We have like 15 of them here…

It’s much worse in Lemmy due its “federative” nature. For example, for “Dungeons&Dragons” - in reddit you have 9 subs in search, 2 of them are memes-related, 3 are “general” ones, 2 for DnD5e, 1 for DnD3.5 and 1 for UK people. They have clear distinction at least in their names, and sometimes have separate “theme”, like the one for 3.5 edition. In lemmy we already have 14, most of them have same name, literally letter to letter. And don’t forget that lemmy’s userbase is ~6000+ times less than reddit. People just continue to create new instances and same comminities, over and over.

Meta-communities in two flawors:

• user/UI-based, where the user can create an entry in his preferences, add a bunch of communities there and set which one will be its “facade”. The main “con” here that every single user should do a lot of work by himself
• server-based, where you can create new meta-community, add your own community there, and send invites to all similar communities to join. Every community that joined could(should?) be removed from discovery, but be visible as “nested”. Search by its name should lead to meta-community. Ownership of meta-community should belong to its members in term that not a single one could delete it or make any harm. Meta-community exists while there’s at least one member in it.

Important part that one to be careful about combining feeds. Small cozy community can just dissolve in valley of posts from much larger one. The thing is controversial, on one hand it’s really handy to see all the posts all at once, on the other hand - it can kill smaller communities, as their creators will lose the sense and desire to have them maintained. There are different solutions:

Meta-communities in two flawors:

• user/UI-based, where the user can create an entry in his preferences, add a bunch of communities there and set which one will be its “facade”. The main “con” here that every single user should do a lot of work by himself
• server-based, where you can create new meta-community, add your own community there, and send invites to all similar communities to join. Every community that joined could(should?) be removed from discovery, but be visible as “nested”. Search by its name should lead to meta-community. Ownership of such meta-community should belong to its members in term that not a single one could delete it or make any harm. Meta-community exists while there’s at least one member in it. Picture of meta-community in discovery could be anything, one can take it from most populated member community, but user could be able to change it in his preferences to any other member.

Important part that one to be careful about combining feeds. Small cozy community can just dissolve in valley of posts from much larger ones. The thing is controversial, on one hand it’s really handy to see all the posts all at once, on the other hand - it can kill smaller communities, as their creators will lose the sense and desire to have them maintained. There are different solutions:

• Make feed combined, but give posts from smaller community higher priority
• Make user to switch feed manually and let hit set “default” to show when you open meta-community
• Give user a choice between two

To me, manual changing feeds feels more healthy for a smaller ones.