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.
… Are you guys for real? Since when is Reddit this centralized heaven you describe? You have r/news and r/worldnews. You have r/funny, r/memes and r/funnymemes and probably dozens of others I don’t even know about. NSFW subreddits are like on another level where every single NSFW category has like at very least 5 subreddits and people who post there crosspost constantly.
And every single other platform for commuities has the same situation - on Facebook you could have found groups NHL, NHL fans, NHL 4 life and like ten other NHL communities with duplicated names.
And yet when we come to Fediverse, the BIGGEST F*CKIN ISSUE of the entire platform is that there is [email protected] and [email protected]
It would be interesting to have a way to “link” to magazines/communities across servers so everything gets cross posted. That way the content should be less fragmented.
But that’s what federation is. What you are saying is that you want the servers to decide which community is the “official” community, then squash the rest. Knowing that some of the most heavily subscribed communities exist on a server with controversial mods…I like having the choice of alternatives.
For Lemmy, just like on Reddit, one community will rise up and be popular and the others won’t get traffic. If the mods on that instance are jerks, another will rise up in its place.
I didn’t say reddit was a centralized heaven I was simply pointing out that reddit’s model shouldn’t be followed strictly here. It’s a hypothetical design discussion, not a big deal. If you feel strongly enough about that you struggle to discuss without cussing at others in all caps, maybe you should log off and take some time to chill out :)
Holy shit, they said fuck and even censored it on the internet, the world is falling apart, asteroids are hitting the planet, and demons are overrunning the world… Oh, wait, nope everything is fine, weird.
some people use those words for emphases and are not even remotely mad, maybe that’s what they were doing?
Thanks guys, everyone has so much optimism and friendliness i was starting to worry that this fediverse thing was a cult. Glad to see that the assholes are all still here!
Yes, swearing means that person is very mad and that only, you can not use it for emphasis or comedic effect at all and if you swear at all that means you hate everyone and want the world to end.
glad I could learn so much today.
if the idea of seeing someone swear scares you that much I am not sure an open federated instance were any legal type of community can be made and shared between each other is the place you would want to be, cus sorry to break it to ya, people on the internet are going to swear. We are not on a playground in pre-school.
Wow it’s almost like we’re in a text-based platform where tone can be confused and there are certain markers we use to indicate tone. But that’s cool we can just resort to being smartasses instead of discussing like adults
I don’t necessarily agree that competing communities is something bad, especially once a “lists” and “sharing lists” feature is implemented. It’s only a matter of time.
I’ll agree and go one further: the idea of wanting to recreate Reddit is bad.
Most of us left Reddit because of the API crap, but I suspect most of us have not been as happy with the Reddit experience as we once were. The more you recreate a system that’s close to Reddit, the more you make it easier for influence campaigns, spam bots, and disruptive trolls to operate.
Federation, with separate but similar communities, makes it tougher for a massive bot operator to run a monolithic influence campaign. My hope is the design of the fediverse helps to defend against these types of attacks. My fear is the inexperience of server operators with these types of coordinated attacks makes it difficult.
Decentralization is a weakness of the fediverse, but it is also it’s most important core strength.
If an instance that you follow goes down, the rest of them are just fine. If it turns out that the admins or mods are nuts on one instance, especially if your home instance is still fine, you just migrate to something else.
It definitely means that things are a little bit more complicated on a day-to-day basis, and it it also means that you can’t necessarily have these massive communities with millions of people because people are going to be drawn to different communities on different servers based on a variety of factors. But as you said, that’s not necessarily a negative thing. It means that there’s a lot more things that would have to go wrong for the entire fediverse to become damaged.
I don’t really understand this sentiment from so many regarding how they long for “the reddit of yore”. As a user of reddit for 12+ years, I don’t really get the complaints… I enjoyed Reddit how it was a month ago just much as I enjoyed it when I started… perhaps even more so. Am I the odd one out, and if so, can someone explain?
I migrated to Reddit after Digg imploded. Here’s a few things I think were better.
Feeds weren’t filled with meme posts. Comments weren’t filled with quick one-liners to get upvotes. Back then, there was much more substantive commentary.
