Firstly, there is the unstoppable flood of new posts that are added while browsing “All”. Although this doesn’t happen when using the Jerbea app, it sometimes renders “All” unusable in the browser.
This will be resolved once websockets are removed with the next update:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3008
Secondly, the issue of the same posts being displayed for days under “Hot”. There is already a pull request for this, so it has been fixed and just needs to be implemented:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3076
Now, the only remaining points for me are:
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Links to external instances should automatically be transformed when opened so that one can participate with the account of their own instance. For example, lemmy.world/c/memes should automatically become feddit.de/c/[email protected].
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Communities from different instances should be able to merge, allowing users to see the content of all communities across different instances.
Merging communities might be hard, but maybe redirecting a community to another instance? this would also allow people to move communities from one instance to another, which would allow large communities to have dedicated instances, or to consolidate related communities under the same instance.
Allowing communities to exist across multiple instances is going to be a nightmare now that I think about it, like how will moderation work? I can already see it becoming a new way to spam. Create your own lemmy instance, spam a post, and make it so that no one can delete it. It’ll cause instances to disable open federation, which would mean we’ll end up with only a few allowed instances
should be fairly easy: send invite to same community on other instance, after merge instances will sync community, moderators will merge.
But this might bring other problems
I think multi reddits (which are a highly requested feature now) could be used as a decent compromise.
Basically imagine users can group communities together into one mini-feed. This could be used for similar communities across multiple instances, like [email protected] and [email protected]. Call them multi-lemmies or subscription groups or web rings or whatever.
Then, what if moderators could cooperate create their own recommended feeds that users can subscribe to? Maybe even put a link to it next to the “Subscribe” link in the sidebar. If users of both communities are encouraged to sign up for the multi-lemmy, then everybody can see everybody else’s content in one combined feed without having to cross-post.
Posts are still hosted on their home instance, so there’s no extra work for moderators except over agreeing which other communities can join the ring. If a user doesn’t want to see a particular community for whatever reason, they can still subscribe/unsubscribe to specific communities like before. That way we get the best of both federation and similar communities sharing content.