This splintering of communities can be a drawback, but it can also be a blessing. Instead of having one account where I do all my social media things, I’ve been categorizing the types of social media I enjoy and creating an account for each category, on the instance that feels closest to that type of media. It’s kind of nice because I know exactly what kind of content subscriptions I’m going to see when I switch to each account. It’s also nice to be able to comment on things and know that people who look at my history will see comments on similar topics. Someone’s opinion on my comments about politics, for example, won’t be colored by my recent comments about extraterrestrials in a different community.

There is some risk of being part of a community that might disappear someday, or become something you don’t like, but that’s a risk present in all social media. As another commenter mentioned, the advantage here is that you can set up your own instance where you can control your own data. It’s actually going to be beneficial that a lot of people do this, so that the fediverse as a whole can handle everyone’s traffic without operation costs ballooning beyond control for any individual instance.

But a consequence of this is the creation of many small communities about the same topics, spread across many instances. I think we will need to create some method of federating many communities across many instances in a categorical way. For example, if I want to see all communities about cooking across all instances, there would need to be some decentralized method of tagging communities by topic. That way you don’t have to decide which community is most representative of what you want to see. And there could be many tags for each community, so if I want to see only videos about only cooking, where only vegan food is shown, there may be a community that ranks high in all those tags.

Instead of subscribing to the community itself, you would just subscribe to the tag, creating a virtual subscription to all the contained communities. You’d be able to see all the communities for your selected topic(s) across the whole lemmyverse. And if you see a community that you think does not belong to something that it’s been tagged with, you can unsubscribe it from the tag so it doesn’t show in that list for you. If more people do the same, that community would fall in ranking on that tag list until eventually it is taken off. But if people upvote content from that community more than communities higher in the ranking, that community would rise in the tag list.

I’m not sure if others would be interested in a system like this, but in my mind, it is the kind of thing we need to have rich curated content at low cost. Okay, I’m done now.