Local communities have a purpose. I live in Northwest Arkansas, a vibrant, slightly more liberal region of the state. I can envision a hyper local instance for all things NWA. For example, a community on trails and trail riding/hiking would focus on the area’s trail system instead of the general topic.

Now, I might want to subscribe to both the NWA trails community as well as the mote general purpose “global” trails community. So, having them distinct in some way is helpful.

Maybe it makes sense to have local communities that function as “satellites” of the global community of the same name. In this model, I could post to NWA trails and optionally choose to have my post broadcasted or cross-posted to the global community.

In the USENET era, we solved the problem with a hierarchical name space. Hierarchies are great, as long as everyone agrees on the structure. The problem is that most hierarchies are completely arbitrary. We would need a consensus group, like the Big-8, ICANN, or IETF that could manage the global community name space. This shouldn’t stop a competing group from standing up a separate, independent global namespace, though.

Maybe the ETA of the global namespace is past. Maybe there are better ways to achieve these goals today.