or maybe at least the posts wouldn’t be replicated, but there would only be one community, and when you visit it, posts for the community are downloaded from your primary instance, as well as other instances based on some configuration that makes sense.
The idea behind a decentralized network is that is decentralized. Each of those “ask lemmy” communities is independently run from each other and can impose different rules and moderation. If you don’t like how one community is being run, you can easily block it without missing much. With federation you can also easily subscribe to all of those communities to make them all seem bigger than what they really are.
What would be nice though is being able to make a custom feed of only your “ask lemmy” communities. That way you get a pseudo “centralized” feed of ask-lemmy-ness. Right now you’d need to jump from one to the next which is kind of a pain.
So the two solutions I’m seeing are either the Lemmy version of a “multireddit”, or another bot that reposts things across instances lol
I feel like if you’re okay with limiting it to communities with the exact same name, that this could be handled on the front end by app or web developers. I have seen some of the arguments about how it would be a lot of work for fairly little benefit on the back-end and I’m sympathetic, but “faking it” from a UI perspective shouldn’t be too terribly difficult (said the non-coder).
