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?

  • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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    1 year ago

    Just pick the most popular one. The rest will slowly die.

    The website UI shows active users, use that metric.

    • hardypart@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      I heard you only see the subscriber count from the own instance, not all together. So there’s no accurate way to tell which one actually is the most popular.

      • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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        1 year ago

        No, it shows subscribers for your instance, but overall monthly users.

        My instance has just over 100 users.

        This is what I see:

    • variants@possumpat.io
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      1 year ago

      just like reddit, you search for a subreddit and see all the ones that didnt take and find the one with the most content and subscribe

      • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And that’s how we ended up with subs rulled by really terrible mods but no one ever bothered to help build up an alternative.

        This right here is where centralization comes from. People refusing to try smaller communities, gravitating toward the biggest ones, and suddenly you end up beholden to whatever the admins of that place want, because the community is rooted there.

        What we need are multi-reddit style systems where you can combine all smaller instances into one feed, instead of only picking the biggest.

        • variants@possumpat.io
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          1 year ago

          yeah that is a good point, I guess I just need to see how it would be implemented. I use https://browse.feddit.de/ to browse for communities and just subscribe to all the ones that relate to a topic, I wouldnt want it to automatically subscribe me to new instances that have the same community because they might do it for trolling or something, maybe the search bar just needs to be improved so we dont have to use outside services to be able to browse all the communities out there

        • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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          1 year ago

          Yeah but nobody wants to split discussions.

          These multi-communities. How would they work? They’d have to be curated by the user - which is a dead end since 99% won’t bother. Or else curated by someone else which leads to politicking about who’s listed and who’s not.

          And what happens when you go to post? You have to pick one? And worry about who will see it and who won’t? Again, most users would find this burdensome.

          Or it could just be like a hashtag and go out into one big conglomerate community. Who hosts that? How is it propagated? How does moderation work?

          I think communities curated by a number of people passionate about each subject is just the best way for forums of this nature to work, realistically.

          If a community gets too bad, they can and will be fractured and eventually one dies.

          Ideal? No. Just what works best.

          Multi-communities is a feature we need though. I just don’t think they’re a solution.