Is it possible to automatically subscribe to all (federated) communities with the same name?

Example in the screenshot: I want to follow !astronomy, and I don’t really care whether the content is coming from from Lemmy.World, kbin.social and mander.xyz - I just want to see it all.

Obviously I could manually subscribe to them all, but is it possible to do so automatically? Ideally if a new similar community pops up on another instance, I wouldn’t miss it.

I read here that community grouping is a thing, so that instances with identical communities can work together. Is that a feature that could work towards this end?

  • HunterBidensLapDog
    2•1 year ago

    • We need a central registry of communities, aka subreddits, and users.

    • Figuring out if two posts are identical is going to be a challenge.

    • Some people are going to cross post but post slightly differently on each instance because they don’t know if their post will be federated

    • Maybe group by hashtag instead of community name?

    • We should steal the ideas that were good with Reddit and Twitter

    • @[email protected]
      2•1 year ago

      What if users could just configure their own named groups for communities from the various instances, and when you view the group you’d see a feed from all of them?

      • Cr4yfish
        1•1 year ago

        Yes, very good idea! When users create a group, they can select keywords to search for and then the App could make a best guess and then show a list to the user where they can select the ones they want or don’t want in the group.

    • Cr4yfish
      1•1 year ago

      Figuring out if two posts are identical is going to be a challenge

      I think I could deal with duplicates pretty easily by checking if different properties of the post are identical, the more are the less likely it is that the post will be shown.

      I think a bigger problem is the comments. What if a user reposts a post from r/astronomy on lemmy.world to c/astronomy on lemmy.ml? Which one do we show, and what do we do with the comments of the other? Merge them together, or just leave them? Maybe show a button on the post when there’s a duplicate und the user can switch instances?

      Lots of figuring out to do, but it sounds fun!

      Edit: The Group-by-Hashtag thing is also a good idea! That would of course make the whole thing less of a headache, but to make that work a lot of users need to do that.