We should implement this as whenever I wish to browse (for example) [email protected] I have to go to there, and whenever I wish to browse [email protected] I have to go there. Would it be possible to implement it in kbin/lemmy’s code to make it easier to browse all?
I just don’t think this is a problem which needs to be solved. On Reddit it’s common to have different subreddits focussed on the same topic. For example, r/Games and r/Gaming. The only difference on Lemmy is that they’re now m/[email protected] and m/[email protected]. Yeah, it’s slightly longer, but super easy to solve using UX tweaks in the front end.
What’s more, this proliferation of communities across instances is critical for a reasonable user experience because of the apparent widespread support for defederating from instances which aren’t ideologically aligned. If people get comfortable with using one uber gaming community on one instance, that instance could disappear from one day to the next because of a capricious instance owner.
It’s much worse in Lemmy due its “federative” nature. For example, for “Dungeons&Dragons” - in reddit you have 9 subs in search, 2 of them are memes-related, 3 are “general” ones, 2 for DnD5e, 1 for DnD3.5 and 1 for UK people. They have clear distinction at least in their names, and sometimes have separate “theme”, like the one for 3.5 edition. In lemmy we already have 14, most of them have same name, literally letter to letter. And don’t forget that lemmy’s userbase is ~6000+ times less than reddit. People just continue to create new instances and same comminities, over and over.
There are dozens of D&D related subs on Reddit, and many of them overlap a great deal. There is nothing stopping people from creating as many D&D related subs as they like, and people have obviously done that. It’s just that you don’t visit the small ones because of a lack of content. I’m not seeing the practical distinction here. You’ll subscribe to the Lemmy communities with content and ignore the rest.
Easy, just create the equivalent of multireddits.