Now, over the years, I’ve subscribed to subreddits that contained the type of content I wanted, plus the default subreddits I was subscribed to as a new user back then are much different than today. Open Reddit using a different browser or a private browser window, so that you’re not logged in. How does that compare to your experience of 12 years ago?
Honestly, much of the things I don’t like are because of large entities wanting to influence social media. That same thing will happen (likely is already happening) to the fediverse. I just hope the distributed nature makes it more difficult.
I think I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but a lot of these issues of structure I don’t think need to be solved on content creator/admin side, but rather on the end user UI side. The fragmentation is good for the network as a whole, but as an end user, I want to group similar communities together into one. Let me bulk subscribe to cats, toebeans, kittens, etc. I’ll do that action once. Then if one of those goes defunct, I won’t really care. I also won’t really care which community I’m posting to (except to ensure I’m following the rules), because ultimately most of the savvy users will be mass subscribed to topics as well.
This preserves control (I can opt out of toebeans if I don’t like that community for some reason), while keeping the distributed nature. No one would truly ‘own’ the cat pics community as it would span across multiple instances and communities.
Communities with similar goals across the fediverse need to be grouped somehow. Any community called “[email protected]” should be linked to allow for subscribing en masse. Perhaps “topic buckets” could work, where you can either subscribe to an individual community or a “topic bucket” that includes all communities across the fediverse that are called “cats@” or “technology@” or whatever.
While groups (meta-communities) could be useful, it shouldn’t be based on named.
[email protected] and [email protected] are likely unrelated communities. Similarly [email protected] and [email protected]
But, also, hopefully there is a reason for the various similarly-named communities. Different moderation philosophies and rules would be expected. [email protected] might be focusing on local cats and [email protected] might be focusing on feral populations while [email protected] is about cute cat pics and memes.
This feels like a feature, not a bug, so I actually think we just need good “sidebar” descriptions that help direct traffic as things grow. Just like r/Trees and r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts helped folks find their place.
Someone else kinda brought up the idea of just adding topic tags to posts, that way the good parts of the current system will remain in place, but users can also browse by topics. Maybe that’s a solution?
So I get the concern, but honestly I think in practice fragmented communities are fine. If anyone’s old enough to remember Fidonet and WWIVNet, they worked great – you had some “local” communities with a lot of duplication and fragmentation, but smaller so you could start to recognize people and have some semblance of a community, and then you had bigger networked communities that were more akin to Reddit forums. They were both good things to have; I don’t think it’s automatically bad to have many smaller forums that cover more or less the same topics on individual instances.
The tags thing sounds great too, of course – it could be a good way to discover new communities or browse everything related to some topic if you decided you wanted to.
The issue with tags is who’s going to moderate them.
The reddit model has an owner responsible for each community. Tags don’t, and as such the moderation responsibility over everything falls on server administrators.
I fucking hate tags.
I don’t think I have anything else to add to the discussion, just wanted to get that off my chest.
#ihatetags
One thing that could help: We have the tech now to auto-suggest tags, even on images, video, and audio. If you posted a photo and then were prompted to simply Y/N a few suggested tags, would that be better?
You know, I’ve enjoyed hating tags for so long I’m super conflicted about this. On the one hand, it’s quite a useful idea and I like it a lot. But I would have to get over my, currently irrational, hate for tags. I might also need to have the tags hidden on any post, just so that my hatred for tags isn’t triggered on a post I would otherwise enjoy.
“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.”
You just described Mastodon. Many instances stick to the default character limit which is still bigger than twitter but some instances don’t have the limit or the limit is much much larger.
Mastodon doesn’t have posts and (tree-style) comments as a separate thing, or upvotes. That’s probably the biggest thing for me
Tree style comments is certainly not there. However one might equate a “favorite” to an upvote. However assuming a favorite is considered positive then there is no down vote analog.
Reddit also had competing communities though like r/tech and r/technology or r/games and r/gaming
I think that we should try to not create the same community in different instances, instead of that we should look for that community in existing instances and join it. So far I’ve realized the short time I’ve been in Lemmy, you can cross post between different instances and the local instance will show you if a post is also published in another known instance.
