Fediverse

This could be achieved within the UI and seems like a good idea.

Each kbin/lemmy instance decides to follow magazines/communities from others through activity pub and stores it locally for the instance.

Having the UI retrieve all local posts with the same magazine/community name (e.g. m/star_trek@kbin.social c/star_trek@lemmy.world). Wouldn't be hugely difficult, I believe Kbin uses postgres database as the local store. The community/instance should be columns you can search for, it would be a small SQL change.

Even if that wasn't an option, there is a means to get all of the magazines/communities from the kbin UI and retrieve all posts for a specific magazine/community. So you could do it entirely in a web client.

The combined view wouldn't change how you comment on specific posts. The issue is where do you post and what view would take dominance (e.g. if a magazine had themed itself).

The solution here would be to default to the local instance if it exists or the instance providing the most posts/comments. Perhaps with a drop downso users can choose.

I believe that Lemmy should add the ability for an instance to self-aggregate, were an Admin bundles other instances communities into a /g/ grouping.

So instance.tld/g/community could include the whatever communities across the fediverse they felt it should.

Some instances would use it for general aggregation, others would be more strict as a way to merge identical communities.

But as for now, there is no feature set.

I think you've misunderstood. Lemmy/Kbin absolutely DOES allow for one big forum to exists for a subject, across the whole fediverse.

It's just that people are creating communities on their own instances, because they don't know or care that one already exists on another somehwere, which they could be joining.

They are two separate communities. They are like if you had two subbreddits called r/startrek and r/alsostartrek.

They could be about the exact same thing, but they were started by different people. The second of which, either didn't check if one already existed, or wanted to make their own for one reason or another.

In the future, it might be possible to combine communities in some way (like multireddits), but for now, all they have in common is the subject matter.

And, while communities have a "home" instance they are not solely accessible by people on that instance. They are accessible by any user on any other federated instance. Making more communities for the same thing on other instances, is not how federation works. You're just making more "subbreddits" with similar names.

Basically, both communities exist on both instances. Only one is needed, on one instance, for there to be a community for a given subject on the entire fediverse.

You can view the Kbin magazine, of course: kbin.social/m/startrek

But you can also view the lemmy.ml community, still in Kbin: kbin.social/m/startrek@lemmy.ml

And the same works in reverse, the Kbin magazine, in lemmy: lemmy.ml/c/startrek@kbin.social

Basically, someone made a second one, even though only one is needed. They both exist for the entire fediverse, not just their respective instances.

This is how the Fediverse is. That said, I’m pretty sure there is functionality being worked on in some way to accomplish exactly what you are looking for.

You're probably wanting something like Reddit's "multireddit" functionality. I know of this issue for Lemmy, with some links to related issues in the comments. Kbin has one here.

Kbin magazines can sort of aggregate content through tags.

Join the biggest.

From the screenshot the local one is on top, but the main one is just below.

join https://kbin.social/m/startrek@startrek.website

As cool as it would be, currently federation doesn't work in this way

Basically the two communities you mentioned are !startrek@kbin.social and !starktrek@lemmy.ml; notice that when I write it out like this, they have different full names.

If you post on either community from any instance it will federate to that community on all instances but not between each other as they are separate communities

Hopefully this helps, I'm not great at explaining these things 😅

Check out https://startrek.website/c/startrek

Because they're two different communities/magazines hosted in two different servers from two different platforms

Federation makes it posible for you to participate in both