What we’re really lacking on the ui end is a way to see groups of identical communities that are on different federated platforms. Hence the idea of a dom-lemmy. The way it would work is lets say you search for a cat community called “cats”, there’s at least dozens of them out there already. Instead it would return the cats dom-lemmy, with the option to either drill down to a specific instance, or to merge all sub-lemmys called cats into a single view
You would have to know to search for “cat” though and that’s not always clear.
For example say I’m part of a sub for the steam deck (I am), instead if figuring out what to search for to get related subs I would rather be able to see a cluster of related subs on the sidebar, automatically generated.
That way instead of trying to figure out what to search for, it just clusters based on the current sub information.
The way sports league
subsmagazines or whatever handle it is the greater league magazine, and then each team has their own team-specific place. It largely in effect already; you have the overarching “video games” sub and then specific games usually have their own sub for game-specific updates (here is what a vendor is selling today, build discussion, etc).The issue with federated would be each instance is likely to have their own “parent” sub, with the specific ones probably falling to whatever instance has the established population.
It would be helpful, I think, for these “default” subs to have like a repository of sorts. Large topic subs all contribute to the same silo, and instances can pick what interactive content they get from the instances regarding comments and such. But that sorta defeats the de-federation tactics by link and article posts, but I imagine attack posts probably wouldn’t fly in the vast majority of instances.