Why haven't multi-communities been added to Lemmy?
A multi-community would be all communities with a certain name, across all instances. It would prevent powermods from being a problem on Lemmy. i think it should be notated with m/
<insert name here>
, just like communities but with m instead of c.The answer to such questions is almost always "Because someone hasn't done it yet".
As others have mentioned, this platform has grown drastically over the past month and so the devs are somewhat preoccupied with what they've prioritised for the platform as a whole. This feature though is on the radar, as others have said.
A quick fix that I actually think would help be just in the UI, where the user can group the communities they're subscribed to into what ever groups they like, so that it becomes easier to browse through communities individually by topic.
I don't think it should be done by a specific name, it should be user defined, I should be able to add the communities together which I deem that they do belong together for some reason.
I think the only reason is that they're swamped with bug reports and more important feature requests so they didn't have the time to implement it yet.
See:
and probably many more. The devs are looking at the different approaches and commenting there, so you should be able to get a good picture how it's going by reading the comments there.
I don’t think it should be done by a specific name, it should be user defined, I should be able to add the communities together which I deem that they do belong together for some reason.
This.
People are used to a single handle mapping to a single community, and I get that they want that to still be true, but it isn't here. It just isn't. Having a communities auto-group in any way is asking for a bad time for all involved.
First of all, people generally are not considering the contexts that those communities are situated in. My go-to example here is politics communities. r/politics is, very frustratingly, about American politics, but that isn't going to be universally true here for communities named politics. You should not assume that an Australian based server, a Canadian based server, a UK based server, an Indian based, etc. will reserve that name to deal with, well, foreign politics. And having them automatically lumped together will functionally destroy the communities on instances focused on smaller countries.
In top of that, it's wide open door for troll instances.
If people want lists of communities, that's fine. That's great even. I'd love to lump together some sports communities so that when I'm in the mood for that, I can find them all in one place. It'd be cool to be able to have them optionally not show up in Subscribed, too. But auto-grouping is one of those features that is actively bad for smaller communities, and which people really only think they want. It's more of a sign that people aren't opening their mind to this new space and paradigm they find themselves in than an actually useful feature.
Another feature I'd like to see is instance admins proposing multi-communities, as in: multi-communities which pop up in the search results and allow you to subscribe to all the the communities grouped together with one click/touch. This way the problem of community fragmentation across multiple instances (e.g. multiple instances having a a "memes" community) would be solved (or mitigated at least).
Lemmy is open source. The developers are working on this for free (minus some sponsorships). PR's are always welcome to help add new features you want :)
Counter question, what is the use case here?
I have only ever needed this feature with NSFW content. In Lemmy I have easily and better way resolved it by having another account with nsfw instance. This creates even better outcome than the multi community feature. All clients easily support two accounts, and you can switch between them in few presses.
Use case? Just wanting to group together certain topics. Grouping together all the duplicate communities that have the same focus as well.
Use case is obvious.
Making a ton of accounts for each topic is not a good solution.
I like to keep my work-related communities separate from my hobby-related communities. So Python/R/Data/Academia communities would be grouped under "work", and Gardening/Bread/Crochet/3D printing would be "hobbies", and then I might want a news group where I can see politics, local news, US news, world news, tech news, etc.
This would be really helpful to me for reducing distractions when I'm actually trying to get information about what's going on in the (real) world or in my specific corner of the programming world.
my answer is that the devs have other, more pressing issues to work on but that begs the question: what?
Performance, security, reliability, other quality of life features, better UX, there are 374 issues open on their github: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues
Until recently it was impossible to browse All due to an issue where it would auto-refresh the feed with multiple posts every second. This and similar issues necessitated a big rewrite to move away from websockets.
Then that was fixed, but it was fixed the same week as the Reddit API went down, so making sure everything was stable and stopped setting on fire under the unprecedented load became priority.
All kinds of other things are still going on, for example there are continuing issues with federation not working as expected which is literally the main feature of Lemmy.
Devs have to prioritise, and "nice to have" features might be a way down their list. That is ultimately the answer to the question in your title.