Just a little rant. When I first visited Lemmy Sites a couple of months ago it felt empty. Besides the really mainstream community pretty much everything else just felt empty.
Meanwhile though traffic has increased a lot and I feel well entertained by the traffic in c/hfy c/noncredibledefence c/keepwriting c/worldbuilding and so on. It is certainly less than Reddit but often quality is substancially higher and is "enough" to keep me entertained.
Also I like that you can actually post something without running into a bazillion deletes, bans and moderator shitshat because your post was two words to short, not NCD enough and so on.
Sure, the C64 community on Lemmy is laughable. So is the ARMA community. I still use REddit for that. Also I often check up stuff on r/hfy and r/NCD but since one week I have been prefering Lemmy for that.
Also my longer posts don't get eaten up any more. God, three weeks ago most posts with 3k an more just got lost without feed back. Nowadays I have even manges posts around 20k without breaking them up. Though the editor is still lacking for longer posts. On Reddit I can copy-paste pretty much anything from Libreoffice into Reddits Editor (which is also pretty lacking but differently lacking). On Lemmy I have to run most text through a little perl script to get them even using correct line breaks perl -pe 's/\n/\n\n/' and different sizes for Headlines are much to few to select from.
Not perfect, not even very good but definitely promising.
I have to disagree. Consolidation seems almost never to improved anything. Take Reddit, for example. I once found a sub called HikingAndCamping. Since I'm a hiker, I looked it over. The top mod only allowed discussions of hiking and camping on Mt Everest (or some equally nonsensical narrow topic). Since I actually wanted to discuss hiking and camping generally, I tried to create CampingAndHiking as a more accessible community. But that same top mod had already claimed that name as well under an alt. Reddit refused to do anything, but when they notified him that I had requested the dead sub (no posts and the alt hadn't logged in for years), he jumped in and created a single "Go away" post. Then he sent me a private message to the effect of "I'm squatting to keep traffic flowing to my other sub. You want to talk about hiking and camping in general? Sucks to be you."
Here, I'd just go to another instance and create the c/ that we wanted and move along. That's part of the beauty of federation. Users can then join the one(s) that appeal to them and everyone gets to have their community.
The way I was thinking you could still go to the original community and skip the aggregated one. So you could have c/gardening and c/flowers, but also c/backyard which could combine the two. You could still go to either one, but for easier discoverability you could create aggregators or include an aggregator in your community, and do this cross server. So if you have two very popular and overlapping communities you could combine them easier. Could also be a client feature I suppose. But right now you'd have to manually hunt for the possibly dispersed communities yourself. Alternatively I guess there is an argument for smaller communities being better which I do agree with. It was just a not very thought through idea :) Or you could have community redirects. So c/technology on lemmy.world could decide to seamlessly redirect to c/technology on Lemmy.ml if wanted. Edit: although the more I think about this the more it sounds like more trouble than it's worth.
Now I get the idea. It's not a bad one, but it may very well be a lot of trouble to implement. Maybe the cross-instance community lists could help. It seems like, most of the time, related communities pop up fairly quickly or show up in the initial search.