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.
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.
no. they're two separate communities, the federation makes sure that people on lemmy.ml can subscribe to fediverse@lemmy.world, as well as post and comment in there, and people on lemmy.world can do the same with fediverse@lemmy.ml.
A post to fediverse@lemmy.world 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 fediverse@lemmy.ml.
right but if someone creates fediverse@kbin.social then you have completely different communities. this is currently happenung with startrek. the subreddit people created startrek@startrek.website (their own server) but if you search startrek on kbin, you get a magazine here thats full of startrek memes.
And that's fine. If I make my own kbin instance for my friends and make a magazine called startrek filled with longform erotic roleplay about Picard, our posts shouldn't be automatically bundled into startrek@startrek.website's. Magazines with the same name on different instances don't necessarily cover the same topics.
No, “fediverse@lemmy.world” and “fediverse@lemmy.ml” 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.
Multiple communities allows for multiple approaches to moderation, and IMO that's a good thing. Ironically given Spez's latest "landed gentry" justifications for his actions, it really was a problem on Reddit that a subreddit name could be controlled by one guy and anyone trying to build a rival subreddit had to fall back to a less obvious name for it.
There's an issue for Lemmy to support some form of "multireddit" that would allow multiple communities to be "merged" as far as the end user is concerned. Wouldn't be surprised if Kbin has one too, I haven't dug for it. I think that's a better approach, that would let people include or exclude communities as they desired.
Ok, suppose there is a unified magazine. I post to it, now which instance hosts my post? Then my instance defederates from that of one of the two magazines, but not the other. Do I now see only half the posts? If I engage in a comment chain, will users on the instances that defederated from mine see a weird half-conversation?
I think there is a fundamental difference between centralized formats like Reddit and federated formats like this one. Trying to simulate one with the other will always be unsatisfactory. So if Melpomene and Facedeer really want to join forces, the best way is simply to close one community and let them comoderate the remaining one.
When an instance defederates, it means they stop pulling in posts from the instance they defederated from. It doesn’t mean that older posts go away, and it doesn’t mean that other instances don’t see their posts anymore (unless those instances defederate back).
Right, that's my point. Suppose two communities on A and B form a "multi community."
I'm on C and it mutually defederates from A, but C remains federated with B.
I then engage in a comment chain with someone on B. You're on A. Do you just see half of our conversation?
More generally, a "community" presumes a group of people who can all mutually interact, like people all having a conversation in the same room. But a "multi community" in a federated structure breaks this assumption. It's like being in a room where everyone is talking on different group calls via their phone, and you may or may not be allowed to hear parts of the conversation.
I mean it’s true that people need more guidance, but here especially; how can you GDPR A thousand instances? How does a small server maintainer deal with privacy laws in international jurisdiction? Especially when their server is only caching posts?
This gets even more dangerous sounding when you get into revenge porn, CP, etc territory. Can you go to jail for caching a post that you’ve never seen or intended to capture because someone on your instance was subscribed to a community that got image-bombed by trolls? Is there some kind of audit trail or emergency fediverse-wide delete command for when mods clean out garbage like that?
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 have had the issue of receiving error messages when I try to post. In my case, fortunately, my words were not erased. I would hit "Add comment" and be taken to a 503 Error (telling me to come back in a few days!). Sometimes the page would eventually load, or I would go back. My post would still be there in the compose window. While this problem exists I have taken to Select-All / Copying my posts before attempting to upload them.
Somehow it hasn't felt too frustrating. I LOVE how patient and understanding most of us are when it comes to this place! For one thing, I ask myself, "Do I really need to post that?" before deciding whether to attempt again. I also think we are all patient because we see the powers that be here as acting in good faith, trying their best, underfunded, and honorable... unlike our experiences with corporate ad & data mining sites.
If it's true that a bigger community is always preferable to a smaller one, then everyone will always sign up for the biggest community or migrate there. In that case, there is no need to worry about the existence of smaller communities.
On the other hand, it's possible that some people are trying to avoid big communities. They have their own problems, for example the futility of posting in a Reddit thread which already has 1k+ comments. And in fact, people already form splinter groups on Reddit itself so presumably they have some value.
But if it's true that small groups are valuable too, then we should not be forcibly aggregating them into a mega group where they will lose the advantages of their small size.
Yeah, this - honestly reddit was perfectly fun and usable in 2012 with 5% of its current MAUs; a fediverse replacement for reddit that doesn't strive to serve everyone but has enough users to produce interesting discussion on any reasonably popular topic would be wonderful. (plus, if reddit still keeps 95% of its users, the spammers / Nazis will continue focusing their energies there, much as they have with Twitter)
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.
