I'm making an App for Lemmy and I'm planning on adding that feature. I also want to make it so you only have to register once and the App can register you to all the instances you choose automatically.

Edit: The Webapp is Nemmy, also the Community !nemmy@lemmy.world

Edit2: Please note that Nemmy is early Alpha, so not really useable as a daily driver yet.

Edit3: Changed Community link to proper format

Being able to one-click subscribe to all communities with the same name known by one's instance is a frequently asked for feature, so I can see it coming down the pipeline, but no, it's not a thing yet.

Even short of that, though, it would be really nice if the community search page had subscribe/unsubscribe buttons right there in the search results. It would at least make it easier.

I would love this. Don't hesitate to upvote this github issue for the backend to allow this kind of things. Until it's managed in the backend there is no way apps will efficiently implement this feature until it is managed in the backend.

I would also welcome blocking all communities with the same name

Would you want this to work retroactively also? Like if I spun up an instance with a community called astronomy with only pictures of buttholes that look like galaxies, should that be automatically added to the community group? What if I started the most legit instance with a community called astronomy with a bunch of my university of space scientist buddies, would that also be retroactively added to the community group?

I think it's a cool idea to be able to subscribe to all communities of a similar name. But it's kind of akin to following a hashtag eventually as the fediverse grows.

It would be pretty cool if communities could federate, but that would be p much like a content load balancer. Like if 5 different instances all had an astronomy community that was sync'd across all 5 instances. You wouldn't have to follow each community across all instances. You could just pick one and all posted content would land on each instance's community. Like raid for social media lol.

I would love to have this! Sometimes the same named group on a different server just doesn't have as much as another but it's still different content.

I would like to keep things as they are now and simply add a sign up button next to the instance in the search window. That way they all stay separate but it doesn't take a lot of extra clicks to get signed up for everything. Or maybe we just have some site hosted by Lemmy devs that crawls for instances based on a keyword search that let's you sign up from there.

Just pick the most popular one. The rest will slowly die.

The website UI shows active users, use that metric.

Sometimes one of them will be just bot posts pulling their content from Reddit or somewhere and it’s kind of annoying, like spam. So sometimes you might want to join one but avoid the other.

Oooh oooh someone write an aggregator to fetch them into one thread and replies will go to the right destination.

You wouldn't necessarily want this since communities are different depending on the context of the instance it may not be relevant to you. It would be great however to be able to create combos of the communities you subscribe to.

I understand the intent and it's a valid feature to want, but this just isn't going to work. How does the app or server know all communities named "whatever" are actually about the same "whatever"? Wouldn't bad actors just create communities with the same names as anything that became popular? And what about the massive number of duplicate posts every time a story big enough that all the communities post it?

I totally get why someone would want this, but it's complicated

Easily the most requested feature. I guess we'll see a solution at one point in the future.

No, because they are indeed different communities. On reddit there is no way to subscribe to similar communities at once as well.