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

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[–] Eldritch@piefed.world 46 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Piefed at least already deals with this. If you post to a community. Then cross post that post to other communities. Conversations from all cross posted, federated articles show up together.

[–] korendian@lemmy.zip 12 points 4 days ago

That's interesting, good to know!

[–] jwr1@kbin.earth 8 points 4 days ago

Interstellar (an Mbin/Lemmy/PieFed client) does this by default for cross posts as well!

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 17 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

You can make feeds containing specific communities on piefed that would combine all like-for-like communities.

[–] matsdis@piefed.social 4 points 4 days ago (3 children)

As a pretty new user to PieFed (and Lemmy), I still find those combined feeds ("Communities") confusing. It helped with discovery, but feels like I have been mass-subscribed and now need to unsubscribe each community individually. (I'm sure this is not the case and I just haven't figured out how it works yet.)

In contrast, the cross-post feature (mentioned by sibling comments) was easy to understand, and looks like a great way to discover (and loosely connect) small related communities.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

@wjs018@piefed.social See!? SEE?!

Lol, I've specifically directly bought this up in conversations about this. Don't worry. I don't think the auto-subscribing to all the communities in a topic is a good idea.

So what a new user is presented with are topics, not feeds. The only difference is that topics are handled at the instance level - by site admins - and have more visibility and populate the "Related Communities" feed. Where-as feeds are the same thing, but user-made. Click here to see them.

[–] wjs018@piefed.social 4 points 4 days ago

I can confirm that this is something @Skavau@piefed.social has brought up in the past on multiple occasions. It's an issue that I am sympathetic to, but so far it hasn't been a high priority for us to take the time to try to address. One of the biggest complaints we see people have about the threadiverse in general is that there isn't enough content; that their feed gets stale too quickly. So, having more subscriptions hasn't necessarily been seen as too much of a "problem" from my perspective.

What I did work on was making it easier to unsubscribe from communities. If you filter the communities page to just communities you are subscribed to, it should be a simple matter of clicking the buttons to unsubscribe to undesired communities. It used to reload the page each time, which made that task immensely tedious.

Frankly, now that Skavau has a third party backing up their position, they will be insufferable about it until we try to fix it 😜

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 4 days ago

https://piefed.social/topics

I think you can unsubscribe from whatever topics you subscribed to here, and it should auto-unsubscribe you from those communities.

[–] korendian@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 days ago

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

[–] rimu@crust.piefed.social 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Lemmy fixes this in v1.0.

[–] korendian@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Oh cool, good to know!

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 10 points 4 days ago

No we are a long way off from a 1.0 release yet.

https://lemmy.ml/comment/22544926

[–] Blaze@piefed.zip 10 points 4 days ago

Piefed consolidates comments from crossposts : https://piefed.zip/c/space/p/771135/space-station-first-all-docking-ports-fully-occupied-8-spacecraft-on-orbit#post_replies

[–] SharkAttak@kbin.melroy.org 3 points 4 days ago

I agree with you, just look at how many "gaming" subs are there... I think I already saw this topic being brought up some time ago. Kbin had something like this, and Mbin plans to add it, if I remember right.

[–] birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 days ago

Having the option might be handy, but federation is the goal.

Besides, moderation rules might differ by instance. It should remain fully a choice.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

I think some kind of "pod" system would be nice where similar posts/crossposts could be visually grouped together like a "pod" of dolphins all surfacing on your feed together in a natural flowing way (randomly assigned color coding maybe?). Seeing one dolphin surface after another should feel like cohesive movement of a pod and any one post should link towards other dolphins in the pod not currently visible too.

You could then as a user "pod" a post by linking it with another post and the resulting feed of newly "podded" posts could itself be a browsable "pod feed".

Obviously a different word than pod may be better, but I like the whale pod metaphor.