Can communities (or subreddits) follow other communities from different instances ?
From what I understand about lemmy, there can have communities with the same name on different instances. So that you have to follow each of them individually. But one important feature of traditional sites like reddit is that you can follow one subreddit (or community) and get all the updates about that topic, interest etc. And i believe its important for link aggregators to have such a unified place for a topic.
One solution to this problem would be to put communities with the same name on a single page on your device with a lemmy client app. So that community Abc@instance1 and Abc@instance2 would show on a single page when subscribed to both. But this won’t work well if Abc@instance1 and Abc@instance2 are about different topics despite having the same name. Also, this means the user again have to find and follow each community about a topic manually to have the same experience he would otherwise get from a single community on reddit.
Applying the fediverse logic here, it would be really nice if communities could follow one another. So that the users can get a similar experience to traditional link aggregators while keeping it decentralized. this would mean that if Abc@instance1 follows Abc@instance2, all of the posts from Abc@instance2 will be available on Abc@instance1 as well.
NOTE: I don’t know if any of such features already exists, but let me know if a similar feature or a different workaround for this issue exists. I am suggesting this as an end user and don’t know much about the practicalities of it, federated communities can complicate moderation for example.
Sepia search is a unified search engine for the peertube vidiverse. Here, we are not looking for a unified search engine, but a unified page for communities about similar topics. This has to be done for each topic or interest, and is much more harder to do compared to a search engine.
That’s the reason why i recommend the idea of federated communities, so that each community can choose which other ones to follow (kinda like instances). This way, you don’t have to manually find and group together different communities, the communities would do it themselves by following other similar ones.
But, if we’re gonna take the ladder, we can actually create something like Sepia search for this thing too. Something like a community-grouper website, that finds similar communities across different instances and group them together as a bundle. These bundles can then be imported to a lemmy client app to fetch content from all the instances and view them on a single page. This is like an extension of my first idea, but with this website doing the work for us, users don’t need to find communities themselves.