This would be excellent if done right. What I am curious about is, where this will be implemented? On the protocol level in activity pub or with each GUI (mastodon, pixelfed, lemmy, kbin etc) need to individually implemented it?

Solution is hashtags + community name, not a “fedicommrc”.
I was in FidoNet with a BBS in 1988 and on the Internet since 1990 first through a dialup vt100 connection to a Unix login access point for usenet and email before the Internet was available to the public. Communities are a special interest of mine. I started a particularly good one for Permaculture using a mailing list with email. I still run it. Noone should, for example, OWN the only permaculture community in the Fediverse. What are others who want their own going to do to gain users and generate traffic? call it permaculture2 or thatotherpermaculturecommunity or permaculture-general or permaculture-westernworld. Letting one group control any particular Fediverse named community is a really bad idea. Have you ever started and run a community (newsgroup, mailing list, subforum, fb group, google group, webforum, whatever)? Having one group control any named community is bad enough but everyone with an instance having to deal with a fixed list of communities for the entire Fediverse is absurd. You could easily have a multiplicity of communities with the same name but identified with hashtags for subjects they specialize it. This should solve your problem with community naming and with this no distributed list of communities for instances to carry would be needed. You could carry 6 different permaculture communities and each would be uniquely identified with hashtags alone. Make sure to code the software to feature those hashtags prominently along with the community name for ease of finding and subscribing to them.
Are you talking about a Fediverse version of a Usenet newsrc? Those who install an instance and want their own communities named as they choose would just do that and ignore any network-wide policy. Other instances can block them for doing that but they can simply connect with other like minded instances and form their own network and forget Federation. This is especially true when some gang of control freaks own a named community, i.e. permaculture. That is not going to fly. Disunity but independence within the Fediverse will rule.

I think that would defeat a piece of the point of a decentralized system. In the current design, what will naturally happen is that if one instance has all the good content on a particular topic, most users will gravitate toward it anyway. We can read across federated instances anyway so I, a kbin user, have no problem reading something on lemmy like this.

Then let’s say one day lemmyworld@lemmy.world gets taken over by people who want to post stuff I don’t want to see. If I miss how it used to be here, I could go make lemmyworld@kbin.social and it would be fine.

not sure that solution is a good one for this environment. I’m new but from what i’ve seen the concept of moderation is different and your solution is trying to engineer a reddit-like moderation design to an architecture that is fundamentally not reddit-like. Moderation here is at the instance level, not the community level.

I can’t form an opinion right now.
If all similar communities appeared combined into a single community I’d still be likely to want to still filter out sources.
But at the same time sometimes a place to see them all together sounds appealing.
It seems that I want both, but probably what we have now is the most flexible, forcing less limitations.

Ether that or allow formeta-communities so that the 500 duplicate copies of “Technology” can self aggregate.

Unless I’ve misunderstood something, community names are already globally unique and multiple identically named communities cannot exist, you’re just not looking at the full name.

Memes@lemmy.ml and Memes@sopuli.xyz are different names, for example.

Sometimes we ignore the part of the name after the @ if it’s unambiguous, but it’s still there.

As it’s currently implemented, the Fediverse allows for multiple identically named communities to exist. I believe this is a mistake. The fediverse should have one uniquely named community instance, and part of the atomic data exchanged through the federation should include the instance that “owns” the community and a list of moderators. Each member server of the Fediverse should maintain an identical list of communities, based on server federation. Just like USENET of yore.

Hard disagree. This allows abuse by moderator abuse similar to how reddit does it. Ideally the UI would allow you to create collections of communities based on your own groupings. And search could be expanded to find more similar communities (ie: based on keywords).

The way loading/finding and joining a totally new community into a new external instance is kinda buggy.

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This could also be the gateway into instance transference. If the instances are more in-sync, it will be easier to transfer either a user account or a community.

I think this is perhaps the most compelling part of your thinking here, but at the same time, I’m more drawn by the idea of improved portability of instance information than the synchronization.

I may be mistaken, but I think a fundamental aspect of the federation model is the independent operations of each community while enabling their intercommunication, and the sort of synchronization you suggest would be a violation of each instance’s autonomy to a degree. Not to say it’s a bad idea, just that I think it would better fit a different networking model than what I think the federated model seems to be pursuing.

USENET was a mess too, though… The entire Alt.* hierarchy was an attempt to route around censorship and I’m pretty sure I recall lots of duplication of groups. /derail

Communities should have categories/hashtags that users can optionally sub to, like the ‘metacommunities’ like plz1 said but optional and multiple. Mastodon does hashtagging and can be done on a post by post basis. The forum software Flarum has a ‘tag’/category system and an additional hashtag system, so what I’m thinking of is more like the Flarum system since it would be awkward to hashtag every single post in a community/magazine/whatever.

So if I wanted to just get solarpunk tech I’d sub to that, but if I wanted that and even moar I’d sub to a generalized Tech tag. Make sense?

I disagree respectfully, as I think this is a feature and not a bug of a federated structure. It’s well known that reddit suffers from the “20K Law”, which is that “The quality of any subreddit drops off a cliff after it gets more than 20K subscribers”. Which is likely because that is the limit of effective manual moderation.

So, having multiple communities on the same topic would be a fundamental fix to that issue, as instead of one giant community, instead you get different, smaller communities with different culture on the same topic, whose users can still talk to each other.

I think the current system is fine as is, we’re not trying to remake a better reddit, we are trying to be better than the limits of reddit.

I understand your idea, but I think it would defeat the purpose of the fediverse. It would create single points of failure that are un-correctable.

I also think many people forget that Reddit never functioned any differently. Everyone seems to have forgotten (and I’m not saying you have!) that there are and were always multiple subreddits for any given topic. With slightly differing names. The only reason people are forgetting this is because eventually one or a handful became pre-eminent and the others died or became transformed into something more niche.

I think it’s a problem that will ultimately correct itself, but I think a tags based system, like hashtags in Mastodon, would be a better solution for tying communities/magazines together through metadata.

I see this suggestion as problematic and recreating a problem reddit had. One group could lay claim to territory and everyone was stuck with however good or bad the culture was in the sub and however good or bad the mods were. There were some places with mods on a powertrip creating an exclusionary or outright toxic environment.