I think it would be wise for us to adopt a hashtag system so you can search by topic as opposed to by community. We're so segmented into smaller sub communities and different servers that it's difficult to find what you want to read.
Upside is that this change would effectively consolidate small communities across instances so they aren't so fragmented.
Downside is that there would be less control over what content is tied to each tag because I'm not sure how moderation would work. You can end up with issues where people maliciously flood a certain tag with junk.
Wouldn't Mastodon just be that? Lemmy and Mastodon federate - and you can see one in the other.
Twitter-likes are tag based. Reddit-likes are community based?
I think it's fine and good if communities merge or get subsumed by an equivalent on another instance.
Yes and no, ideally we would also still have communities. You can imagine how a topic like Henry Kissinger's death could be talked about in both of a politics sub, and noncredibledefence esque military based sub.
The point is basically to give better search functionality and bridge these communities by topic in a way.
Right now, you can't see Mastodon toots unless they go out of their way to link a Lemmy community. I hope we'll get better integration at some point (a way to subscribe to users or hashtags, maybe), because that would give a lot more activity