As it is known, lemmy has many instances. There are similar communities in different instances. Is it possible to gather and display similar communities around a single title? For example, if there are 3 different technology communities, if you press and hold a community name in the subscriptions section on the left, the selection buttons are active. then if we choose more than one community. And if we click on merge the selected communities. Next, let’s name this group. The 3 different technology communities on the left will no longer appear. The group name we typed will appear. When you press and hold the group name, the options to distribute the group and edit the group will appear. When you click on the group, 3 community content will start to appear on the main page.
I think I’ve seen this feature in some Reddit apps before, with a name like “multi feeds” or something. Currently the lemmy API doesn’t support this AFAIK so it would need to be entirely client sided. This makes it a bit tricky to implement due to sorting.
For instance, let’s say you have 3 communities technology@lemmy.world, technology@lemmy.ml and technology@lemmy.ca. Let’s say you have them in the same feed and sorted by Hot. The server will provide me with 3 different list of posts for each community but how do I merge 3 lists together while preserving the “Hot” ordering? This requires the client to know how posts are scored on the server and implement it client sided.
Lemmy is open source so I can find the algorithm used to score the posts based on the sort type and implement them client sided but this does feel hacky as the client is imitating server behavior.
Funny enough this is literally how the inbox feature works today and why inbox too so long to implement. Inbox was actually written in a reusable way so I could potentially port it over for communities with some small changes.
In any case I think this feature is too complex to implement at the moment and I would prefer to hold off on it until I’m done some of the other features. I will add it to the roadmap. Maybe by the time I get to it this would be added to the Lemmy api so I wouldn’t need to do this client sided.
