There was some proposal that I have seen multiple times on Lemmy and at least once on the GitHub repo that communities should be able to subscribe to each other much like users can subscribe to communities. I vastly prefer this to other proposals such as auto-merging communities with the same name, which I can think of a few ways that can go wrong.

It would also be reasonably intuitive for the average user, since following stuff is already a familiar action you take on social media. You wouldn't really need to understand the quirks of federation to know why posting to one community makes it appear on other downstream communities. And as far as I know about ActivityPub (which is admittedly not much), it's not a stretch use it to implement a feature like this.

I wonder if this proposal ever reached anywhere.

[–] fushuan@lemm.ee 4 points 14 hours ago

A better proposal in my eyes would be a "improved cross-post". Currently crossposts are just posts that link to the other post, thus making two separate conversations and double the spam for people.

My proposal would be for a crosspost to act like a true link to the original, where people wouldn't see them as two independent psots but the cross posting would just expand the amount of people that sees the original. Users that click on the cross posted post are directed to the instance it was originally posted, and the conversations are kept simple.

I guess that to implement this we would need to change how a post appears to people, it would in a way look like a post from community A that shows in community B, but the ID of the post is the same so it shows up once in feeds. Dunno.

[–] Peter_Arbeitslos@feddit.org 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Something like that?

[–] kplaceholder@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 day ago

The idea that I'm talking about is actually more like communities forming a network, with chains of following. If I host a new instance and create a memes community in it, I'd like to start having that community follow memes @ lemmy.ml and memes @ lemmy.world, so that the community already has content from the get-go, but users may be able to post memes that are unique to my instance and its followers. The followers would also see memes from upstream unless my community unfollows them, as long as they don't also follow them independently.

This model of the network would allow each community to independently determine which other communities it thematically implies, without the user having to follow all 4 communities with the same name but different content across the platform.

The multireddit suggestion is more like having directories/tags for communities. It wouldn't achieve quite the same thing, but it would be useful as well. Both ideas can coexist and complement each other.

[–] ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What am I looking at?

[–] Peter_Arbeitslos@feddit.org 11 points 1 day ago

That's a hyperlink. Some new www-stuff which was recently developed in one of our planet's greates research Institutes which also has a great particle collider.