The ability for communities to follow each other can definitely fix the biggest issues in Lemmy. Unfortunately it feels like there's always a high priority issue getting in the way, whether it be patching security bugs or broken frontend bugs or the sudden need in better moderation tools lately. Growing pains and all that.
I'm hopeful that some form of community grouping will happen soon enough.
I definitely think some form of grouping is necessary for a better user experience. I would be content with user grouping, but I would love to see an option that is more automated for users, like the community following feature the author mentioned.
One issue might be that users lose some control over which communities they see content from. If [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] are all connected in this way, but I despise something about [email protected], I can't follow either of the others?
Which could be solved by a toggle on the community. The next question then would be what the default is, and I think more content would be better than less.
The last issue is how much more confusing this will be for new users, which I don't know how to solve because I don't quite understand it myself
I think it would be pretty easy to sort in your 1+2+3 case. Let users natively ban instances.
Say you hate instance 3. If you go into the 1+2+3 thread, you will only be able to see or interact with 1+2 comments, as all others wont even load for you.
The tricky part is if 3 users can see or interact with your comments. It might be the case that you literally just wont see anything downthread if one of them replies to you.
They should make their own instance if they can. The devs cited Star Trek.website as the model for communities like fandoms. It is also cleaner as the instance can make several subs which have different rules and content.
The problem is that it requires money, either by the admins or through donations.
Just because one is open doesn't mean it should be used.
I also think that, compared to Reddit, there should be a more collaborative relationship between the mods and the admins because mods can choose their admins.
If they want to move r/rust to Lemmy, then just pick an instance and move, or start your own instance if none of the existing comms matches their needs, instead of all of these excuses.
Again, it's really hard to get this through people's head, but Lemmy is not a reddit clone, every instance is an independent forum each with their own different policies and moderation. If you don't like the comm of one instance, you can easily move to a different comm on another instance with the same topic.
For different comm on the same topic to follow each other would honestly be a moderation nightmare, which is why I'm only supportive of user level community grouping (which would be more along the line of having multiple subscribed tabs. )
Can you elaborate on why a community following another would be a moderation nightmare? It would be up to the moderators of a specific community to follow the other communities, if it became a problem, they could simply unfollow.
Sure. It boils down to "should I have the ability to moderate posts on a followed comm". In the event of a rule conflict (removal, pin thread, etc) , which mod team gets to make the decision about which set of rules to follow? If you say "it's up to each mod team to decide.", then that would really be no different than crossposting which already exists in Lemmy, and each comm will then have different content anyways.
Let me put it this way, using a reddit analogy: do you think it would be a useful feature for r/gaming to follow r/games and r/truegaming on a subreddit level to centralize all gaming content on reddit?
As I was reading the blog post, I asked myself why a soft fork would be necessary and I'm glad to see they came to the same conclusion by the end.
This is the first I've seen of the community following communities idea as a solution to the separation of similar discussions among multiple instances, and I love it. This combined with the personal user curated multi-reddit ideas and we're golden. I wish I knew Rust so I could help make it come to fruition.