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?
Look, as long as I don’t have to remember both a community AND a server name, I’m good. I just don’t want to hav to remember and / or subscribe to multiple things with the exact same name.
I can understand that desire, but think about this from a practical perspective. You are on lemmy.world, but someone else is on lemmy.ml. If you both use the same app that does this behind the scenes aggregation for you, you won’t be able to tell which instance is holding which post. Let’s say someone on sh.itjust.works posts on their instance of a community, but the app just makes it appear like it’s in the community.
Now, if lemmy.world blocks sh.itjust.works and lemmy.ml does not, then you can’t see that post, since it’s blocked for you. But the person on lemmy.ml and on sh.itjust.works would be able to see it. This is a good example of solving a problem by create a dozen new ones.
Lemmy developers have been discussing how to address this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
There isn’t a clear solution, since some communities have different names, so how would an app know to join them? Or would you join communities that had deliberately been split for various reasons?
Clearly coordination and agreement between leaders is needed. I suggested something like that with a pseudo-instance of “@global”, for example. However, it seems there is some resistance to the mere idea of globalizing certain popular communities, which I can understand.
Federation comes with its own set of problems, like replication, data volume, storage requirements, and massive overlap.
That last one affects user experience directly, and needs to be addressed. Maybe it will sort itself out, maybe not. If we have 10,000 servers, even 100 almost the same communities means quite a bit of work on the part of users just to decide which ones to join.
We are looking at the human equivalent of a system with an extremely fragmented disk, or database tables with indexes that end up doing table scans.
Periodic re-organization will be necessary to to maintain usability.