If I understand correctly, users of other fediverse things like Mastodon can follow lemmy communities (and users?) but the reverse is not currently possible. Would it not make sense for lemmy users to be able to subscribe to a hashtag or user on a mastodon instance?
This would make sense, hashtags being a kind of community that goes beyond the boundaries of a single instance. This immadiately made me think about this thread from last year, maybe there’s still some fuel for thought there.
I think this is pretty much excluded by Lemmy’s design : people should engage in communities rather than following each other like VIPs.
Now, aside from following, it may be interesting to be able to treat a top-level toot like a post and participate in the thread (basically the way we see toot threads in Friendica).
This would also be interesting in principle with platforms like Peertube were top-level posts are artistic creations. Lemmy users would contribute to the actual comment section instead of having their discussions in their corners.
And now this raises the question of how to treat crossposts. More specifically, how would Peertube treat a crosspost in a Lemmy community. It may be interesting to have a drop-down option to “display comments from the … community” at the end of the regular comments.
Let me mention a third kind of object : the groups that Mastodon is soon going to include. Similarly, Friendica has forums. Given the proximity in spirit with Lemmy communities, the interest of Lemmy users becoming able to follow them is quite obvious.