This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode where everyone's social status was determined by their ratings.
Yeah you are right! I'm sure you can do better.
...
Not taking it personally.
I would also appreciate the ability to customize, but it would be helpful to begin with a curated list of instances for each topic.
I would prefer something pre-made for convenience but that can be modified by each user to adjust to their preference. I'd rather have a generalist solution forced on me than have to spend countless hours grouping communities from hundreds of instances.
What I like about that is, the more people there are, the more low IQ content gets upvoted at the expense of everything else. However, on an instance with no downvotes, discussions may receive fewer votes than memes, but at least they are not buried.
There could be conflicts between hashtags, as a hashtag for one community may not have the same meaning for another community. This would result in mixing topics and potential confusion.
Oh, I thought it was about tagging the communities and merging them based on those tags. Are you suggesting tagging the posts instead, and displaying all posts tagged the same from all communities across all federated instances in the same location?
But this can already be accomplished with the search feature. You only need to select 'Local' or 'All' and search for a word. People shouldn't be forced to hashtag every post, so the result would be the same as it is now.
I think conflicts can arise with hashtags just as easily as with community names, so it might be better to have an updatable and moderatable link instead.