Ask Lemmy

This is one of those things that sounds simple and intuitive on paper ("just" take all these communities of the same name from disparate instances, smash them together so they all display on the same page) but once you start thinking about the details it becomes clear that it'd be a logistical nightmare and a clusterfuck to actually implement.

For a start, moderation would become diabolically complex.

• If multiple communities across instances are merged, each has its own moderators. Who can moderate which content? Everyone? Only the moderators for the instance in which the content originated?
• If it's the former, what's to stop a rogue moderator from a bad instance from merging their community and then deleting content/banning users who aren't theirs?
• What happens if a user gets banned from one instance, but other instances have merged content in this community under which that user is not banned?
• Who decides what community and instancewide rules apply to the merged instance of that community, which will inherently include users from outside their instance?
• Who sets what the banner and sidebar look like, considering that nobody from any given instance can "own" the entire supercommunity?
• Etc.

I think the only way this could possibly work at present is if were client-side, i.e. you can create your own supercommunity by merging content into a single page on your own device, but purely for display and in a read-only fashion. This would not provide the implicit benefit I think you're angling for, though, which would be solving the Fediverse fragmentation problem.