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.
I think it would also be helpful to have a way to see only one instance.
Say for example, some regional variants of communities group up (ex. The Canadian community for X + the general community for X)
Sometimes you might want to see all the content, and sometimes it might be helpful to just see the local content. A toggle or custom view would be nice to have