This, worded in far more technical terms than I had understood back at the time, is one of the reasons why I've always opposed the idea of "merging" communities in the Fediverse. Merging views is fine, but merging the communities themselves and all that this means (focus, themes, memberships, rules, censorships, timezones...) is just Not.

[–] fluffykittycat@slrpnk.net 3 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

We need a mature multireddit like function, and for similar communities across instances to be pre-merged. A function to display comments on the same post cross posted or parallel posted on one page would be useful too. That would help with fragmentation while allowing communities to be independent underneath

[–] showmeyourkizinti@startrek.website 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

So if I understand you, Lemmy would benefit from a grouping above /c that’s not instance related? Like Usenet had the rec.cats group which spawned rec.cats.siamese? So maybe a /u universe? If I wanted to read about television I could go to u/television which could merge feeds of c/television@piefed.social and c/television@lemmy.world and any other c/television@.? I could see possibilities of abuse but we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Maybe a /u could be an opt in thing with a manager of some kind to prevent unrelated /c’s from randomly joining.

[–] julian@activitypub.space 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Isn't that basically a Piefed topic?

[–] showmeyourkizinti@startrek.website 1 points 4 hours ago

Is it? I’m on a Lemmy instance and I use Voyager as my daily drive, so I’m pretty behind on Piefed. But that does sound like a good idea.

[–] julian@activitypub.space 3 points 8 hours ago

The potential for abuse or culture clash comes when these disparate (yet related) communities are combined.

From a user perspective it may make sense to expose "related discussions" that you can browse to. Keeping the discussions separate yet linked could be a workable compromise.

[–] CMLVI@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago

Yeah, this would be good in my mind. I don't even care if it's just the communities my instance is federated with only; I would imagine I land with an instance that shares my values, so their federation I'd be OK with (hypothetically). I just don't want to feel like I'm missing out by being somewhere else and not knowing/being aware of a portion of the community. I want the discussion just as much as I want the information presented.