Thanks!! I posted here thinking it would “be the place to have a discussion” but then realized - hey, GitHub already does that. I’ll get over there soon, if I’m enjoying the discussion here.

Exactly! Except that doesn’t exist over here in Lemmy.

That’s what I’m asking, but with a little new functionality. Either way the core thing I want is meta-communities, aggregating whatever communities users might want into a single feed.

Sure (and hi!)

The first part of an idea is just the aggregation of communities into a meta-community, like Reddit used to have meta-reddits that users could build, taking multiple subreddits and joining them together into a single feed. Here instead, we would be joining together multiple community instances - for example, say, !android@lemmy.world and !android@lemdro.id, both instances of “android” communities with different users and different feeds. I want to be able to join these two “android” communities into one feed and interact with them as if they were the same “community”.

The second part of the idea is that users could create these meta-communities (lists of communities) and share invites or links to them, similar to Spotify playlists. Subscribing users could then choose to “update” their meta-community along with all of the other users following that meta-community to match the list of the originating user.

The third part is that the system would check to see if the subscribing user (or creator of the meta-community) could actually interact with all of the instanced communities from the one they are currently at, and let them know if there were issues with federation.

Absolutely.

Going deep into the academic rabbit hole (and pushing myself to contribute more) - take a look at Julie Cohen’s work if you haven’t. She frames a lot of this out - namely the need to actively code the conditions for human flourishing into digital architecture - and It helps her book (Configuring the Networked Self) is freely available online.