If my home instance is lemmy.ca, and I want to create and moderate a community about, say, Japanese woodworking (random example of a subreddit I follow), isn’t it a bit odd for that community to be hosted by lemmy.ca? If somebody else later created a community of the same name on lemmy.ml or lemmy.jp, would people be more likely to join those communities as they seem more “official”?
On one hand, joining multiple instances just for “better” vanity URLs for new communities seems wrong (and annoying to manage), on the other hand it’s odd that I’d arbitrarily impose the traffic associated with a community completely unrelated to Canada onto lemmy.ca. How is this supposed to work?
Im only just looking into the fediverse. But as I see it, ideally, some future feature of lemmy would allow communities centered around the same thing on different nodes, to merge, that is, to be federated between them. Maybe by mutual consent from the mods of both.
This would help discoverability immensely, and also allow one to sub to a “local” community but have posts appear to users subbed to the “same” community on their local instance, as well as see posts from users posting to their instances connected community.
It would be a bit like a crosspost, except any given post would still live on the actual server it was posted from, the feed just gets aggregated from all the different “mirror” communities.
Critically, it should always be possible to disconnect, as well. To have those two timelines of content seamlessly unzip from each other, taking their respective comment threads with them, but allowing both communities to separate again and continue.
This would also provide redundancy in cases of instances going down, perhaps to re-appear later, perhaps not.