It’s a headline because we’re all hoping this is a moment that will wake one of the crazies up and be like “nah can’t follow this anymore, that crossed the line”
I mean, this is solvable by just looking at each unique group of communities and making an informed decision each time.
Some groups will likely result in lots of duplicate posts, in those instances don’t subscribe to the communities that are effectively duplicate mirrors OR pick the duplicate and try to grow that one if you prefer the home instance more.
I don't think auto-combining similar named communities is a viable solution, except in the case of users doing it themselves (e.g. multireddits or whatever).
Different communities, even with the "same name" (technically not possible because the @domain is part of the name), will have different vibes based on who participates, who moderates, what instances they're on, etc. Mashing all of those together would at minimum, be a bad user experience and at worst, invite tons of harassment from 'troll' communities.
I am very similar and did not realize before you said it, that I'm essentially just replacing the early days of educational TV when TLC, History Channel, Discovery, etc. were all showing educational/interesting content.
I like how they make it seem like China has really leveled up their cybersecurity skillset to be able to hack into these systems. I'd bet money most of the access comes from phishing credentials from humans.
FWIW, I never got notified that the download was ready, so make sure you check back for reddit mail every few days if you request yours. It took about a month for mine.
No thanks.