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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
That doesn’t seem practical to me — for instance, who would make the rules and appoint moderators for auto-created communities?
… 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 :)
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.
my view on this matter, generally
fediverse currently is in its early inception, so it still need to “emulate” current flow of (popular) web service, so of course it will be some “un-ideal” for the “how the fediverse supposed to work” yet
but in time, when the “internet masses” get a grip of what and how fediverse works, the people will see that fediverse itself will show the advantages over “conventional” monoverse
it takes time, just like how today monoverse social media working, understand and get accepted by majority internet users
ex: fediverse@lemmy.world vs fediverse@lemmy.ml
Isn’t the point of federation that those communities would federate and then have merged comments sections? Or am I misunderstanding how it works?
Interesting idea for sure! Without any thought to the details or technical side of things, how do you figure the community moderators would be appointed (if the communities are created automatically)?
I would imagine it working just like on reddit and lemmy, where it can originally be claimed by the original poster or anyone who wants it. It’s obviously not an ideal solution, but it’s worked well enough historically. Maybe someone else would have a better idea
Maybe “tags” is the wrong identifier and needs to be called something else? It may work like tags, but if the tags are moderated and act similar to instances then they would need to be moderated so while they may operate like tags it seems what OP is asking for is a bit more complicated.
OP meant subject-matter or domain
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.
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.
