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I think grouping different communities together would be a great feature, but you'd still have to find someone to curate and collect those groups, and host them somewhere.

"Why are all of these communities there" is a bit of a weird question, in my opinion. Why is there a news.ycombinator.com when Reddit already existed? Why was reddit founded when Digg was around? Why aren't don't Outlook and Gmail combine forces into one? Why would anyone want to go to stackoverflow when expertsexchange and hundreds of forums already existed?

Every server has its own rules, that's why. Some are more tolerant of abusive behaviour under the banner of free speech, some will use bans liberally to maintain their community. Some servers ban NSFW posts, others don't care. Some servers block some other servers for abuse, others don't. Some communities are fine with meme posts mixed into serious posts, others want to stay on topic.

Even on a centralised platform such as Reddit there have always been duplicate subreddits because of people who disagreed with another subreddit's rules or moderation practices.

Nobody owns rust, except as it may exist on their server. This is basically like asking why (e.g.) rust, and rustcode, and rustnews are all different subreddits and why don't the same links appear in all of them. Because they're different. If you want to see all of them, you subscribe to all of them.

Why should 1 person or instance own rust? Why should they be linked. They aren’t the same thing. The namespaces are rust@programming.dev and rust@lemmy.ml so on obviously they aren’t the same thing.

You’re confusing instances with communities. Instances are servers. People create and mod communities. They shouldn’t be linked because they have different mods and rules.

> A big problem is that you don't actually see content on other instances

What do you mean? On lemmy you simply click "all" and see a feed from all federated sources, on kbin that seems to be the default. When you open threads/posts you see comments from all sources. The other stuff doesn't exist yet as the platform is very new. You can help.

this isn't strictly true and the weird edge cases add more mental energy than conforming to the expectation of "all of the content I was expecting".

For example, clicking on one of the profiles I follow, and then their followers. This will only show the profiles I also follow on that remote server. Do that again, and it gets even worse.

Where instead, the "thing you expect to happen" is to list, 1:1, their follow list as it exists on the remote server.

Other things, for example, not fetching someone's post history earlier than before you followed them, when you're browsing their profile. e.g., a user with 100 posts that you just followed.

I'm aware of the technical reasons (you weren't subscribed), and the open source reasons (not enough volunteers to fix the bug); but both are inadequate to a new user, frustrated and lonely, struggling with a lack of network effects, where having a delightful app might save that experience.

> This could even help with the decentralization aspect, because ideally the content and accounts would be replicated. So if one instance goes down, its content is still on connected instances, and possibily "ghost accounts" from that instance which let users there continue to post

So Usenet?

Or, IRC. For all the major support systems (most I think now have moved to discord), they all had a freenode channel, but what if they'd all chosen different networks, so you'd need to connect to maybe a different network for mysql, another for postgres, another for php, another for rust, etc...

To make it more confusing though, all of those networks EACH have their own smaller channel for those technologies, just the official one is on x server.

Reddit is awesome because it's one place to get ALL content related to a niche under one umbrella, and because you can use awesome 3rd party apps -- the next reddit replacement doesn't need to be federated, but it could be community-ran as a sort of DAO, where users can vote on features/etc...

There’s an ongoing discussion about how to better facilitate this here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818