Lemmy

I wonder if something like a hashtag system, or built in multi-communities would be a good solution. It's definitely something I'd say needs to be addressed at some point, but I'm not sure what would be a good solution, especially as I'm not yet familiar with the specifics of ActivityPub. The solution you pose seems to be a good step in the right direction.

I'll also say, I don't think limiting communities to a single instance is the answer, because if that instance ever goes down for whatever reason, the whole community is gone. It should be distributed across instances by design, imo. I've seen some people suggesting this, so I wanted to address it.

Really like the thinking.

I suspect however that your proposal would dissolve the boundaries between communities too much. And potentially create a problematic amount of work and traffic and confusion across the federation.

I would counter-propose to put the aggregation on the user/client side, where, like on reddit, users can create custom feeds that aggregate multiple communities. This is also, generally, a feature in the fediverse-microblogging platforms.

At the moment, lemmy provides "All", "Local" and "Subscribed". So my proposal would be that there'd be a fourth "User" feed, with any number of sub-feeds or filters. Perhaps, speaking of UI, it could just be available as a special filter under "Subscribed".

Either way, the User would create a feed by listing the communities that would contribute to that feed. Give the feed a name and then view it whenever they like. Given that similar logic is already happening for the "Subscribed" feed, I would imagine that this is a realistic feature

Some additional enhancements could be the following:

• Sharing custom feeds. Allow users to make their feed configurations public so that others, especially newcomers, can copy and get up to speed on where things are in the ecosystem.
• Allow the feed to be sorted with equal or skewed weighting. Lets say you have a custom feed for programming that aggregates two communities, one big and active, the other smaller, less active but no less interesting. You might want your feed to present things from both communities with equal probability. I think this could be straightforward. The idea would be if you're sorting by "most comments", you can do so relative to each community's level of activity, so that the most active post from each community are considered equal in your feed even though one post as 10x the comments than the other in absolute terms.
  • Going even further ... you could maybe add a custom weighting, so that posts from the less popular community are weighted twice as highly because you're more interested in it. This may be a relatively heavy burden on the server, but would be cool!
• The Cross-posting UI can list at the top of the communities list those that you group along with the originating community. This way, communities can remain discrete, which is generally a good thing, but cross-pollination can happen as easily as possible.
  • For those that don't know, the icon, underneath a post, with two squares, one infront of and to the bottom-right of the other, is the cross-post function on lemmy.