Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.

This premise on which your question is based isn’t actually true though. There’s /r/technology and also /r/tech. There’s /r/DnD and also /r/dndnext. As of recently, for some reason there are like 35 nearly identical amitheasshole subreddits with different names.

I feel like what you’re observing is just that reddit communities are mature, people have had time to gravitate to whichever community is more active or has better quality moderation and so there is generally a “winner” sub with more participation because… unless there’s a major problem with the bigger sub it tends to be more interesting than a less well-trafficked sub.

Lemmy, in contrast, is still fairly wild-west. Most communities are not very active and have only a few subscribers. If a competing community with an overlapping topic appears, folks are willing to subscribe to it just in case it takes off. If Lemmy continues to retain a healthy number of users, I expect in most cases that consolidation would set in unless there were major differences in moderation policy or something else that splits the community into factions that align across server or community boundaries… and over time you’ll see a similar layout of one or two dominant communities and a long tail of tiny ones that few pay attention to.

I think people, including u/spez, are not remembering how fluid a lot of subs were on reddit. The large subs grew to where they were by luck and good moderation, they weren’t/aren’t immune to upset, and reddit maintains/ed several smaller competing communities for every main one (games, gaming, truegaming). The same will happen here eventually but we need time to see who’s actually running the best communities, not whoever got to the name technology on the largest instance first.

I think there’s been talk of implementing “multireddits” so you can combine them in your own feed but who knows when it’s coming. I personally think it’s good to have the communities as segmented as possible, if one goes to shit then you can easily just stop participating there and move to others.

It would be nice if the instances could essentially federate themselves across instances. If two communities agree, they could both combine and show the posts from one another’s feeds, without sacrificing their autonomy. This way if you are subscribed to once instance’s community, you could see content from a much larger super community.

Maybe that’s a good idea. Going to /C/technology shows a view of all /c/technology sub’s that the instance is aware of :)

Posting to /C/technology would just post to your instances /c/technology

Or maybe differentiate between communities and topics? /t/technology aggregates all the communities around technology? That would be cool IMO

This is a great idea but I see problems with it. Someone has to define the topics but this can be done by name matching. The bigger problem is the decentralized nature of Lemmy. Every server has to scan every other server for the communities to create a topic. Now let’s say we have 10 servers and each of them will have to fetch from the other 9 servers the communities list. This would already be 90 requests sent global. Now scale this up to 1000 and a single server will have to send 999 requests and respond to 999.

Edit: Currently we have over 1426 servers

It’s a very good thing to avoid what happened on Reddit that a big istance is moderated by people that don’t think democratically and rule against other people’s will deleting posts and banning everyone they don’t like.

With federation, you can choose the instances and communities you like the most, the ones with better moderation and so the kindest one will probably prevail :)