For example, I’m on Lemmy.ml and I’ve joined !photography@lemmy.ml, !photography@lemmy.world, and !photography@kbin.social. In this example, it’s not very different from the number of similar groups on Flickr but, in comparison to Reddit, it seems like the decentralized platform can be a little unruly.
How are you going about joining different communities and managing your engagement? Are you only participating on the community on your instance? Are you joining and posting in as many instances that seem relevant?
I actually think Lemmy should take a page from Mastodon here. Instead of users creating groups (which sounds like a huge headache to implement smoothly), Lemmy should add hashtags or something similar. So I would sub to #photography and people posting would be restricted to a max number of hashtags (TBD). You can then choose to stay subbed to the hashtag and/or sub to the communities that crop up frequently on your feed and then unsub from the hashtag if you want.
That would require such a massive change in the way the platform works, and it would be way more difficult to moderate.
A multireddit equivilent would probably make more sense.
I have loved the idea of subbing to hashtags since PhotoVine and wish desperately that this was a universally employed function of all social media platforms. I think Tumblr is the only other platform that has this as a built-in feature now. Ice Cubes just added a make-shift function to create a list of hashtags their Mastodon client (possibly by my request).
The instance I’m on you need to request the admins to create a community. I like the idea.