Honestly, this is the kind of thing that should be hidden behind the UI. I’ve been on the internet long enough that I remember when we had to use a similar approach for addressing emails - where you essentially had to put routing information into your address field, rather than letting the servers figure it out.

Apollo, for instance, had a feature like autocomplete for /r links. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped.

The fragmentation of similar/identically oriented communities is a strength in some ways but at the same time presents a fragmented user experience. While I recognize the challenges on the server side if there’s not an aggregator, I think the client should be able to allow users to designate what would essentially be a multireddit consisting of all of the news.whatever communities, and offer further aggregation that the seven different posts linking to the same article into a single post. There’s a few different ways replies could be handled, but that’s the general idea.

We want to make sure we keep the strengths of federation while hiding things like duplication from users.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Sync does a good job at this, the best of any clients as long as it's in the ! notation. There are definitely several issues over on the Lemmy github asking to clean up the webui though for all the reasons you're calling out.

[–] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

That’s an Android only app, right? I’ve been tempted to pick up an Android device just to check it out. I am not allowed to be involved in any app development myself but my understanding is that sync is the high water mark for clients right now.

[–] russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net 7 points 1 year ago

The default Web UI also has autocomplete as well, though its a bit iffy sometimes:

It works for both communities and users as well

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