For some reason I suck at long comments, they keep getting destroyed when I try to post.
I had a long written out response about how when you have multiple communities on one subject, moderation responsibilities get dispersed and become easier for everyone. They don’t have to set up any division of responsibility on a single board, they don’t even have to agree on the EXACT same rules. They simply have to federate and link each other so that the community members know to watch for threads from each, comment where they like, and post on the one that is closest to their instance.
If we throw away the idea of “Redundant” or “competing” boards and just accept that we can have all these spaces coexisting, things could work out pretty nice.
I mean, instead of ONE Sherlock Holmes board that might discourage sexuality discussions and ban BBC Sherlock, you can have 3 that have slightly different rules, different mods but still federate with each other and give you 3 spaces to discuss Sherlock Holmes that are all reachable from your homepage on your home instance.
I think what we are seeing now is the effect of being in the “land rush” phase of lemmy build out, and won’t be the norm once things settle down. Really the biggest thing to improve things would be for admins to pre-federate common communities so that when new users search for them they are found, instead of getting “not found” then creating yet another duplicate of the same content.
Eventually people will coalesce around certain communities and bail from others, and that will likely morph over time. I’ve dropped my subs to all the beehaw communities due to their isolationism, and I suspect others will do the same. Some will like their walled garden, and that’s fine - that’s what makes the fediverse strong.
I think a link-aggregator format is perfectly okay for the fediverse, I think redditors wanting to interact with it just like they do reddit is the problem. Communities don’t have to compete, we don’t all have to talk in the same place if we want to talk about a topic, and probably shouldn’t. It’s the reason splinter subreddits exist, and those actually aren’t bad, they are just inherent to the natural course of communities. It’s less convenient, but if everyone isn’t happy and keeps fighting, they should go off and do their own thing. Having something in one big mega community means centralization, and the fediverse is decentralized. Aggregating all instance’s tags into one community automatically, and then appointing a moderator of that mega-community means them having a say over how other instances run their own moderation. That’s not how the fediverse does, or should, work. Fediverse gives you ultimate control over how things are run and which sites you want to talk to, should you run your own instance, and that’s kinda it’s whole thing.
You’ve been conditioned into thinking that centralized hubs are ideal. They have upsides, but also have major downsides. In the same way cities can be hellholes, frustrating, and expensive to live in. They’re very convenient, and pretty necessary for business. But people don’t have to be a part of a business ploy to have value, not everyone wants to or should live in a city. Different people have different needs, even if they like and want the same things.
aside: following tags on lemmy could be a perfectly fine feature, but no one person from fedi should moderate it, what’s shown should follow all federation rules in place for your home instance. It’s just like how you can search tags on mastodon and it populates from all federated instance of your home.
Exactly this. I see a lot of people suggesting the fediverse be more centralized because they’re so used to centralized platforms.
Isn’t the point of federation that those communities would federate and then have merged comments sections? Or am I misunderstanding how it works?
No, “[email protected]” and “[email protected]” are like different subreddits would be on Reddit. You can follow both (and you can see both from either instance), but posts from one are only on that one. You’d have to subscribe to both to see them all.
no. they’re two separate communities, the federation makes sure that people on lemmy.ml can subscribe to [email protected], as well as post and comment in there, and people on lemmy.world can do the same with [email protected].
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.
Partly in jest, but partly not:
Webrings, fam.
The old, glorious webrings of the 80s and 90s should return. That’s what’d connect your various “cats” instances, without the need for any of them becoming the Official And Only “Cats” Community.
Other than that, I don’t really like the idea that you describe that a generalist principle like “cats” should be “owned” by an automatic system. That’s kinda yet another problem that we’re trying to escape from (evenmore now with AIs). And made it worse when in order to participate in a “smaller” community which is still about cats, you have to “steal” another noun that describes a different community, such as “toebeans” (which could also be for eg.: furries).
That doesn’t seem practical to me — for instance, who would make the rules and appoint moderators for auto-created communities?
