There are several social and technological barriers to the import of communities, basically:
* It's harder to justify the fair use of importing posts from a community versus things like comments. There are people out there who are upset that they can't import communities, but there are also a lot of people out there who would be upset if we did, as well. * We currently import things as OpenID users, so people can still have control over their content. But, OpenID users cannot make posts, so we can't post as them to a community without backend changes. And if we import posts and tag them as OpenID, then there'd be a lot of confusion from OpenID users who would think that would mean they could post.
There are proposals and suggestions around this, but chances are wholesale importing of a community (short of single poster communities, perhaps) isn't going to happen.
Re: Wild speculation!
* It's harder to justify the fair use of importing posts from a community versus things like comments. There are people out there who are upset that they can't import communities, but there are also a lot of people out there who would be upset if we did, as well.
* We currently import things as OpenID users, so people can still have control over their content. But, OpenID users cannot make posts, so we can't post as them to a community without backend changes. And if we import posts and tag them as OpenID, then there'd be a lot of confusion from OpenID users who would think that would mean they could post.
There are proposals and suggestions around this, but chances are wholesale importing of a community (short of single poster communities, perhaps) isn't going to happen.