I thought you were going to say at all. :P
the users will organically migrate to the most popular sublemmy over time & the rest will close or be ignored.
I sure hope not. It does seem to be leaning that way, but it would sort of defeat the purpose of decentralization right? I guess you can’t change the course of the river. I started a small instance with a focus on gardening, and it’s growing slowly. I wonder if smaller instances would grow more evenly if they were focused on regions/ countries/ cities or with a focus on topics? Either way it’s interesting! We’re just getting started here. Things are going to change. I wonder what we’ll say a year from now.
In the days before Reddit ‘won’ you used to be able to find tons of niche sites/boards cultivating smaller audiences. Beer advocate/rate beer, headfi and whatever the latest splinter was there in the audiophile community both come to mind. There’s generally more division by which each might find more ‘aligned’ or maybe their friends are on one first.
I don’t know if it’s possible to predict, social dynamics are weird and this is going to be new for a giant segment of the audience.
