Communities not existing on all instances is a big problem.
Example, Lemmy.ml and Lemmy.world have duplicate communities aren't connected at all. So we are artificially isolating groups more and making it confusing for would be converts.
It's valuable for .ml to have duplicates since certain instances and numerous individuals are defederated from them. There are also people who are trying to diversify the fediverse by moving communities off .world. Big, opinionated communities like the different news communities are going to spawn new versions as people disagree with mod decisions or the background culture and feel they can't have the conversations they want.
Some splitting is inevitable, imo, and healthy, though whether it's good in this or that particular case is a useful conversation to have. Merging communities is also useful, but only when it makes sense (one is barely moderated or barely used, or people have defederated from an instance one is on because of spam, etc.)
One of the things that I'm experimenting with is to have "communities that can follow communities". So, if community A follows community B, then it can re-post anything that has happened on Community B.
If you do it "properly", it doesn't even need to be a lot of data duplication because the "follower" community would just be creating Announce activities.
The only thing that is making me hold out on this experiment is because I am 100% sure that some people will see their posts on a community they never interacted on and they will panic on the grounds of "mah privacy" or something silly like that.
The only thing that is making me hold out on this experiment is because I am 100% sure that some people will see their posts on a community they never interacted on and they will panic on the grounds of “mah privacy” or something silly like that.
Don't hold out out of that. There are idiots everywhere and they should not be taken as a good driving force for anything.
Half the point of the Fediverse is that your activity is public. It's the entire point of why have activity with a community or instance in the first place. Heck, it's "kinda" the name of the protocol: "ActivityPub".
Thank you for the encouragement. In principle I agree with you 100%, but we also need to keep in mind that this corner of the internet is extremely averse to having their presence exposed outside of their original context.
NodeBB also does this, and currently still does. A category (group actor) can follow another category (also a group actor).
It essentially is synchronization of categories using 1b12.
Proof of concept does work but it needs reworking in some ways. The largest issue is that Lemmy itself doesn't understand when a group actor tries to follow a community.