Absolutely not.
I don't know why people are obsessed with recreating reddit, but I think it sucked and it's not a good thing to have this kind of massive, centralized communities, where all posts in the X category go there.
On the contrary I think smaller communities are just as dope as the big ones. Not everyone wants to participate in a big community with threads filled with tens of thousands of comments, some very much enjoy smaller ones where they actually get to interact and bond with a smaller amount of people.
Besides those kind of massive communities recreate one of the biggest problems that reddit had and still has: power-hungry, power-tripping mods. No, thank you. I don't want tankies to usurp leftist communities again, leaving those who oppose them with little to no alternatives.
Yes, big communities make me feel it is unnecessary to contribute and go into lurk-mode.
But it is a hard balance. A larger community should be able to create more and better content. So I hope we will see both as Lemmy/kbin takes off
It really depends on the type of community and the subject that its centered upon. Topics that are more ... ugh, "brainless" so to speak? The kind that don't really need community cohesion, interaction, but just operate on a simple factor - like cute cats, femboys, funny memes, are fine and can work quite well when they're very big.
But if you have communities whose main purpose is to interact/discuss with others, I think small or medium sized groups are better because that allows you to actually get to know people and discuss topics that interest you.
I'm pretty convinced that as time goes on some communities will grow larger, others will split on ideological grounds, and overall I think that's a very cool thing.
I like the idea of articles and magazines, microblogs and tags, and collections.
You can build a collection of magazines and tags for whatever reason you choose. Apollo used to allow something similar, I had one for ‘news’ one for ‘Ukraine’ and one for ‘wholesome’ when reading the news or reading about Ukraine got to be too much. It could work well with this system (I’m familiar with kbin you can use whatever terms you like).
You can see a list of articles from all the magazines in the collection in article view, and all the tags in the collection on microblog view. You can choose to have your collection set to private, or you can share it as a public collection.
Other people could then subscribe to your public collection if they didn’t want to build their own collection from scratch.
You wouldn’t be able to post to a collection, and if you replied, the reply would go to whichever magazine article or microblog you replied to. If you wanted to post you’d have to post in the relevant magazine or system.
I don’t like the microblog firehose and I find tags confusing. I wouldn’t want them all muddled up in my nice categorised and indented article feed, but kbin’s ‘articles vs microblogs’ system gives you the best of both worlds by choosing which feed you want to look at separately according to your mood.
I agree your points represent challenges, but I think they are opportunities rather than fatal flaws.
Community collapse = intra-instance interaction = success of the model.
Community splintering among instances = greater opinionation, fit between user and community = success of the model.
Spicier domain names, content, and users are likely to attract eachother over time. Blocking that domain or choosing an instance that is defederated with it then becomes a powerful tool to shape your experience.
Unlike the corporates, instances don't need active users or growth to survive. They exist because someone with the skills and resources wants them to. If anything, some of them may benefit from users moving on to more popular instances.
I concede that getting a healthy supply of mods and content is the biggest challenge for Lemmy right now. However, I more would be lost than gained by replacing communities with tags. I'm tempted to go on here about the virtues of subreddits/communities vs. tags here, but I think anyone that's here instead of on Mastodon probably has an idea of that already.
To bring it home, I think this type of social network is inherently decision-focused. The federation model amplifies that, which is intimidating and challenging, but I think ultimately to its benefit rather than its detriment.
What might be worth considering is an option for like-minded communities to soft-merge, so someone going to X will see everything from Y as well and vice versa. That’s obviously not part of the federation thing right now but I think it would be useful. Users could perhaps opt out of the soft merge by clicking a check box to see/not see affiliated communities/magazines.
Some kind of multireddit-like feature would be pretty nice, where it can aggregate posts from multiple communities across multiple instances, and presents them as a single post. Commenting on them would just take you to the post where things would work as normal.
Although the hard part might be figuring out how to make sure that it doesn't get abused with spam or something along those lines.
I'm thinking when you hit subscribe, it presents a box of other communities that the community owner suggests as the same topic. Then I can also subscribe to those at the same time if I want.
If I run a D&D community I could suggest D&D 5E community as well and a TTRPG community too. Or also another D&D community from a different instance.
Less about structure and more about easing end user friction to get to content
I think it's more about the individual users you find in each of the duplicates. It's like old forums. There would be several different sites hosting their own forums with plenty of duplicated topics, but you would choose one based on who was there. Multiple small options makes it easier to find the place where you fit in and can actually make friends instead of having fleeting interactions with strangers with whom you'll probably never speak again.
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?
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.
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?
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