This is how I thought it would work / How I think it could/should work.
I thought this would be a super aggregator to federate all content related to a particular interest.
Taking "fediverse" as an example interest:
- All magazines/communities with the name "fediverse" across all kbin and lemmy servers would be aggregated into a single feed.
- All microblog posts with the hashtag #fediverse would also land in that same feed.
- As a user I can subscribe to this feed, create new threads, add comments to existing threads, etc.
- When I create a new thread it lands in that aggregated feed. The fact that I'm posting from kbin.social is largely irrelevant.
As a reader/consumer: by default when you subscribe to #fediverse it would have everything. Then, for more advanced users, you could configure it to filter out instances, hide/show microblogs, add/remove communities, etc. It would become your personal version of this particular interest. Combining the concepts of multi-reddit and federation.
The aggregated feed would simply be identified by say, #fediverse.
The server-specific community would be #fediverse@kbin.social, and not @fediverse, since that looks like a username.
In this model microblogging basically just becomes a particular way to create threads. All the features of mastodon can be expressed in terms of threads so the two concepts can be merged, this would remove some apparent complexity.
For writing, you wouldn't choose a particular community@instance target, you would just write to #fediverse. The fact that the OP is hosted on @kbin.social is a technical detail.
TL;DR:
- All duplicated communities across all servers should be aggregated into a unique feed that you can then personalize. Hide the concept of instances at first.
- Microblogging is the same as posting a (lightweight) thread, so there is no need to separate the two concepts, hide the dichotomy. The forum model is a superset of microblogging.
It’s definitely an interesting concept but then you have to define what constitutes a “duplicated” community. Do they have to share the exact same name? What if they are functionally duplicates but have different names (fediverse v fedi-verse)? What would happen if “trees” on Kbin is about actually trees but on a Lemmy instance it’s about weed?
I don’t have answers just questions. But I do like the idea of being able to abstract the instance that a community/magazines lives on one step further and make the topic the important part.