This post assumes you have a basic understanding of what Lemmy and Kbin are. Which, in turn, assumes you understand at least the concept of federation.
The Issue Currently, the way Lemmy/Kbin (which I will refer to simply as “Lemmy” for the rest of this article) work like this:
Cool, so our user can access content from both instances. They go to Instance #1 to talk about transporation, and Instance #2 to talk about animals.
Tags is a cool idea to help users find posts or communities on specific topics.
But taking away the different communities on the same topic is misunderstanding one of the key benefits of the fediverse over Reddit. I might want to talk about horses in a different way, with different people, operating under different rules, to the way others might want to talk about horses. The fediverse allows that, without having RealHorseTalk and RealRealHorseTalk nonsense.
Better UI and categorisation tools, yes. That’ll help make sense of this for new users. But don’t take away an actually positive aspect of the fediverse just to make it look more like Reddit.
This is exactly how i felt reading the article, part of the point is to empower users to be able to make a community on a different instance if the first instance has poor moderation, a crazy admin, or just isn’t the vibe you’re lookimg for.
I think a better solution is something similar to multiredits, where users can group communities together on their own. Which also opens up opportunities for someone to view only tangentially related feeds in the same view (i.e c/news and c/canada, or c/technology and c/linux)
Maybe even allow instances to generate their own community groups you could tap into? So if I’m on lemmy.world, I could see a proposed “gaming” group that lumps together local gaming communities with cherry picked communities from other instances. I think a wealth of options here will be key. Let me see the group, and see what community it is originally from if I want. And then if I notice that one community keeps posting nonsense, allow me to block just that community (like I can now) from the group.
I’m also waiting to be able to block whole instances, but I believe that will come.