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?

  • giacomo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Would you want this to work retroactively also? Like if I spun up an instance with a community called astronomy with only pictures of buttholes that look like galaxies, should that be automatically added to the community group? What if I started the most legit instance with a community called astronomy with a bunch of my university of space scientist buddies, would that also be retroactively added to the community group?

    I think it’s a cool idea to be able to subscribe to all communities of a similar name. But it’s kind of akin to following a hashtag eventually as the fediverse grows.

    It would be pretty cool if communities could federate, but that would be p much like a content load balancer. Like if 5 different instances all had an astronomy community that was sync’d across all 5 instances. You wouldn’t have to follow each community across all instances. You could just pick one and all posted content would land on each instance’s community. Like raid for social media lol.

    • f4te@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I like the RAID idea, there are two F1 communities on different servers with the same number of subs. they should be synced. no reason to have two

    • Hazama@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Okay. That’s a good point. I thought this was a pretty cool idea. (I’m basically just getting into Lemmy myself here) but yeah, there’s room for some bad actors there lol.

      I guess the real solution is like you said, let communities say, “hey, we think they’re cool and want to share content with them”

    • DharkStare@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You wouldn’t have to follow each community across all instances. You could just pick one and all posted content would land on each instance’s community.

      I’ve thought about something like that as well. I think it would be a pretty convenient feature.

      • Losername@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I want this as well. For example, I am a teacher and want to find teacher related discussions. I really don’t care which instance it is on. Just gimme the teacher drama and organization.

        Do I need to make several accounts to subscribe to them all? I’m kinda technology impaired and don’t understand internet stuff easy.

        • derpysmilingcat@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Unless it is on an instance that has federated from the one you’re on, like Lemmy.world and Beehaw, you only need the one account. .

    • mvirts@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Add a distributed hash table layer for fetching content in a topic on demand? RSS+BitTorrent = hashtags for Lemmy?

    • mookulator@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Yeah the more I hear counter arguments from people on here, the more I think the best solution is for communities to group together and opt in to cross posting with one another. Are you saying thats a flawed idea too?

    • RGB3x3@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It would be federation within federation! The administration overhead would probably be nuts.