I think one of the issues with federated forums like Lemmy is that multiple communities of the same name can exist on different instances. I do think that overall that’s a good thing, as it encourages the decentralized governance of communities, depending on the instance, but it also leads to a general fracturing, since you may only be subscribed to one of the many instances of a particular community, and need to subscribe to all of the ever growing list of communities with that name if you want to see all posts across the fediverse.

I’m not even sure if it would be possible, but what I am suggesting is the ability to consolidate all communities of a particular name into a single super community. So for example this post would show up in the super feed of the larger fediverse community, and rather than subscribing to a single instance, such as fediverse@lemmy.world, you could subscribe to just a single super community called “c/fediverse”, which would allow you to both view all posts in those communities with that name at the same time, and see all of those posts in your feed as well.

Addressing a couple issues I could foresee, this could be an opt in system, such that communities are not automatically consolidated into the super community feed without consent, but they could check a box when setting it up to make it possible. Also, if a user or instance is blocked from another user or instance, posts from that community would need to still not show up in the super community feed.

Does this make sense? Is it even technically feasible? What sorts of obstacles exist to implementing something like this?

Edit: As commenters below note, Piefed allows this already, and lemmy will as well with 1.0

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/3521

  • korendian@lemmy.zipOP
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    16 hours ago

    That’s interesting, I have been hearing a lot about piefed lately, I am gonna have to check it out.