Sometimes it's best just to let things be. In my experience, the higher quality conversation tends to be away from LW. But there's some exceptions to that. I wish https://lemmy.film was still around.
What will be great is if/when there’s a multi-Reddit style feature that will aggregate similar communities across instances into one feed. Not sure how you’d deal with duplicate posts though.
Yeah, I wonder if there would be a way to combine the duplicate posts into like a thread type of thing? Idk. Tough challenge to deal with, smarter people than I haven’t found a solution yet
But then you would have groups with completely opposite point of views clashing, which is a reason why they are in different communities in the first place.
Let's take a famous example. An article about a new type of electric vehicles. [email protected] would probably be interested in interesting the technicalities of the new type, while [email protected] would probably focus on how cars, even if electric, should still be limited.
People would get quite aggressive against each other, and mods would have an issue moderating the whole discussion, because a mod on the electrichevehicles community wouldn't be able to moderate comments from the people from the !fuckcars community and vice-versa.
Communities are usually split for a good reason, and that makes sense.
When separate communities exist but share the same stance and rules on one topic, that's where discussion that should happen in one place gets fragmented. [email protected] and [email protected] have no reason to be split. The lemm.ee version is more active, have more proactive mods, but the LW has a broader audience due to the LW position in Lemmy. So some people keep posting on the LW version, keeping a weird situation where both situations are active at the same time.
I’m not saying aggregated feeds like that be the default, just an option available for someone like me who is neutral about what instance are community that content surrounding a given subject comes from. It would be a handy way to put them in one feed and interact with all of those communities
Still technically cumbersome. One of the main Lemmy dev recommends merging similar communities
there will be lots of duplicate posts and comments, which increases server load and confuses users. Better to merge the communities in the first place.
Well, on the optimistic side: two thriving but redundant communities is better than two stagnant communities.
Maybe you can embrace it. Like, have inter-community events such as a regular monthly discussion that alternates between communities. It's only a problem when there are duplicate posts, right?
I'm finding I'm a lot less frustrated now that Thunder has great support for cross-posts. On any one post you can see a list of all the other posts, their votes, and comment counts.
It's super easy to jump between all the threads discussing the same thing and participate in them all.