Communities on different instances about the same topic should have the option to essentially federate so a post on one appears on all of them and opening any of them shows you the comments from all of them. This way when lemmy.world is down its not a big deal because posting to any news community federates to all of the communities instead of barely having people see your post. Federation could be decided by the community mods and the comments can have a little “/c/communityname@instance.name” on it so you know which community the comment was originally posted on.
Sounds like clients need to improve. Detect posts with same links and group them. Maybe server side allow users to categorize or tag their communities so it’s easier on client to organize them. Clients should also allow the user to set rules and conditions on those feeds.
Problem is we can’t have both ways. You can’t force all users to receive all news posts into a single feed and claim it’s distributed. Features. We need more features on the client side to solve these problems and improve the experience.
We have to get out of this 90s software architecture mindset and start thinking bigger. We don’t want to limit ourselves and build another Reddit because someone dislikes the growing pains of a new platform.