Solving the fragmented community problem is something I’ve been pondering too, and the meta-community idea you described seems interesting.

Obviously, a proper technical solution will be difficult. Federation comes with a host of challenges, as well as benefits.

Giving communities the opportunity to be open to other like minded people on different instances would be beneficial to the network, for a number of reasons.

If two communities on different instances have the same name, it doesn’t seem crazy to ask each of them if they’d like to federate with each other.

That way, apart from instances defederating, discussions could continue even if individual servers go down.

Of course, people love to hold on to their little fiefdoms, so the issue is as much social as technical.

I have little interest in being a mod, but I see the issues you’re describing as a user and I’ve given them some thought.

You can create a community with a similar name or switch instances if you cant get your instance admin to help. For me, the frustration isn’t so much with unmoderated communities but abandoned ones, especially on larger instances.

Fixing that seems simpler, as adding a toggle to hide inactive communities should hopefully not be controversial and it could be implemented by the client. Please?

It will be interesting to see how things evolve, as a solution is clearly needed but federation poses some interesting challenges especially since deleting posts should be discouraged.