Meta

While having distributed social networks is much better than the centralized models I do see the splintering of communities into separate instances as frustrating. Add to that the current difficulties in finding and subscribing to communities and it becomes a major hurdle for new users.

I'll be honest, lemmy seems confusing as fuck for new comers.... and I say this as one of the early Digg to Reddit refugees.

If you want to compare it to how it works on Reddit, you can imagine that each Community across different instances is its own subreddit - the only thing Reddit enforces is uniqueness to the subreddit name. In that way, you can have /r/Australia and /r/Straya, and people will congregate on one or the other for one reason or another. Though the name uniqueness does funnel people into a certain spot as there's only one 'instance' - reddit itself.

I think if Lemmy had something like multireddits, so you could subscribe to similar communities under a single banner, that would go a long way to addressing the fragmentation problem - in the meantime it's probably up to instance owners/mods to try and direct people to other similar communities to reduce the impact. 🤷‍♂️

There needs to be a site or Lemmy itself needs to change so that it automatically supports "multi communities". Like If i go to /s/Australia it should get /s/Australia from perthchat, lemmy.ml and all the other ones.

They already do support this but it's only the "front page" which is nice I can see beehaw stuff.

Everyone can participate in communities on different instances. If that means users from this instance primarily interact within communities elsewhere, that is totally fine and expected.

Communities will naturally form where they do for a variety of reasons. If that means here on aussie.zone, great. If it's somewhere else, also great. The focus should be on participating and building the community wherever it is.

No need "link" to the other instances you've mentioned. Go ahead and join any communities you like over there. If they don't exist or you want it created here, just ask :)

It's just part of having an explosion of new communities, I think hopefully will sort itself out.

Having said that if you did want to post your post to more than one community (or crosspost someone elses post) there is a cross-post icon across from the comments e.g. the two squares overlaid. You can then search for one of another community (not sure if from your subscribed list) and post there as well.

It doesn't add another post, just a 'crossposted to' note.