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.

  • federateduserOP
    3·
    4 years ago

    I know, starwars & startrek was a bad example for comparing similar communities. I just went along with the examples you gave initially.
    Lemmy has some major differences compared to other fediverse platforms because of the concept of communities and being able to follow them. I’m not an expert, but from what i understand, there are limitations on how much decentralized it can be. I made this post to address some of the concerns, and I’m ok with it as far as we all understand these limitations exist. I hope others would get an idea when they read this post.
    I still think that lemmy is far better compared to traditional platforms like reddit. I’m grateful for this project to exist and i cannot ask you more. Thanks for replying, this was my first post on lemmy.