I think you’re forgetting the other half of the slogan: decentralized social network. You want to maximize decentralization? Disconnect from the internet and type to yourself on textpad. What we want out of the fediverse are the advantages of bringing people together, with the benefits of decentralization. No one wants decentralization as an end in itself.

So, if cross-posts are not showing up in my feed, then I have to actively look for cross-posts separately in the communities? How would I even know they exist? That’s still not what I want. In other words, there are two kinds of cross-posts: (1) redundant posts to overlapping demographics. I don’t want to see more than one of these. (2) commentary cross-posts. I want to see these as separate posts.

Sibling communities would hide (1) and not (2).

I like that you’re imagining new ways to do this. That’s what I’m trying to do too. This brave new world of community created multi-communities honestly sounds a lot like sibling communities to me. There’s the question of who is making the multi-communities, and to me the natural response is “the communities themselves”. There’s less user friction if a community is just already affiliated with a bunch of other communities voluntarily.

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.