this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2021
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What could that be except communities? Hashtags maybe? Or maybe having communities that affiliate with each other, not as a full merge, but providing a mutually agregated feed, something like a multireddit but that would be accessible from the communities' respective pages.
Yes, all those are valid ways to approach it, imho.
(Hash)tags is the obvious one. Also the most chaotic and mob-driven. But it would be the least centralized and more community-driven way to approach it. I expect each community would be able to moderate what tags are allowed for the posts that are submitted to it, and/or be able to correct mis-tagged posts. And ideally each user browsing by hastag should be able to add his own blocklist to exclude communities he doesn't want content from. This approach has the advantage of being more granular and offering a categorization that is "perpendicular" to communities. So you can actually browse by tag in only one community (as a way to subdivide it further) just the same as how you can browse by tag on a particular instance or on the whole fediverse.
Multireddits are curated aggregations of subreddits, but that means it requires maintenance and in the end it has a centralized point of control. In the reddit example, any user can decide to make a curated list of subreddits to form a multireddit, when people "follow" the multireddit the user who created it is the authority to decide what new subreddit might be added/removed. I guess it could be seen as meta-communities (a community that instead of managing an aggregate of post manages an aggregate of communities). This way you can have multiple meta-communities for the same topic that organize communities in different way, or that gave different "authorities" so if you don't like the set of communities one person has chosen, you pick another (or make your own), so even if the authority is centralized, you can switch it around and have it your way without really losing content. So centralization of that control is not a big a deal as long as you can fork it with no further consecuence.
Whichever path is taken, the goal is being able to subscribe to a topic in a way that's cross-instance, without having to manually keep track of each instance, taking advantage of the federation and not having to rely on big community nodes to form around one server. Ideally even if there were many small communities in separate instances it should work just as well as if there was only one big one.
Without something that, I don't see what advantage federation has for a reddit-like service (the main advantage I see right now is shared user accounts, but you could have also done that without needing federation, by separating the user/session management to a different service/API that independent servers could use for their own communities without needing to federate with other communities).
I don't agree : "managing" doesn't mean the same thing. AFAIU, there's nothing more to managing a multireddit than updating the list of subs it contains. Managing a community (or a sub) includes moderating the content. The only way for a multireddit maintainer to have any control is that the multireddit be more followed than the subs it contains, so that being part of the multireddit is in the sub's interest.
I don't think one has to manually keep track of the instances. One can subscribe to a community on another instance, follow the updates in their subscribed feed, and comment from their instance.
Ok, if there are two communities on the same topic on two different instances, that's two communities that one has to subscribe to, but that's a one time operation, right? Also if the communities have to be created on two instances, it probably means that they don't share the same code of conduct (CoC). So it does result in two different communities being created, right?
Maybe what you are asking for is that instances being able to whitelist only a community from an instance, e.g. if the community has stricter CoC than the instance? I have don't have any idea about whether it already works that ways, or about how hard it would be to implement that.
I just read in another comment that there is an issue for that: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1576