The content on all the communities seem different.
Why didn’t the “copycats” get the “this community name has already been taken” message?
It was bad enough at The Other Place finding one overlooked sub about one of your interests.
Now you have to find every single community in every single instance if you hope to talk about your topic?
I mean, look at this:
No Stupid [email protected]
No Stupid [email protected]
No Stupid [email protected]
No Stupid [email protected]
Indeed, there’s a viability threshold for a community, and it’s probably on the order of 100 active users. Having them spread out isn’t doing any of them any favours.
But that points to the need for and importance of discovery tools. Community tags, better search, better federation tools, better back-linking and cross-posting tools, user-defined lists, etc. The Misskey/Calckey “Antenna” saved-search feature would actually be very powerful in the threadiverse, particularly if coupled with community and post tags, and would really improve the visibility of new or undersized communities to those who are looking for them.
But forced amalgamation across independent and independently operated websites definitely isn’t one of them.
I don’t think it should be forced, but I think some kind of option for “amalgamation” should be available, either user-side (multireddit-esque thing, etc.) or community-side.
If communities want to amalgamate, they can just collectively choose to use a different community. Negotiate mod status for the immigrating mod team, and abandon the old instance. With small communities, this is feasible. With large ones, it’s not, as a significant number of members won’t want to amalgamate. And they shouldn’t have to.
At the user level, lists and antennae would give users a lot of power to shape their streams.