The problem is our kicking off point is reddit the community and not reddit the link aggregator. We've forgotten its humble beginnings.
What we need is to go back to basics and develop a simple link aggregator with basic federation. So that anyone with a federated node account can follow links posted to it, without having a local account.
Then of course each link posted can spawn a discussion, but no need to have that in the first version of the software. These discussions can take place in a decentralized space for the time being. Giving the software the advantage of simplicity.
For example the ActivityPub object Actor does not have to be a person, but rather a category of the link aggregator.
What we need is to go back to basics and develop a simple link aggregator with basic federation. So that anyone with a federated node account can follow links posted to it, without having a local account.
Then of course each link posted can spawn a discussion, but no need to have that in the first version of the software. These discussions can take place in a decentralized space for the time being. Giving the software the advantage of simplicity.
For example the ActivityPub object Actor does not have to be a person, but rather a category of the link aggregator.