Is it possible to automatically subscribe to all (federated) communities with the same name?
Example in the screenshot: I want to follow !astronomy, and I don’t really care whether the content is coming from from Lemmy.World, kbin.social and mander.xyz - I just want to see it all.
Obviously I could manually subscribe to them all, but is it possible to do so automatically? Ideally if a new similar community pops up on another instance, I wouldn’t miss it.
I read here that community grouping is a thing, so that instances with identical communities can work together. Is that a feature that could work towards this end?
We need a central registry of communities, aka subreddits, and users.
Figuring out if two posts are identical is going to be a challenge.
Some people are going to cross post but post slightly differently on each instance because they don’t know if their post will be federated
Maybe group by hashtag instead of community name?
We should steal the ideas that were good with Reddit and Twitter
What if users could just configure their own named groups for communities from the various instances, and when you view the group you’d see a feed from all of them?
Yes, very good idea! When users create a group, they can select keywords to search for and then the App could make a best guess and then show a list to the user where they can select the ones they want or don’t want in the group.
I think I could deal with duplicates pretty easily by checking if different properties of the post are identical, the more are the less likely it is that the post will be shown.
I think a bigger problem is the comments. What if a user reposts a post from r/astronomy on lemmy.world to c/astronomy on lemmy.ml? Which one do we show, and what do we do with the comments of the other? Merge them together, or just leave them? Maybe show a button on the post when there’s a duplicate und the user can switch instances?
Lots of figuring out to do, but it sounds fun!
Edit: The Group-by-Hashtag thing is also a good idea! That would of course make the whole thing less of a headache, but to make that work a lot of users need to do that.