Web rings were definitely a thing.

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.

it would be good to have some kind of linking.

my feed is usually ten copies of the same thing posted to similar communities on different servers

Since I don't follow that much .world communities, I never really was affected by these attacks, so yeah, I totally agree with you! I hope we'll end up more decentralized at time goes on. It was hard to navigate people during the migration so a lot of them ended up in a huge one.

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

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

Good idea. Will do.

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?

One big issue with the existing cross-posting feature is that it does not work AT ALL with text based posts, just links.

I think the main difficulty is in labeling “sibling communities” as such, because when you create a community, it’s not like you magically know which ones are supposed to be siblings to you.

Users will most probably cross-post from them.

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.

That's kind of not the poster's fault.

When a given interface respects the cross posting method, it doesn't show multiple posts, it shows one post with a list of places it was cross posted to.

Unfortunately, not every interface respects that part if federation. Most lemmy apps don't (afaik, none do, but I can't claim to use all of). If kbin via web isn't following that, it isn't that person's fault.

Now, that's different from someone making multiple posts of the same thing because they don't know how to cross post lol.