A lot of us come from reddit, so we’re naturally inclined to want a reddit-like platform. However, it occurred to me that the reddit format makes little sense for the fediverse.
Centralized, reddit-like communities where users seek out communities and post directly to them made sense for a centralized service like reddit. But when we apply that model to lemmy or kbin, we end up with an unnecessary number of competing communities. (ex: [email protected] vs [email protected]) Aside from the issues of federation (what happens when one instance defederates and the community has to start over?) this means that if one wants to post across communities on instances, they have to crosspost multiple times.
The ideal format for a fediverse reddit-like would be a cross between twitter and reddit: a website where if you want to post about a cat, you make your post and tag it with the appropriate tags. This could include “cats,” “aww,” and “cute.” This post is automatically aggregated into instantly-generated “cats,” “aww,” and “cute” communities. Edit: And if you want to participate in a small community you can use smaller, less popular tags such as “toebeans” or something like that. This wouldn’t lead to any more or less small communities than the current system. /EndEdit. But, unlike twitter, you can interact with each post just like reddit: upvotes, downvotes, nested comments - and appointed community moderators can untag a post if it’s off-topic or doesn’t follow the rules of the tag-communities.
The reason this would work better is that instead of relying on users to create centralized communities that they then have to post into, working against the federated format, this works with it. It aggregates every instance into one community automatically. Also, when an instance decides to defederate, the tag-community remains. The existing posts simply disappear while the others remain.
Thoughts? Does this already exist? lol
Edit: Seeing a lot of comments about how having multiple communities for one topic isn’t necessarily bad, and I agree, it’s not. But, the real issue is not that, it’s that the current format is working against the medium. We’re formatting this part of the fediverse like reddit, which is centralized, when we shouldn’t. And the goal of this federation (in my understanding) is to 1. decentralize, and 2. aggregate. The current format will eventually work against #1, and it’s relying on users to do #2.
I’ve been brainstorming things like this, too, and have come up with some similar thoughts. I think we can have both tags and communities. Suppose there’s a trust model. A community on an instance will entrust certain members to whitelist posts that are in an approved list of tags. Anything on any instance that gets tagged with one of the approved tags would go into a queue. You could employ a bot to work the queue to eliminate low hanging fruit, and then trusted community members would work it to approve posts.
Likewise, an instance community could have a trust relationship with a community on a different instance. They could say, “Any posts approved by the cats community over there are automatically approved here.” This could help distribute the load on the queue. As a side note, there would need to be logging of metadata so an audit trail could be analyzed in case problems arose in the trust circle.
So, that addresses a way to handle submissions. There’s another ball of wax with comments. Ideally, a comment section would be a way for users to discover new communities. You might be reading comments on a #cat submission and see a comment from someone in #toebeans and go, “Oh hey, that looks interesting,” and you can jump to the community and/or subscribe to it. It’s not immediately obvious to me how an app could aggregate comments across multiple communities or if ActivityPub could facilitate it. Seems plausible.
I really hope we eventually get a richer platform out of all this. It’s a great opportunity for people to put their heads together and think of new improvements.