this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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You are literally describing reddit. Allowing mods to federate communities together would be novel.
The beauty of the fediverse is that when one volunteer-run server goes down (as happens all the time) there is little disruption if your feed is filling with other instance's content. You can't count on these volunteer-run servers to have 99.9% uptime like reddit, they can disappear over night.
Same idea for communities. If lemmy.world disappears tomorrow there are dozens of communities that disappear with it; fragmented across the fediverse. If mods of those communities were federated with complementary communities on other instances then there is no disruption.
I don't think that communities should automatically federate, it should be agreed to by the mods. But with the current population we can't afford to keep identical communities isolated. Many will die a slow death when together it could have been thriving.
All I'm saying is that if /c/butterflies exists on multiple instances they should be able to "aggregate" themselves as if they were one instance. We don't have enough users to isolate small communities; they have no shot here.
If large federated communities want to exclude others... those others can just form their own federated group. We're still in a much better position than if we had one large community on a single instance or a speckling of tiny ones across the fediverse that aren't large enough to drive engagement.
In the current model small communities are forced to choose a server. When that server goes down we lose an entire community. Two examples off the top of my head are Firefox and Android. We can't count on legends to save us every time. And why go through that chaos when we have the underlying systems to avoid it?
Wait, what? No, not at all. There is no reason for them to redundantly store all the data.
Imagine the same concept but the data is just being aggregated. The purpose is that content gets more exposure and engagement not to create an archive.
Is that so different than how the fediverse currently works? Subscribed content is already being federated across instances I'm just asking it to be organized together. When your instance federates with a community on another instance it doesn't get the entire "5-year" backlog sent to it; only new posts and old content that someone interacts with is sent.
I think there are limits to the scalability of the fediverse, in general, I just don't see how organizing the data differently is breaking anything. Only the most limited servers are going to be impacted from receiving content from three /c/butterflies instead of one. Most people are probably subscribed to the duplicate communities already; I certainly am.