So let’s take this actual example: There’s !canada@lemmy.ml and !canada@lemmy.ca. They talk about the same thing, but are treated by the current federation implementation as separate instances.
How would you feel if there was a moderation feature to import another federated instance’s community into your own, so that the posts from the other instance automatically show up in the same feed? That way, you only have to subscribe to one community on one instance, but you get content from multiple instances. I’m not talking about crossposting or mirroring/duplicating posts between communities, only displaying the posts from another instance the community’s home server federates with, with moderator discretion.
Communities stand on their own, they have their own moderators, followers, posts, etc, and there’s no way to merge them as entities. Activitypub-wise it makes as much sense a merging two users.
The main way to accomplish what you’re talking about, is just to close one community and recommend people use the other one.
Well, this suggestion isn’t really merging, more auto-subscribing to similar communities when you subscribe to one, as recommended by the mods of the community you subscribed to. It solves the fragmentation problem where popular topics have lots of independent communities on different instances.
so like, not merging them. but putting all of those community under one category? actually, this seems like a great idea. the option like would replace the centralized reddit community, to sub-communities from different instances.@AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml
how I would do this is first make a list of similar/same type of communities. keep the communities seperate but putting them all under one topic. and by default you view everything from that topic until you decide to click one specific community from an instance.
I think there will be some cases in the future where some sublemmies are basically the same thing in a different instance.
I think this is a needed feature for lemmy’s federation to truly shine, but I understand if there is too much things you’re working on right now. just a suggestion @dessalines@lemmy.ml
I don’t think it’s a good idea to auto subscribe ppl to communities they haven’t explicitly wanted to. I think the best would be for sidebars to link other communities.
Hmm, yes some sort of popup with checkboxes to auto-subscribe to similar communities on other servers as recommended by the moderators would be a nice addition.