I think mastodon needs a way to subscribe to or view the public feeds of other instances without necessarily having to create accounts on them. A lot of instances are billing themselves as topical communities, and I am interested in more than one of them, but I don't want to have to maintain a whole bunch of profiles
@luka Well I can always just follow individual users on other instances, for sure - I am following @Gargron already. But I just discovered a gamedev instance (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/about) and I would like to "join" that community without having to create a separate profile for it. I know I will stumble across its users in certain hashtags, and I guess that is as close as it gets at the moment?
@hyperlinkyourheart @Gargron
so it seems.
@hyperlinkyourheart yeah, it's a weird issue, and there's lots of discussion around it. I think they've settled on implementing cross-instance "groups" rather than encouraging instances dedicated to certain topics
@davemakes I have seen groups mentioned alright, I am interested to see how they work. Maybe after they arrive I will not feel like I am missing out anymore! 😛
@hyperlinkyourheart you can always take users' rss/atom feeds and subscribe to them with your rss reader.
ex: https://mastodon.social/users/Gargron.atom
i don't think that local timeline has its own rss/atom feed.
/cc @Gargron