Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about coding or how this stuff works in the background.
But I’m a fairly old reddit user excited with Lemmy who thinks that the the limitation to the creation of communities is a good thing and that there’s always a chance to make stuff differently.
The concept I would like to brainstorm is: branching.
Instead of simply giving the ability to create new communities to users, would it be possible (and desirable) to just branch existing communities? As an example, let’s imagine that DnD discussions start to dominate the gaming community (yeah, I know, it’s just for theoretical hypothesis). Could the mods at a certain point decide to create a sub community for DnD inside the gaming community? When people would subscribe to “gaming” they would see the existing branches and decide if they want to subscribe to gaming in general or just that one set of games in particular. Apart from the benefit to the user, a mapping of Lemmy’s communities would also be much more easy to visualize.
I don’t know… this just occurred to me and wanted to share.
Lemmy and Mastodon can talk to each other, not fully but especially Mastodon can see and write to Lemmy communities (although posts are ordered by publishing date since it can't understand upvotes). What the icon does is show you a comment or post on the original instance it was sent from.
If a Mastodon user sends a comment to Lemmy that icon will link to the same post but as seen on the original instance it was sent from.