Honestly I joined lemmy.ml because it had the description that most closely matched my interests without feeling like I'm joining one single person's home lab experiment. I think we would need a few more large general purpose (vanilla) instances.

On the other hand I wonder if it doesn't make more sense to condense communities/topics into single, topic-specialized servers. I can't imagine, from a UI perspective subscribing to 100 different news communities and another 100 gaming communities and... I feel like the current UI just isn't designed with this in mind.

[–] KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It'd definitely be neat if there was a way to group those similar communities into single, shared communities between federated instances. Like, if 6 different instances have "Gaming" communities, to have them all effectively grouped into a single one, and also include the "Gaming" communities from any other instances that you federate with in the future.

I think the ideal UX would be to be able to see one "Gaming" community, subscribe to it, and check a box for "Include Similar Federated Communities" or something, and have posts from all of them show up in your feed, without having to individually subscribe to them.

[–] SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I think the ideal UX would be to be able to see one "Gaming" community, subscribe to it, and check a box for "Include Similar Federated Communities" or something, and have posts from all of them show up in your feed, without having to individually subscribe to them.

I see an important hurdle to that: moderation rules are still specific to instances. So "multis" create some side effect UI challenges. In fact I think the current UI lacks reminders about which community you are participating in.

But I really like and support your "Include Similar Federated Communities" suggestion.

[–] KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 1 points 2 years ago

That's a great point about moderation rules; I hadn't considered that... I suppose that does make it difficult.

[–] Woofcat@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 years ago

I feel some of the regional instances are the best. I.e. I'm on lemmy.ca but can clearly read and post to the other instances. That way the load can be somewhat split on geography.. likely better speeds as well.