This is quite a similar to other recent questions and breaks rule #3 related to using Lemmy.

For now I subscribe to multiple communities, but I really hope the Lemmy devs figure out a way to let each user create a community group.

The way I envision it is that you can create a group where you can combine communities on your end, and you can then cross-post to these communities when you post to that community group.

On the other hand, there would need to be a way to ensure that cross-posts aren't generating a ton of duplicates to those subscribed to multiple communities, and I'm not sure how the comments on these cross-posts should be dealt with. Maybe the comments should be kept separate per cross-post, or maybe if you have these communities in a group there could be a way to display the comments from there multiple posts together, to ensure all those crossposts have a change to get some interaction on other instances?

Then there's also the possibility of spammers abusing the system.

There is still place for improvement.

I'm joining all the ones I'm interested in, redundant or not. I'm looking at all the posts, wherever they are, and commenting on them regardless of where they are if I'm inclined. If I want to make a post, I tend to do it on the largest or most active version, and I don't tend to cross post.

My guess is the various Android & iOS clients will add this feature to combine similar communities and view all of their content together in one feed (like multireddits on reddit).

But I hope this feature is implemented at a system level in the Lemmy software itself.

I think many people may have already requested this as a feature on official GitHub issues.

The only one I'm struggling with is the technology communities. I am subscribed to 4 of them, but the same user is posting the same articles to all 4, so I see the same things over and over. Since they all mostly have the same content, I want to unsubscribe from all but the most popular, but I'm lazy and haven't done it.

Much like I ignored reddit usernames in the comment section, I tend to ignore which instance a post is coming from while scrolling. So I subscribe to all the relevant ones, and just scroll from my "subscribed" in my instance.

For all the times I've seen people complain about this, I still don't see what the supposed problem is.

Yeah - it's just a tiny bit more effort to subscribe to three communities instead of one, but then that's it. It doesn't matter in the slightest from that point on, since all three of them are going to come up just the same in my feed.

I honestly think that there really isn't a problem - that really, there's no notable way in which anyone is actually negatively affected. It's just that it's different, and different is bad.

If it's a niche interest such as photography, I would just subscribe to all and see which one is the best over a few weeks.

If it's a more dynamic topic such as technology, I will go for the most curated version if it (Beehaw communities are usually good ones, at least to me), and only subscribe to one. Otherwise I'm getting overwhelmed with multiple occurrences of the same article.

It's not too bad, minus people crossposting the same content across each instance

The way I see it, some communities will thrive and others will die. No need to worry about the mess in the process. For now during this early stage just post to all of them or pick one you like and stick with it.

I have been thinking about this problem recently and believe the solution may be a new fediverse protocol/service that provides:

• Federated Emergent Topic Taxonomies

That is, a model of the relationships (e.g., is the same as, is a type of, is related to, etc) between different communities (/groups/services/instances, etc.) that emerges from the way that users/servers interact with them, that different servers can maintain independently and merge or split by consensus if they choose. Then other services (like Lemmy instances or clients) can tap into this information to provide solutions to problems like the one you describe (e.g., a feed of all the photography communities, regardless of which instance they're on).

I think there are several big conceptual and technical challenges to implementing this. I'm keen to discuss them.

Does anyone know where I would go to discuss this with the people who care, have struggled with developing new fediverse protocols and/or are best positioned to spot the flaws and possiblities in the idea? So far I see mostly w3c working groups taking behind closed doors.

I'm not, I just post/read/comment wherever. Sometimes the same articles will pop up repeatedly but I just ignore them.

I've never much cared for the details of a lot of communities/subs outside of very specialized ones. I'm going to participate if the topic is interesting and learn about the rules as I go. There being multiple communities for the same thing was pretty common on reddit.

This is how I use the site:

1. Sort by New Comment
2. Scroll through feed
3. See something that interests me or makes me think of something I think is clever/witty
4. Open the comments
5. Read them/post my own.
6. Continue to read them and post replies until bored.
7. Go to 1.

I’m currently subscribed to duplicate communities, which works well except for the crossposts being a little annoying.

To be honest, I don't even know what instance I'm looking at most of the time. My app doesn't show the instance name, only the community name, and the community names are often all identical across instances.

I started by joining only one instance (vlemmy.net). When it went down, I realized I needed more, so I joined 3.

As for the communities, I subscribed to whichever clone had more traffic, among the ones I'm interested in.

I comment and post from whatever instance I'm logged on, as sometimes - especially in the recent weeks - one or two are temporarily down.

I don't even know man this shit is so confusing. I used to just comment and upvote when I saw shit I liked but now how will I know if the shit I liked came from one server or another. This is just madness we can't keep treating people this way!

It would be great to be able to merge communities and filter duplicates. Kind of like multireddit.

I'm posting to the communities that seem active enough for me.

For some cases, like photography, pets and landscapes communities, where I probably will not comment, I decided to follow them on Mastodon instead of Lemmy. This way I can keep my Lemmy timeline cleaner.