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?
Depends on if there will be a “big one” or even if there should be (after all, the point of this whole system is to not have all eggs in one basket no?). IMO there should be some sort of tag functionality across all instances and some sort of UI that just simply shows you all instances under this tag as if they were one (with the option to filter them out for yourself). Something like that perhaps.
Or the ability to ‘subscribe to the top 5 communities by user count’ on a specific topic like, “Technology” or “Pics” or “Aww”
I think that is a pretty good idea. You could add some other options like top N communities with the same name, or if you like to live dangerously, ALL communities with the same name.
There is a chance someone will make a common community that is a NSFW version but then you can block that yourself. Or add an option to allow including NSFW communities.
And maybe even the option to auto sub to any new communities of that name that your instance connects with.