Yet another lemmy instance proudly hosted in Montreal, Canada. Still need to get a icon created, if there are any designers here who would like to contribute please feel free to post!
Just joined from the Mid-Atlantic portion of the 95 corridor myself!
I'd love for someone else to chime in with an answer to your question, because that's something I've been wondering myself. I'm pretty sure the general plan in a federated ecosystem is "one of them will become more active, becoming the 'main' one", i.e. it's an intended feature not an issue. I'm interested to see how that fragmentation might impact an already small user base.
It seems like it's going to have to evolve organically. Federating individual communities might work, like if you're subscribed to [email protected] it could also pull in posts from [email protected] and other similar communities on a voluntary basis. It is a problem that needs solving though.
Yeah, been trying to learn Rust & Typescript to contribute towards a multireddit feature, but it's definitely an uphill struggle. I'm out of my depth.
Overall though, the fragmentation is mainly just users trying to make this "Reddit 2.0" instead of letting it develop more naturally, and spamming new communities like mad.
In terms of actually active subreddits with actual users & posts & whatnot, which of these 5 is the "real" technology subreddit?
I think the fragmentation is a feature; if a server wants to have a Reddit moment and take their ball and go home, the other communities are all still there. Getting the UI to combine the communities visually would be nice, though. I'm sure we'll get there eventually.