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As I watch The Internet look like it’s starting to adopt a new phase (let’s call it federation writ large), I’m watching for signs of both success and struggle. I have some strong opinions of features and functionality lacking in the current suite of UIs that might help adoption, but thing I’ve been thinking about more recently is the effects of premature fragmentation.

Like so many things, it boils down to a problem of discovery. By discovery, I mean the user’s ability to find posts and topics that they want to read and engage with.

If lemmy had 10 users, we would not need separate topics. It’d probably be a few posts a day, tops, and it’d be easy enough to just scan through and see if anything of interest was being discussed. That could probably scale up a bit - let’s call it 100 users just for discussion. 100 users, 10-15 posts per day. Somewhere beyond that, you’d probably want to start some kind of classification. It would need to be at a fairly high level, like tech and polit