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Only if you want to force everyone to adopt this behavior

Did you read the proposal? No one is forcing anyone to do anything. The proposal would allow one community to follow another. Communities don't have to send a follow request and the other community doesn't have to follow back. This works just like users following users/communities. It's all optional.

There are tons of people here that are telling you that this is a non-issue to them, why do you think that all clients need that?

There are tons of ppl telling you it is an issue for them. If its not an issue for you, then you lose nothing if this is implemented, but ppl who care have one of their pain points solved.

it absolutely is better to delegate behavior to the nodes as much as possible... Pushing as much functionality to the client is such a good way to follow Postel’s Law that is basically second nature to those developing distributed systems.

The nodes are the servers not the clients. Your argument is the exact opposite of what every fediverse developer says. The reason most of the fediverse uses the MastoAPI (or lemmy api for the threadiverse) instead of the ActivityPub Client to Server API is because the C2S expects a more client focused ecosystem but all the developers find it easier to handle logic on the server.

The proposal was intentionally written to be easy to implement. All fediverse platforms deal with follows so handling follows for groups is a simple extension to that.

Some subreddits are still not wanting to move to Lemmy

I've seen ppl saying they don't want to use any threadiverse platform because of disparate communities/threads. This issue keeps being talked about and always generates pretty big threads so its clear that its an issue that causes a lot of users friction. There's also plenty of issues that are way lower priority than this but they're still filed on various projects' trackers.

I think it's higher priority than you do and would contribute to helping the fediverse grow but I don't think we're gonna convince each other so I'm gonna bow out here.

requires no extensions in the spec

That proposal doesnt require an extension to the spec. It requires a group to follow another group, which is definitively within the ActivityPub spec. The proposal above is written as a FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal) which is the agreed upon way to propose new behavior in an interoperable way.

no changes in the server side

But it takes changes on the client side. One is not inherently better than the other. Also, doing it client side means you have to duplicate the work for every client. Doing it server side means it works for everyone.

easily prototyped/tested

Every fediverse platform already supports following Actors. That's part of the spec. Handling follows for groups is just as easy as for users.

The third solution wouldn't cause extra communication. If you're subbed to a community that follows other communities, you receive all the posts once. That's the same as if you followed all of those communities yourself.

If your server hosts communities that follow others, that would still be the same as having users on your server follow those servers. It's the same amount of communication.

I'm assuming you were talking about this comment. That doesn't explain why merging communities is bad, only why you may not want to do it. Which would always be an option. Having the option to merge duplicate communities doesn't mean you can't maintain similar communities without merging them.

That's exactly what the third proposal in the article would do. See the proposal its based on for more detail.

the Lemmy devs are not interested in this

I know. I'm the one who posted that one of the lemmy devs is not interested in this. But if the userbase gets behind it, they could convince the dev team. Kbin, mbin, or sublink could implement this and even if lemmy doesn't it would improve things for lemmy users because who follow communities hosted on those implementations and could serve as a proof of concept.

there is also the “political” aspect

Everything about the proposal is optional. Nobody would be forced to do anything, unless the owner of the community decides to go against the wishes of the community members.

Lemmy has been around for years, not months, and this is still an issue that ppl are having. Some ppl know each other and can choose to keep their communities separate. But for ppl who want larger, more in depth discussions and new ppl, this simple technical measure can make the platform better for the multiple reasons I mentioned above.

Your arguments against it seem to be:

1. Its not needed. - I've pointed out multiple reasons I think its needed. Consolidation either doesn't happen, is never actually completed, or is a years long process. Discussions are fragmented which leads to communities that don't have enough activity. New users are unfamiliar with the platform and unaware of large players so don't know how to find the most active community. Consolidating on a single community means you've centralized the community and put it at risk if that server goes down.
2. People might not want it - The proposal doesn't force anybody to group their communities. They can maintain their independence. I imagine that mods thinking about grouping with another community would have a discussion with the other mod team and both communities' members.

I disagree with both of those arguments but even ignoring that, I don't understand why it matters to you. You seem to be fine with the current state and this proposal wouldn't disrupt that. Either the communities you're in don't join up with others or they do and you wouldn't notice (unless a mod groups with a wildly different community)

I don't think we've consolidated around [email protected]. You're using a single post as an example. I've posted links that got 40+ comments in [email protected] but way less in other communities. I've posted or seen threads in [email protected] that got more discussion.

The merge of cooking communities on lemmy.world is also not really relevant. Those communities were each supposed to be specialized communities, not general cooking communities. They shutdown because they couldn't sustain enough activity. And they were all on lemmy.world so the userbase likely all overlapped; I'd bet that most ppl subbed to them were already subbed to [email protected] anyway.

What I'm talking about is when small and medium sized servers (not lemmy.world) have their own communities that overlap with other communities. Users who join those servers aren't necessarily going to know about lemmy.ml or lemmy.world. They'll see communities they're interested in and sub, but then won't see as much interaction as they want. This leads to ppl just giving up and going back to the corporate sites.

Even if consolidation is happening, there's a transition period where ppl are posting in multiple places, ppl get the same post in their feed multiple times, comment threads are separate. Then when consolidation happens, you have a single community where those mods hold all the power. If we used something like the proposal above, each community could still exist but all the conversations are still consolidated. That keeps the power spread out and likely keeps each mod team in check and provides multiple on-ramps to the community. You could find [email protected] or [email protected] but if they're grouped, you still find the super-community. And then if one of those servers goes down, only users subbed to that community have to migrate and they should be tangentially aware of the other community so migration is easier. Their server could even handle that migration automatically.

Lemmy doesn't have to have missing features for someone to want to write their own implementation. And in a decentralized system you want multiple implementations to exist. This is a good thing

Exactly. It's also using Spring Boot, Hibernate, and Lombok. It looks just like projects at work. It might be the first fediverse project I contribute regularly to.

But if you increase the userbase, you'll end up with more ppl who like yugioh and want a community which leads to duplicate communities. But for niche topics, the duplicate communities are likely to end up with userbases too small to sustain enough activity. A way to combine communities makes it more likely that users find other users who want to discuss niche topics with them. That helps to grow the userbase.

There is no point

Yes, there is. If we can keep those 5 users here, its better than them being on reddit. There's no reason not to work on this. We have multiple projects, each with multiple contributors, so we can do multiple things at one time.

Because all the evidence shows...

What evidence shows that? This post is in [email protected] and crossposted to [email protected]. There's also [email protected] and I know I've seen others. Most of these communities have been running for a few years now and there's still no consolidation.

You can see the same pattern with communities for gaming, linux, gardening, movies, tv, etc. I'm subscribed to multiple communities for each of those topics on separate servers because the consolidation doesn't happen.

I saw one recently in a linux community where a user complained about multiple "I ditched Windows" posts. I've seen requests for stickies in some gardening communities.

I assume nothing actively prevents the communities from merging other than the mods being comfortable running their communities. But they shouldn't have to merge. We can have solutions that enable multiple communities to exist while also preventing rampant crossposting and post duplication.