I’ve noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like ‘cats’ will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list.
A: could we figure out a system to let our communities know about the duplicates as a sticky so that users can better find each other?
B: I think this is the best solution, could a ‘super community’ method be developed under which communities can join or be parented to under that umbrella and allow us to subscribe to the super community under which the smaller ones nest as subs? This would allow the communities to stay somewhat fractured across multiple instances which can in turn protect a community from going dark if a server dies, while still keeping the broader audience together withing a syndicated feed?
I was wondering the same thing. This is one of those double edge features. On the positive side if a community moderator is no good, or an instance is getting too big, there is the simple option to just make a new community on a different instance. The downside is having a bunch of duplicate small communities is not always a better option than one big centralized one.
I like the idea of super communities, but I am not sure that is even possible with the fediverse/lemmy. There might be some way to do this manually with instances dedicated to a certain topic, but that seems like it would be overkill. Also it would be interesting to see who would end up responsible for moderating the super community.
Maybe an option would be to have a virtual “parent” community, or a community group that communities can join. For example, the supercommunity “memes” could contain meme communities on different instances, aggregating posts and comments when queried. Posting would only be possible to a given community though.
This brings an issue with moderation however. If a participating community would be taken over and used to post spam, there would be no clear mechanism to exclude that community from the parent community. Perhaps it would be better if these parent communities where user curated, so the creator would add one or more communities to the parent, allowing other users to subscribe/unsubscribe from the parent at will.
Maybe treat it more like tags, and if a community within a tag is spamming a user can still hide that community independently.