Circles / Groups of instances with same interest?

[Matthias84]

Describe the problem to be solved

Hi there, as peertube seems to be growing, I see the use for a more structured approach to browse this part of the fediverse. E.g. how can different universities join a part of the fediverse which is focused on science and scientific education?

Describe the solution you would like:

My idea is to allow a kind of circle (or group or subfederation ...) to show instances which not only trust each other, but share similar content and channels and users. For example a instance might be member of different circles for different updates:

• Universities - the kind of organisation
• research - general aspects/keywords for all hosted channels
• Rostock - the location
• ...

Does this make sense to form a better "brotherhood" of instances and make it easier for admins to find a trustworthy and self managed group of instances? I guess this would also simplify crawling of sepiasearch and for consumers to find appropriate hosts and video content.

Implementation might be as a seperated webpage, similar to webrings, or that instances / channels / users are allowed to refer to wikidata items, which itself form a graph of relations and smilarities? For example one instance peertube.uni-rostock.de refers to Q159895 and peertube.hmt-rostock.de will refer Q881130. Admins could setup allow auto-maintain to peer with instances which are similar like University Q875538 or within Rostock Q2861 or state of Mecklenburg Vorpommern Q1196.

Describe alternatives you have considered

Currently every instance would need to add + update all other instance to peer with them because of similar topics. This is hard maintain and doesn't allow any priorisation on aspects (e.g. yes this peertube is focused on universities, but also provides content created for in this state / city ...)