federated forum idea
here's my idea:
there's a bunch of forums, and they're their own things
except!
if you have an account on ANY of the forums, you can post in any of the other forums
@lizardsquid Usenet and FidoNet come to mind, as attempts at this before.
I'd say the big issue would be... when a multicommunity, single logon discussion platform - whether federated or not - gets popular, you'll get some downright toxic effects on the communities using it.
Usenet got overrun by AOL users in 1993, and never recovered. (Before then, the influx of new users was manageable, and the existing users could instill the culture.)
Facebook and Reddit always were full of toxicity.
@lizardsquid That's not to say it's a bad idea - I like it - just that it's a problem that needs to be dealt with in federation/moderation systems, and some communities will need to break federation for safety.
(This isn't unique to the forum format - there's already Fediverse instances that restrict or completely disable federation, and I've also seen trolls instance-hop to harass a user before - a threat model that even Usenet didn't have BITD, as it had a paywall (tuition or ISP charges).)
federated forum idea
@lizardsquid And maybe with a central directory for users to find new ones?
I like this idea.