Just had a small, probably-never-going-to-happen thought: what if Lobsters implemented ActivityPub? My account there is hongminhee, so I'd get a @hongminhee@lobste.rs actor, and tags like #rust or #programming could be Group actors you could follow from Mastodon or anywhere else. Comments would federate as Notes, so you could boost a thread you found interesting without ever leaving your home instance.

The tricky part is that Lobsters is invite-only by design, and that culture would be hard to reconcile with an open fediverse. You'd probably want to keep writes gated behind a Lobsters account while making reads public. Lemmy did something similar, though it still struggled with spam after federation. Anyway, it's open source, so maybe someone with more time than me will take a crack at it someday.

@hongminhee they're not opposed to it: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/499

I remember commenting on it when I had started working on my own federated link aggregator.