I hope some functionality like that will show up purely because I need this question to stop appearing every 3 minutes.

Yes, you'll subscribe to 10 technology subs. Oh no the humanity.

Subscribing to 10 technology communities will likely get you a much, much more vibrant experience than just subbing to r/technology. People actually, you know, discuss things in smaller spaces, rather than just drop drive-by comments that no one will ever read.

I'm hoping for two features: Let communities "follow" other communities - so one community's content also shows up on the other. And let me group communities together on my personal feed, if they don't want to follow each other for some reason. For now, I stay mostly on the home page, which aggregates everything - but I'd much prefer to be able to browse by topic and still have some aggregation.

I hope that with future versions of lemmy they can create "lists" that people can subscribe to that will do this.

or at least let you add communities to your own lists that do that.

It's helpful to understand what the rules and values of an instance is to evaluate if a duplicate community is worth subscribing to. There will be dominant communities that shake out. Subscribe to a bunch now and then reevaluate in a month.

What about all of the other technology communities? Forums, Web sites, chat rooms, books, magazines, local clubs? We need a way to clump them all together and subscribe to them all at once.

You start with a false premise:

An example, if there are like 10+ different communities for “technology”, do I really have to subscribe to all of them just to get the same experience I would have gotten on /r/technology?

r/technology was never the only technology subreddit. There was retro, retrotechnology, who knows perhaps something like bambootechnology, cartechnology, etc. So you never had that experience. You had the same experience you would and do have here, except there it was tinted with a veil of capitalism to keep you submissive. What you are seeing now, is the normal, always has been (insert "always has been" meme). The "big pharmas" of the internet are actually the outlier.

As for the task of "clumping" those communities, I'd surmise in the "content fetching" form that would be the task of a community aggregator, like lemmy itself if eventually a "lists" feature is added, or if communities are allowed to follow each other. Or, if we keep the cross-aggregation separate from the content posting, so that it's possible to do both or either witout requiring a super VPS, maybe a webring could do it. I remember webrings from the 90s. They were cool.

Things organically change over time; at some point the clustering you talk about might still happen. Actually network theroy predicts it will happen

This is a feature planned for Artemis/kmoon I think.

My wacky solution for this would be to make use of kbin's microblogging feature to see which magazines are associated with what tags, then suggest magazines with similar tag profiles. However, this doesn't really help with cross-pollinating Lemmy-based communities.

Multireddits would be nice, as would some actual activity in the fediverse that isn't just talking about the fediverse.

Ive commented on this before. I call it towns. A town has multiple communites. Its basically a multireddit but work with me here.

Towns are tied to your account on your instance. Its only use is to group communities to be easier to read.

Just subscribe to all of them if you're that worried about missing something. It's really not that complicated.

Also, stop worrying about reenacting your Reddit experience. Lemmy is not Reddit. Figure out what you like about Lemmy and focus on enhancing that instead of stressing about forcing Lemmy into your preconceived notion of what it should be.

Think these "fractured" distributed communities are the new normal we need to embrace moving forward. It seems like we've been conditioned to think in terms of corporations and monopolies for too long, and maybe, just maybe, a more "splintered" approach could work better.

Why does everything need to fit in one uniform or under one roof? Humanity is diverse, and we have diverse experiences.