Thanks for the link, I didn’t know there was already a discussion about this. It’s not a simple issue to solve, i think there are positive and negative aspects to both solutions.

The community solution:

• (+) Moderation of communities by creators
• (+) Sense of belonging to a community
• (-) Fragments content and interactions

What scares me about this solution is the problems associated with fragmentation. If users who are interested in design, for example, will do a search and find 36 communities on the federation with the name “/design@server.tld”. I imagine that the first reaction will be to choose the community that has the most members, therefore the most content and interaction. I don’t think they will have fun reading all the descriptions, all the rules of the 36 communities, but I could be wrong. One way to limit fragmentation a little bit would perhaps be, when creating communities, to show a list of all the existing communities with the same name. I’m also a little afraid that this fragmentation will result in less interaction between users and that we will end up with many dying communities with no interaction.

The hashtag solution:

• (+) eliminates the problems of redundancy or fragmentation of content and interactions.
• (+) simplifies the user experience
• (-) no moderation (unless a system is invented to elect moderators democratically)

What can be problematic with this solution is that we’re going into the unknown, we don’t really have a model to follow. Which from a certain point of view can be a good thing because it also allows you to stand out from Reddit and create a unique differentiation. There is also the aspect related to moderation that remains unresolved, we could perhaps invent an effective or democratic way to elect or remove moderators for each hashtag. In any case, I think we should at least give users the possibility to block/hide certain users or instances.