So let’s take this actual example: There’s !canada@lemmy.ml and !canada@lemmy.ca. They talk about the same thing, but are treated by the current federation implementation as separate instances.
How would you feel if there was a moderation feature to import another federated instance’s community into your own, so that the posts from the other instance automatically show up in the same feed? That way, you only have to subscribe to one community on one instance, but you get content from multiple instances. I’m not talking about crossposting or mirroring/duplicating posts between communities, only displaying the posts from another instance the community’s home server federates with, with moderator discretion.
I was hoping we would have the ability to follow other instance’s feeds with one account like how you subscribe to a subreddit on reddit. Like if someone made a lemmy instance all about photography then I could follow that feed instead of having to create an account on their instance, then follow an instance all about keyboards or cars etc. I think that would be the best way to decentralize the content instead of all being on one instance with multiple mini communities. Some times I follow multiple subreddits about the same thing because they have a slightly different focus so I dont think merging them would be the best option but being able to subscribe to one or the other or both would be nice
That is how the federation currently works.
You already sort of can do that, you just need to manually subscribe to each individual community you want to follow on that instance. Just in case it’s not clear, you can subscribe to and read and comment in other instances’ communities from here, your home instance, with one account.
oh wow! ok never mind then haha I used mastodon before and I remembered you could follow a user but not the entire instance