[Discussion] I don't think this format makes a lot of sense for the fediverse

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.

misnina,

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.

rosatherad,
rosatherad avatar

Exactly this. I see a lot of people suggesting the fediverse be more centralized because they're so used to centralized platforms.

Kichae, (edited )

Yes, exactly.

One thing that really surprised me with people from Reddit flooding in was the sometimes severe amount of angst being generated by FOMO. The sentiment seems to be "If there are 100 communities dedicated to this topic, I'll have to subscribe to all of them to see everything!" But this thinking ignores the fact that in super-sized subreddits, they don't see even 1 percent of posts and even 0.01% of comments in such spaces due to the sheer volume of stuff being posted there.

Anyone who came to Reddit from forums, where stupidly massive forums were those that had like 10,000 users knows that nothing is missed by having communities larger than that. Many of us were on forums with 100 active users or less, and they were incredibly engaging spaces. We remember what it was like to actually get comments on our posts, and replies to our comments, rather than throwing something into the cacophony and hoping that someone pays it any notice.

And anyone who regularly trawled 'New' knows that in massive suberddits the same link or fundamentally the same post gets posted a hundred times as people race to be the one to get THE post on the topic and farm that sweet, sweet karma. It's way, way better to have those 100 posts spread across 100 instances, where they can get attention from 100 different communities, and people can actually discuss them and engage with each other, rather than have just one of them rise to the top and a generating a comment section of 20,000 people fighting for visibility.

I expected these kinds of "how can I see EVERYTHING is everyone's spread out?!?" feelings from Twitter people coming to the fediverse because how content spreads through communities on Twitter, via re-Tweets. I wasn't prepared for it from Redditors, since I had kind of assumed that everyone on Reddit was as frustrated and bummed out as I am about posting things to active communities or comment threads that no one ever notices.

grus,
grus avatar

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.

crib,

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

grus,
grus avatar

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.

EfreetSK,
@EfreetSK@lemmy.world avatar

... 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

pacology,
@pacology@lemmy.world avatar

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.

cerevant,

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.

DudePluto, (edited )

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 :)

Killakomodo,
Killakomodo avatar

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?

DudePluto,

You're making a bigger deal about this than I ever did lmao

gibmiser,

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!

Killakomodo,
Killakomodo avatar

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.

sznio,

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.

overzeetop,
@overzeetop@lemmy.world avatar

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.

mulcahey,

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?

samus12345,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

carloshr,
@carloshr@feddit.cl avatar

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.

nintendiator,

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).

Mac,

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.

kdave,

That doesn’t seem practical to me — for instance, who would make the rules and appoint moderators for auto-created communities?

cerevant,

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.

Tekchip,
@Tekchip@lemmy.world avatar

"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.

possum,

Mastodon doesn't have posts and (tree-style) comments as a separate thing, or upvotes. That's probably the biggest thing for me

psycho_driver,

I would have preferred to be able to use /r/linux over on that old platform, but I found that at least some of the mods were imbeciles. I like the option of competing communities for the same topic. Mods will have to do a decent job if they want their community to be the leader for that topic.

neonpeon,

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 submission and see a comment from someone in 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.

Greenskye,

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.

RGB3x3,

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.

IndependentComb257,

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.

DudePluto,

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?

RoquetteQueen,
RoquetteQueen avatar

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.

arquebus_x,

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.

T156,

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.

Greenskye,

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

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