The ability for communities to follow each other can definitely fix the biggest issues in Lemmy. Unfortunately it feels like there's always a high priority issue getting in the way, whether it be patching security bugs or broken frontend bugs or the sudden need in better moderation tools lately. Growing pains and all that.

I'm hopeful that some form of community grouping will happen soon enough.

They should make their own instance if they can. The devs cited Star Trek.website as the model for communities like fandoms. It is also cleaner as the instance can make several subs which have different rules and content.

The problem is that it requires money, either by the admins or through donations.

If they want to move r/rust to Lemmy, then just pick an instance and move, or start your own instance if none of the existing comms matches their needs, instead of all of these excuses.

Again, it's really hard to get this through people's head, but Lemmy is not a reddit clone, every instance is an independent forum each with their own different policies and moderation. If you don't like the comm of one instance, you can easily move to a different comm on another instance with the same topic.

For different comm on the same topic to follow each other would honestly be a moderation nightmare, which is why I'm only supportive of user level community grouping (which would be more along the line of having multiple subscribed tabs. )

As I was reading the blog post, I asked myself why a soft fork would be necessary and I'm glad to see they came to the same conclusion by the end.

This is the first I've seen of the community following communities idea as a solution to the separation of similar discussions among multiple instances, and I love it. This combined with the personal user curated multi-reddit ideas and we're golden. I wish I knew Rust so I could help make it come to fruition.