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 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.
Ok - I can see how the default experience has changed.
I guess in my use case I’ve always joined subreddits that interested me, and in some cases, even blocked subreddits that annoyed me when I’d browse r/all. For a typical “day” of browsing Reddit I would: check out my favorite subs (local communities and hobby oriented). If I had more time, I’d check r/all to see if there was some trending news I somehow missed that day.
I agree all the memes have become quite an annoyance over the years.
… 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.
You’re making a bigger deal about this than I ever did lmao
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
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?
“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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Reddit also had competing communities though like r/tech and r/technology or r/games and r/gaming
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].
Right now it’s basically you post on the one on your instance and follow the others and can comment anywhere. I think it’s an eensy bit chaotic, but it works.
A post to [email protected] exists on lemmy.world and is mirrored to other sites, where users can see it and comment on it (and those comments are also visible on lemmy.world.
But it wouldn’t appear as a post in [email protected].
right but if someone creates [email protected] then you have completely different communities. this is currently happenung with startrek. the subreddit people created [email protected] (their own server) but if you search startrek on kbin, you get a magazine here thats full of startrek memes.
I do like the idea of making x-posting nice and easy so we can hit several communities of similar topic at once
I remember arguing for a tagging approach on reddit, way back when subreddits were first introduced—I (correctly) feared the subreddit approach would fragment the community and create echo chambers of users who never interacted with anyone outside of their subscribed subs.
But it does have some strengths that perhaps work better in a decentralized environment. One is easier and more explicit assignment of moderators: you mention “appointed community moderators” for tag-communities, but who would appoint these moderators? And what happens when people use new tags that don’t have existing communities?
Another strength is the ability to create communities on the same topic with distinct moderating/curating styles. Take s/AskHistory and s/AskHistorians: both addressed the same general type of questions, but the latter’s more rigorous moderation resulted in a very different type of response and both had their place.
I think it will take time for communities to develop distinct moderating policies and for users to become familiar with them; but in the case of redundant communities, eventually users will gravitate toward those with the best moderation.
What if you could link communities in the settings? So that any posts to the linked communities also appears in your favorite instance’s community.
Maybe both communities have to approve the link to avoid SPAM or any other type of attack.
We’ve already got linked servers through “federation”. Why not have automatic cross posting through “treaties”?
