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: fediverse@lemmy.world vs fediverse@lemmy.ml) 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.
Reddit also had competing communities though like r/tech and r/technology or r/games and r/gaming
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 “cats@what.any” 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.
Python@programming.dev and Python@Zoologists.social are likely unrelated communities. Similarly LaTeX@programming.dev and latex@example.nsfw
But, also, hopefully there is a reason for the various similarly-named communities. Different moderation philosophies and rules would be expected. Cats@Midwest.local might be focusing on local cats and Cats@WorldFederation.zoo might be focusing on feral populations while Cats@Lemmy.world 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.
… 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 fediverse@lemmy.ml and fediverse@lemmy.world
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 :)
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
“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.
The solution is to somehow merge all the communities into one list for the user based on keyword or something. That way it foesnt actually matter.
