fresh

That's an interesting proposal. I think I need to understand it better. Could you describe to me in what ways this would be better?

This is a good idea too, but I do see them as different implementations with different advantages.

• "Following" is much simpler to implement, because it uses mostly existing systems. That's a big bonus.
• "Following" is essentially automatic cross-posting, right? Presumably, everything from the followed community is cross-posted to the follower communities. I can't think of when I would ever prefer that over getting selective cross-posts. Sometimes I don't want to blast stuff out to all communities. Sometimes I want to post something in a local community, and other times I want to hear from all related (sibling) communities. Maybe it's just too centralized for me.
• Siblings are related to each other but retain their unique identity. A followed person doesn't need to know or care about the follower, and doesn't have to allow any input from the follower. "Sibling" relations are bidirectional, while "follower" relations are unidirectional (though both sides can follow each other). I think all this has a big functional difference.

I suppose some of this is a matter of taste as well.

Maybe it does already happen? Then again, I don’t want it to always happen!

Cross-posting itself can also be a form of commentary. For example, c/London might cross-post something from c/NewYork — “Hey, this would be a cool idea for our city too!” Or “They’re talking about us. Thoughts?” — and the separate set of comments are desirable because they come from a different community. I want these to be two separate posts sometimes.

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Multi-communities seem similar. Is that a grouping the user makes? If so, I think that’s too much work and will still lead to unnecessary fracturing. What if I follow a few Technology communities and a new one is made since the last time I checked? Do I have to go through and manually check if all my multi-communities are current?

Good points. I'll be more explicit about the details:

If, at the time of formation, you don't know which communities would be siblings, then it's the same as the current status quo, so I don't see that as a comparative disadvantage. In any case, there's no reason to rush into siblinghood. One hope would be that the existence of the term "sibling community" itself would encourage people to discuss possible connections, even when they're not yet connected. I hope it brings like-minded groups together.

The sibling relation would need the consent of both mod teams, not just one side, so it can be unilaterally severed, but only jointly formed. No one would force lefty news and righty news to become siblings. But there are currently 5+ major "Technology" communities that are almost entirely overlapping. I hope siblings would allow them to overlap where appropriate but maintain their unique identities.

Good idea. Will do.

Yeah that's a great example, especially because they have slightly different names. If you're not in the know, you might never know.

That's interesting. I think I vaguely remember those too. The term "affiliates" sounds so corporate nowadays, but I think it's a similar idea.

I'm also strongly in the camp of "stay separate". I wouldn't ever want to give that up. But I'm also frequently frustrated by discoverability of related communities and needlessly separated small userbases.

I agree. Do you feel this proposal doesn't address that? My hope is that sibling communities would allow us to keep redundancy and diversity while still enjoying some of the benefits of sometimes coming together.

This is an incredible project. This channel has made me realize that the plain angular modernist aesthetic is really limiting.

It always drives me crazy that, in Canada and the US, there’s a “charming part of the city” and we all lament that there’s not more of them. We could, at any time, decide to build more, but instead we make it illegal, mostly for the sake of cars.

But, like you said, the foreign makers are also making big cars to comply with our corrupt pro-corporate regulations.

EVs are looking to be both more expensive and more dangerous. I have zero hope that they will be an improvement in any way except emissions.

We need weight and size based taxation to discourage big cars. More than that, we need to move away from car dependence.

Consumer preference is part of it, but car manufacturers have also intentionally stopped competing for the low end and small vehicle market. It’s textbook tacit cooperation.

During the pandemic, there was a chip shortage that led makers to prioritize high margin cars like trucks and luxury SUVs. Many makers decided that they liked being a low volume high price seller and just cut their lower priced cars altogether. If everyone does it at the same time, there’s no market mechanism to punish them. Many people can’t buy smaller cars even if they wanted. It doesn’t help that all of our car regulations in the US and Canada encourage this by having much weaker regulations for bigger vehicles. The whole market is a mess.

I don’t doubt that iPhones are harder to repair than they need to be. What I seriously doubt is that other major phone manufacturers are better about building with repairability and longevity in mind. (Remember, the beginning of this comment thread is claiming iPhones are especially disposable.)