Honestly, this is the kind of thing that should be hidden behind the UI. I’ve been on the internet long enough that I remember when we had to use a similar approach for addressing emails - where you essentially had to put routing information into your address field, rather than letting the servers figure it out.

Apollo, for instance, had a feature like autocomplete for /r links. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped.

The fragmentation of similar/identically oriented communities is a strength in some ways but at the same time presents a fragmented user experience. While I recognize the challenges on the server side if there’s not an aggregator, I think the client should be able to allow users to designate what would essentially be a multireddit consisting of all of the news.whatever communities, and offer further aggregation that the seven different posts linking to the same article into a single post. There’s a few different ways replies could be handled, but that’s the general idea.

We want to make sure we keep the strengths of federation while hiding things like duplication from users.