This weeks news:
- Interoperability between NodeBB and Discourse set a new way of federation between forums
- Publishing platform Ghost starts work on adding #activitypub support
- testing platform @pubkit launches in closed beta
- Following podcasts on your fediverse account became even easier with PodcastAP
- Mastodon has gotten funding to start implementing quote posts
I’m not sure. Similar communities at different instances can have very different rules and vibes. There’s a reason people prefer talking politics on Beehaw versus Hexbear.
I like the Kbin solution so far. Leave communities separate but cross-link and deduplicate individual threads from multiple communities in your feed. The implementation at Kbin is still a bit flawed, but the idea is sound.
I think it’s useful if it’s a feature you can choose to activate or deactivate yourself on specific groups of communities, but it sounds awful if the decision is made for you.
The value is in the granular way that you can connect communities. You’re totally right that there are a lot of cases where there are good reasons not to connect communities. That goes across instance borders (like you said, Beehaw and Hexbear would preferably not connect communities), but even for instances that are similar, not all communities need to be connected. In the current example of the Social Hub forum and the NodeBB development forum, only 2 communities (categories) are connected, and the rest is not.