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
Maybe communities could set, voluntarily, some sort of tags that can be subscribed to or used for search.
With that idea, cat memes, cat owners, cat pictures, etc. could all be viewed together if they include a #cat tag, regrouping them, but without a hierarchy.
Something like the user tags on Steam games could work well: give the users the ability to submit and vote on tags, give the moderators/admins the ability to remove and blacklist ones they don’t like, and let the community sort everything as they see fit. Searching and displaying them could then be "show me everything with the tags “cute AND (cats OR dogs)”
