One issue with the fediverse right now is that there are many redundant communities. Like !technology@beehaw.org, !technology@lemmy.ml, !technology@lemmy.world, etc all having essentially the same topic.
I think the easiest solution to this is to take reddit’s multireddit feature, allowing users to create their own “technology” multi-community that includes all the popular technology communities from all the instances. Thanks to federation, the user could interact with this multi as if it was one big community. Perhaps a way to share the multi with others so that all the component communities get federate-mirrored to the new user’s instance would be needed too.
Is it actually a problem? One of them will naturally “win” - they’ll get the first chunk of people, then people will join that one because the people are there.
If we do get two vibrant competing communities it will be because they provide something different to each other in some way and then we probably don’t want to lump them together.
I think multi-lemmys would be useful but I don’t think we need them as a solution to the competing communities situation.
One winning is not necessary desirable, the whole point of federation is to spread things out over many instances.
Combining them into one would also be an issue with instances that like to defederate.