Reddit Was Fun

That makes me think having something like "federated communities" could be neat, where a community on one instance could opt in to have content mirrored/visible from a community in another instance. In practice it would be something like subscribing to a community on one instance essentially being equivalent to subscribing to multiple communities on different instances, but if there is disagreement on e.g. moderation practices moderators might decide to "defederate" the communities.

I've functionally mass-subscribed to every community that overlaps with my primary interests regardless of which instance it is on and make use of the feature to view submissions from subscribed communities.

The fragmentation is frustrating because it makes individual communities seem less populated than the topic actually implies. For example, there are multiple large Games communities across the biggest instances, but as they are not on the same instance, people are likely to participate in a subset of all of the available communities. This generally reduces the volume of participation in any one community, even if the volume across all those communities summed up is very substantial.

A "multireddit" at the community level would be quite nice (rather than the process of subscribing to a large number of communities and using the "subscribed" feed).

I like the idea of having first party support for joining communities across instances. That would relieve some pain points.

Though,human history has shown that we are largely incapable of promoting consistency without a governing body of some sort. Which necessitates some level of centralization.