I don’t think this is a good idea. Keep in mind that different instances have different policies, moderators, and users. This leads to different rule enforcement, culture, and federation status. Even if a magazine/community has the same name and the same discussion topics does not mean it’s the same group of people reading those posts (some might be, due to cross-instance federation, but not all will be). In short, they are different groups and cannot be treated as the same without pissing off people.

The proper solution is to let each community just evolve until one naturally emerges over time as the go-to community or they all differentiate themselves enough to be considered different (albeit with similar names). Adding a bot to cross-post content just slows that process down and makes the problem persist for longer. If a topic is truly small enough that getting enough people for critical mass is difficult (like your DIY cobbling example), then it shouldn’t be hard to start a discussion in each of the separate communities to suggest assigning one as the “main” one and then just stop using the others. This is something that should be driven by the communities, not the software.

Upvoting in solidarity with the idea, but I have no meaningful insight into whether this is possible or not long term. I do agree that means to reduce fragmentation would be nice.

Mechanized greater amalgamation carries a presumption of agreement and agreeability. This is not what I experienced on Reddit.

For instance there was r/gamedesign. It had serious problems of people staying on topic, and lesser but recurring problems of people becoming most uncivil. I started r/GamedesignLounge in opposition to this. I “ruled” with a firm hand unfamiliar to Reddit users, but quite to old guard Usenetters. All posts and comments required moderator approval. I would have been perfectly happy to share this in a double-blind comoderator system where I don’t approve my own posts, but such a mechanism doesn’t exist on Reddit. All subs are run by the “Lord of the Manor”. I was a nice, disciplined LotM and my job primarily consisted of hitting Approve. The fact of requiring people to adhere to the rules up front, rather than waiting for people to offend and be dealt with later, definitely elevated signal-to-noise ratio.

But I got no members and no surfacing. The incumbent name that anyone would look for, “gamedesign”, is already owned by someone else with critical mass. Opposing such a de facto group with “better moderation ideas” is pretty much impossible on Reddit.

Another example is the TV show fan sub r/TheOrville vs. r/USSOrville vs. r/OrvilleVSTrek . The last one died. The 2nd one is barely alive. I’ve refused to participate in the 1st, in solidarity with the 2nd and 3rd. Nobody cares though.

For awhile, there was only one r/vikingstvshow about the series “Vikings”. I don’t know about now; don’t care. Turned out it was not for fans of Vikings really! It was more for people to hurl rocks at Vikings and say this sucked, that sucked. Mods were totally down with that and fairly negative about the show. Somehow there weren’t enough Redditors interested in Vikings to support multiple subs about it, so the one dominated by negative leaning mods, ruled the roost. Anyone who actually liked the show, after getting the barrage of pissing and moaning over and over again, pretty much you packed up your stuff and went home after awhile.

In the case of Game of Thrones, there were enough people to support quite substantial, separate subs with very different moderator policies. And the different communities mostly hated each other. Tons of institutional inertia accrued to the sub that first managed to grab the “Game of Thrones” name though.

I got banned from r/CobraKai. I got a little wound up about what would really happen in the modern USA, if you had some karate jackass kicking you in the head on some beach somewhere, like in the original The Karate Kid. Someone would probably pull out a gun from their glove compartment and blow the other away. That’s fact, in the real world. Happens all the time. Happens between 12 to 15 year old kids in my city. Makes the newspaper headline regularly. Well that’s just too negative and toxic to be saying in the sub for some reason, so I get banned.

What if I want to go talk about this show somewhere else, where having a real sense of real world violence, and making comparisons to the fantasy world of the show, is ok? Not that CobraKai material is itself at fault here. They did their juvenile detention episodes. Its the heavy handed mods that were the problem, not the show. Well, r/CobraKai is reaping all these incumbent advantages of traffic shaping, having the name of the show.

So far from wanting to consolidate communities, I am thinking communities should not be allowed to monopolize valuable brand names for community participation. I’d like to think that “Game of Thrones” could have at least 5 different communities, all with “Game of Thrones” technologically part of their community name. I haven’t really thought through what the differentiator would be… the most trivial default designator would be a number. You might be on GOT 1, someone else might prefer GOT 2. Others prefer GOT 4. GOT 5 decided “5” wasn’t doing them any mindshare good, so they change it to the non-default “GOT - Icicles” or some such. But GOT would be a way that you quickly found all such groups, when searching.

This could admittedly lead to a long list of GOT groups, like 200 of them, and games to see how you climb to the top of such a list. But it might actually be a better circumstance, than just ceding all this valuable word territory, to whoever had the luck of first starting with the most obvious name.

Wouldn’t it be easiest to close the non main communitiesand point to the main one?