As a new reddit exile, I may be misunderstanding this.
In theory something like a !gaming community could crop up on multiple large instances, especially during the mass exodus while instances are getting hammered with spikes in volume.
If that’s the case, we’ll have fragmented communities across instances. Is there any way besides subscribing to each of them to combine them into a sort of multi-reddit type aggregation? Or is this considered a temporary (albeit important to adoption) problem during the crazy stages?
It’ll sort itself out. Kinda like how you could have a bunch of different subreddits about the same thing (r/gaming vs r/games vs r/videogames, for example) but one always bubbles up to be the biggest main community. Similar will happen here. There’ll be many instances for the same thing, but eventually there’ll be “the one” that becomes the unofficial official one.
I actually think it is good to have alternatives
in your example, r/gaming was the largest gaming sub but I was subscribed to r/games because I enjoyed the content and discussion there more
each instance/community will have its own culture and each user can decide which one fits their style better
The problem there is that I don’t want to have to, nor have time, to sift through 80 ‘r/gaming’ communities to find which one is the one that ‘fits’ me.
The analogy I’d use is do you want to goto a restaurant with a 2 page menu of food, or 100 pages to choose from? From a user experience, most people will be far more comfortable and happy with the 2 page limited menu that guides your decision vs too open of a choice.
Too much choice is a real problem, and leads to people more often than not choosing to just leave if there is no real guided options.
I don’t think you’ll have to sift through that many options. There’s going to be an obvious choice that has 5-10x more subscribers than the next one. Sure that isn’t the case right now, but overtime that’s what it will look like. I can only imagine that reddit had similar issues early on too.