KBin/Lemmy should provide a combined local view for duplicated magazines/communities across the fediverse. Treating the concept like a hashtag.

The point of the fediverse is to distribute content so no one has a monopoly. People squatting on communities/magazines don’t understand there is nothing stopping people creating one on a hundred other instances.

Each kbin/lemmy instance decides to follow magazines/communities from others through activity pub and stores it locally for the instance.

Having the UI retrieve all local posts with the same magazine/community name (e.g. m/[email protected] c/[email protected]). Wouldn’t be hugely difficult, I believe Kbin uses postgres database as the local store and suspect it would be a tweak to the SQL query it runs.

Even if that wasn’t an option, there is a means to get all of the magazines/communities from the kbin UI/lemmy REST API. As well as retrieve all posts for a specific magazine/community. So you could do it entirely in a web client, for KBin it would be more work.

The combined view wouldn’t change how you comment on specific posts. The issue is where do you post and what view would take dominance (e.g. if a magazine had themed itself).

The solution here would be to default your local instance if it exists or the instance providing the most posts/comments. Perhaps with a drop down so users can choose.

I would also configure things so instances can select a site wide default if they can’t moderate it effectively. For example pushing all posts to the star trek instance rather than local magazine with a mod who is MIA.

This would remove most of the concerns users have about the fediverse, since they wouldn’t be confronted by different instances. To them the fediverse is <insert instance> it would also encourage distribution of content.