For the unaware, Lemmy is a Fediverse alternative to platforms such as Reddit and Tildes.

I've been using Lemmy as one of my main social platforms for the past 6 months, but I've been aware of it for almost 3 years now. The platform has improved significantly the past couple of months now that it feels like there's momentum driving the project forward. That said, it's not quite there yet that I would recommend it to my peers, especially those that aren't tech-savvy.

Anyone that has used Lemmy would recognize the biggest issue by far: Community segregation, and a lack of focus. There can be multiple communities dedicated to the same thing across multiple instances. This often causes confusion and harms activity on the platform because people don't know where to post, where other people currently reside, and where to find the "correct" communities. (And yes, I do understand why each instance having its own communities can be important and beneficial.)

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Take this fictional example: I love pancakes and want to talk about it. Currently, there are 4 communities dedicated to pancakes: pancakes@a.com, pancakes@b.com, and so on.

Pancakes on instances b and d are dead. Last activity 3+ weeks ago. Pancakes a had its last post 2 days ago, while Pancakes c had its last post 6 days ago. I just wasted 3 minutes just researching where I should post.

Alright, time to post. But where? pancakes@a.com and pancakes@c.com are both somewhat active... Should I post in a and crosspost to c? Maybe there's hope in other communities kicking off again, should I crosspost to b and d as well? Oh no, am I going to post 4 times just to find my fellow pancake lovers?!

Roleplaying as the regular user that I am, I post once to gauge interest then never post again because I got choice paralysis and don't understand where I'm supposed to go in order to browse pancake posts. As you can guess, this is a problem. Just hearing about this adventure has probably already confused you.

Let me take this a bit further: After crossposting to all 4 pancake communities, I get three comments. One in a, b, and d. Each comment is in a separate post and none of them interact with each other unless the poster opens each crosspost separately.

If these commenters had met, they could've replied to each other and created long threads. The comment count could have easily been 10+. But since there didn't seem to be any activity, each comment section felt a little lonely, and now the commenters are also demotivated to talk about pancakes.

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Luckily, this problem is recognized by users and developers. There have been a couple of good proposals, so let's talk about them and which I think would be most ideal to implement.

Proposed solution 1: Merging communities

The first proposal is the ability to merge communities across different instances. What was three or four shall now become one.

The idea for this is simple: Admins would have the option to merge their community with another one from a different instance, so pancakes@a.com and pancakes@b.com will be merged and now point to the same place. Same mods, same posts, same comments, probably hosted exclusively on one of the instances. Essentially, the merged version of a community would just re-direct you to the proper one.

This isn't a good solution in my opinion. Your options would be to either give all the power to one version of the community, or to stay separated. This would also centralize discussion to once instance, something that arguably goes against the Fediverse ethos. Admins and users may be hesitant to merge communities.

Proposed solution 2: Multi-communities

The second proposal is the ability to browse multiple communities at the same time. Now instead of having to browse all the different pancakes separately, I can browse all the posts at the same time!

This proposal was heavily discussed on Github and I think it's a decent solution. However, I don't think it's very ideal when you think about it more.

1. To create a multi-community, you would have to know where each community is and add it to your list. This would take effort and implies that you already know which communities to browse (not everybody does).

2. It's a bit unintuitive because you'd have to go out of your way to use this feature, something not everybody would be willing to do. Many people want grouping of similar posts/comments to be "automatic", not something each user would have to do manually.

The idea comes from how Reddit handles it (MultiReddits) but from my experience it's a feature not many people made use of, and it sounds like a pain to have to constantly create and manage new multi-communities to group together duplicate communities. This shouldn't be a task that users have to manually do.

Proposed solution 3: Communities following communities

The ability for communities to "subscribe" to other communities is an idea that comes from this Github comment. This is, in my opinion, the best proposed solution by far. Community a can follow community b, making posts from b also appear on a.

What this means is that community moderators can choose to have posts from other communities to show up on theirs. That means if all the pancake communities are following each other, I can post on pancake@a.com and it would show up on the other pancake communities as well, and the comments would simply be grouped into just one post!

As a practical example, imagine if your post on games@lemmy.world would also show up on games@sh.itjust.works, and people from over there will only interact with your post and not a crossposted version of it (which would separate comments).

This would fix the "centralization" issue of merging communities by giving all communities the power to choose which communities to integrate with, and users would have the power to choose which instance to post on. You wouldn't need to worry about posting or browsing the "right" community, because each community would be interconnected. Just as the Fediverse gods intended.

Of course, communities would have the freedom to choose which ones to follow. If the moderators on pancakes@d.com disagree with pancakes@a.com, they don't need to follow that community and show its posts. I don't foresee something like this happening often, though. Providing options either way is good for all sides.

One argument I saw against this is that it takes away some control from users browsing. What if someone wants to see posts only from pancakes@a.com, but hates all the other pancake communities?

An option for this would be nice, but I honestly don't see a reason why anybody would want something like that. I guess if you hate pancakes@b.com and didn't want to see posts from there, you could block them yourself. Problem solved.

Conclusion

I'm making this blog post mostly to re-fuel discussion on this issue. From my point of view, it's a critical issue that makes Lemmy a bit tedious to use, and no doubt caused a lot of people to bounce off the platform. I say this as someone actively using it.

I don't doubt that implementing a solution can be technically challenging, but it's something that has to be dealt with eventually. Ideas have been suggested for what seems to be years now, and I really hope that it's something that can be decided and worked on soon.