As a new reddit exile, I may be misunderstanding this.
In theory something like a !gaming community could crop up on multiple large instances, especially during the mass exodus while instances are getting hammered with spikes in volume.
If that’s the case, we’ll have fragmented communities across instances. Is there any way besides subscribing to each of them to combine them into a sort of multi-reddit type aggregation? Or is this considered a temporary (albeit important to adoption) problem during the crazy stages?
I can understand that desire, but think about this from a practical perspective. You are on lemmy.world, but someone else is on lemmy.ml. If you both use the same app that does this behind the scenes aggregation for you, you won’t be able to tell which instance is holding which post. Let’s say someone on sh.itjust.works posts on their instance of a community, but the app just makes it appear like it’s in the community.
Now, if lemmy.world blocks sh.itjust.works and lemmy.ml does not, then you can’t see that post, since it’s blocked for you. But the person on lemmy.ml and on sh.itjust.works would be able to see it. This is a good example of solving a problem by create a dozen new ones.
Lemmy developers have been discussing how to address this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
There isn’t a clear solution, since some communities have different names, so how would an app know to join them? Or would you join communities that had deliberately been split for various reasons?
I think a solution could be to allow communities to merge voluntarily if the mods of both agree to. It would only work with instances that aren’t blocked anywere. But users that would be subscibed to one would automatically be subscibed to all the merged commuities as well and you could post to the merged commuity from any of the participating instances. That would have the advantage that if one instance fails the community would almost seamlessly continue on the other instances.