This pops up every now and then. This is exactly the same as subs on reddit with the same topic but different names. Usually one gets bigger than the other and thus attracts more users. The other one might die or live on.

i think this is a fediverse feature that will eventually happen, but will pop up in a few different forms first.

i think right now its tag-based grouping, but the lack of consistent API across the 'verse makes it hard

I’d like to see community merging as an option on the client side. I would like to see a combination of multireddits (so that all of the various /news subs were presented to the user as /news), and that multiple posts around the same article could have their posts merged transparently.

This way, the system could still respect the rules of federation (eg defederated hosts wouldn’t appear) and users would on top of that be able to choose which /news subs they wanted to see as unified.

On /kbin, there is a feature called Collections -- you can group similar communities akin to multireddits. These collections can be public or private, and don't need to have an overarching theme. Public collections are pretty handy for discoverability too.

If the Ask communities were merged which mods would get to decide if my comment about human rights is valid?