Mastodon lets you subscribe to hashtags. Misskey/Calckey let's you create saved searches for termsaand hashtags.
Community tags and either of those options would go a long, long way.
Both also have lists. Being able to add communities to lists would give people the "metacommunities" they think they want.
But honestly, I think people will do better long term if they have to put in even just a little bit of legwork to find the communities with the right fit, and ignore the rest. People have a lot of FOMO around this, but it's not like anyone read even 1% of anything that was ever posted to big subreddit. They never feared missing out on all of the stuff below the fold.
He definitely didn't make me upset for having a portable AC unit. It's... not power efficient, but it does keep my house cool enough to work in on the worst days.
He did sell me on heat pumps, though. I'm hoping to have one installed this fall, which will remove my need for that big luggin' AC unit entirely and totally get my house off of oil.
If it isn't, OP should add it to the issues tracker! Adding things there gives the project leads, plus anyone who is willing to volunteer some time, to know what features people are asking for, and to choose some ready made things right off of the shelf to work on.
The devs have always been pretty helpful and responsive on Lemmy. I imagine that has changed a lot in the last few weeks, but they're basically always checking the issues tracker.
I'll second IRC. I don't need my chat to be e2ee, and encryption has made Matrix a much bigger pain in the ass than it's worth to me.
Forums, too, though I'm a big fan of the distributed social media space. Lemmy has an experimental front-end based on phpBB, and I would love to see someone take that idea and go whole hog on it to create proper federated forums.
There will be lag, sometimes significant lag, in moving I think. Remember, the protests were about trying to save Reddit, and, failing that, making it as obvious as possible that Reddit's about to shoot itself in the groin. People who have invested a decade or more building and running stable and growing communities kind of have to grieve the loss of the fruit of their labours.
I do think you'll see many of them show up here relatively soon, as users. But the prospect of rebuilding from near scratch will probably take a little more time for people to wrestle with.
Lemmy, kbin, Mastodon, Misskey, Pleroma, Friendica... They all use different APIs, and those APIs need to be supported separately by developers if they want their app to be compatible with all of them.
ernest is talking about changing the kbin API to be more in line with lemmy's, which would allow apps made for lemmy to also work with kbin, but they wouldn't, for instance, work with (or possibly even know about) kbin's microblogging feature.
This also just is the time defederation happens most. When populations grow faster than people can manage.
Taking on the responsibility of hosting a community website means doing what you think is best for they community. For a place with clear rules and established norms, that means upholding those rules. And if you can't uphold them against the sheer number of people flooding in, then it means reducing the number of people.
No one website is responsible to the network. This is not a power trip. Though this is about people protecting their "precious communities", as you so judgementally put it. Because they set up their site to create a coherent community.
If you way to be a part of it, you can apply to join. If you don't, then you're not entitled to interact with them.
the idea that my account is hosted at an individual Lemmy server and that other servers trust that one to validate my account
I can't stress highly enough how much this isn't how it works.
You basically never directly interact with other servers. Instead, when someone on your host site first subscribes to a community hosted on a other site, your instance pulls in some recent posts from that remote site and then requests that all future content from that group be forwarded along to it. Then, people on your local site interact with that mirrored content, and your local site sends local additions back to the original host for syncing.
Your account only exists locally. You're always reading locally, and you're always acting locally. Everything else is servers mirroring and forwarding content.
Because Lemmy isn't a website. It's software that runs social content aggregation sites.
It's like what WordPress is for blogs and other unidirectional content serving websites.
The fun thing is, though, that any website running Lemmy can share content posted to it with any other website running Lemmy.
It's only confusing because corporate social media has taught us that "service = place".