In the glory days of web 1.0, social websites would prominently link out to their digital neighbors via lists known as webrings; magical doorways to an expansive hinterland of digital villages.
Let’s envision what a truly federated chat like Matrix could do to improve the cross-connectivity of chat channels. Most of these features are already possible, they just haven’t been implemented yet in a community-oriented client experience.
Yeah, it’s weird that they talk about federated webrings, without actually suggesting federated webrings. I discuss it in passing here (and early in passing), calling it FedRing. It definitely seems doable as kind of plug-in to other services that is also a federated service - so you could jump from the sidebar in a Lemmy community or instance to a Mastodon account or channel.