The idea that I’m talking about is actually more like communities forming a network, with chains of following. If I host a new instance and create a memes community in it, I’d like to start having that community follow memes @ lemmy.ml and memes @ lemmy.world, so that the community already has content from the get-go, but users may be able to post memes that are unique to my instance and its followers. The followers would also see memes from upstream unless my community unfollows them, as long as they don’t also follow them independently.
This model of the network would allow each community to independently determine which other communities it thematically implies, without the user having to follow all 4 communities with the same name but different content across the platform.
The multireddit suggestion is more like having directories/tags for communities. It wouldn’t achieve quite the same thing, but it would be useful as well. Both ideas can coexist and complement each other.
You cannot assume that communities with the same name are meant to be on the same topic.
Say I set up an instance focused on discussing parties at home. There are fun in-person games you can play with your friends when many of you are over, so I would create a community c/games for discussing them. Now, what if I want my instance to federate with lemmy.world? They already have a c/games that is dedicated to videogames. Maybe I also would need a community dedicated to videogames, but I’d have to call it c/videogames, because I already have a c/games.
Some human intervention would be required to let the network know that the local c/videogames is the one that has to federate with lemmy.world’s c/games, and not the local c/games.
Maybe an automatic suggestion would be fine as a starting point, but it would be more useful that communities themselves could explicitly establish which remote communities they are associated with, without depending on the names.