Lemmy

Why not implement "Communities following communities"?

Community a can follow community b, making posts from b also appear on a.

What this means is that community moderators can choose to have posts from other communities to show up on theirs. That means if all the pancake communities are following each other, I can post on pancake@a.com and it would show up on the other pancake communities as well, and the comments would simply be grouped into just one post!

As a practical example, imagine if your post on games@lemmy.world would also show up on games@sh.itjust.works, and people from over there will only interact with your post and not a crossposted version of it (which would separate comments).

This would fix the "centralization" issue of merging communities by giving all communities the power to choose which communities to integrate with, and users would have the power to choose which instance to post on. You wouldn't need to worry about posting or browsing the "right" community, because each community would be interconnected. Just as the Fediverse gods intended.

Of course, communities would have the freedom to choose which ones to follow. If the moderators on pancakes@d.com disagree with pancakes@a.com, they don't need to follow that community and show its posts. I don't foresee something like this happening often, though. Providing options either way is good for all sides.

I think this would be a more elegant solution than combining comment sections from multiple crossposts.