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?
I hope some functionality like that will show up purely because I need this question to stop appearing every 3 minutes.
Yes, you’ll subscribe to 10 technology subs. Oh no the humanity.
I, too, am annoyed by this one. It’s like people forgot that reddit had multiple tech subs too, you just picked the biggest one usually. This is no different, just nothing is big yet. Maybe its that last part that bothers people.
I, personally, want things to be decentralized. I want to have 100+ technology communities that are all relevant. But for that to be practical, there needs to be a simple mechanism for people to follow the topic “technology”, and get the content of all these 100+ communities merged together (then perhaps manually block some of them that have bad moderation). Unless we have such mechanism, we’ll end up with one main big technology community, and all others will be secondary.
Mastodon lets you subscribe to hashtags. Misskey/Calckey let’s you create saved searches for termsaand hashtags.
Community tags and either of those options would go a long, long way.
Both also have lists. Being able to add communities to lists would give people the “metacommunities” they think they want.
But honestly, I think people will do better long term if they have to put in even just a little bit of legwork to find the communities with the right fit, and ignore the rest. People have a lot of FOMO around this, but it’s not like anyone read even 1% of anything that was ever posted to big subreddit. They never feared missing out on all of the stuff below the fold.
Making people go scrounging over ten subs is the ideal way to reduce your subscriber base. It’s also a shitty model for a link aggregator and a terrible way for people to ask questions and get answers. Not all of us have ten hours a day to scroll through multiple communities on the same topic, with the same article posted 8 times with 8 different discussion threads and some goober posting the same inane comment on all eight. It’s a waste of time.
There are perfectly good reasons for similar communities with a different focus to co-exist. Making the Fediverse harder and more Byzantine to use is a terrible reason to want it, though.