[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.

Wander,
@Wander@yiffit.net avatar

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.

average650,
@average650@lemmy.world avatar

In many areas Reddit competing communities. And that made it better. Frequently I wouldn't post on larger subreddits because my comments would just get lost in the noise, but in the fragmented communities, they would usually get read.

phase_change,

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.

DudePluto,

the idea of wanting to recreate Reddit is bad.

Absolutely, and this isn't my suggestion anyway. I think this comment section is a good highlight to how many different end-goals make up the fediverse. As you pointed out, a major goal of federation is to guard against the internet being co-opted by monolithic influences. The primary guard against this is everyone's distribution across multiple servers - even our own - preserving our ability to cut any server that becomes compromised.

However, another end-goal is that of lemmy and kbin: to be link and content aggregators. An aggregator is meant to bring things together in one form or another for the user to consume. I think the current format works against this goal, and could be better served by the tag system I theorized without sacrificing federation any more than we're already doing (and smaller, less popular tags would still exist for those who want to participate in smaller communities).

This approach is actually less like reddit than the current one. As a lot of people pointed out, having moderators for monolithic tags could be a potential threat to federation. As such, another approach could be implemented. Purely brain-storming

itadakimasu,
@itadakimasu@lemmy.world avatar

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?

phase_change,

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.

itadakimasu,
@itadakimasu@lemmy.world avatar

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.

sj_zero,

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.

disney,

Reddit also had competing communities though like r/tech and r/technology or r/games and r/gaming

deergon,
@deergon@lemmy.world avatar

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)?

_finger_,

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.

hikarulsi,
@hikarulsi@lemmy.world avatar

OP meant subject-matter or domain

DudePluto,

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

4am,
@4am@lemmy.world avatar

What would you claim if there were no communities?

itadakimasu,
@itadakimasu@lemmy.world avatar

Fragmentation of communities is a huge concern for me and has me sitting at the edge of my seat constantly as I watch this unfold.

I think a couple of things are going to naturally happen:

(1) If a community is spilt, one will eventually win, as users want to join communities with a larger number of people. Users will eventually migrate from the smaller, failed communities, to the larger more mainstream community.

(2) I suspect that one or two instances will eventually contain all popular communities. Smaller, more niche instances will close doors. I don't think any instance with a trashy name is going to survive (srsly wtf is up with shitjustworks? Are you going to browse that while on free time at work? Yeah, no.)

(3) either something similar happens as described above, or eventually people get frustrated and lemmy/kbin fail as users move somewhere else that isn't as complicated.

naoseiquemsou,

Isn't it possible to have some sort of metacommunities that we could subscribe to and automatically feed us with the contents from several ones?

itadakimasu,
@itadakimasu@lemmy.world avatar

That could work. Some type of "Super Community" that aggregates (participating) smaller communities with the same purpose could be a solution; at least I think so. I don't really know how moderation would work... perhaps "participating" communities of a "Super Community" agree to receive cross-moderation support, somehow.

It all sounds kind-of complicated and likely not coming as a feature anytime soon.

hikarulsi,
@hikarulsi@lemmy.world avatar

Super-community works for subscription

Need another mechanism for posting, as different communities has different rules

DudePluto,

I suspect that one or two instances will eventually contain all popular communities

I definitely agree. It's so much easier to find communities within your own instance, thus communities on large instances automatically have an advantage over communities on smaller instances. I'm currently having this issue with a community I moderate on lemmy.ml that isn't even showing up on searches across the fediverse

Greenskye,

This is an area that needs big improvement. The home instance advantage is currently driving things towards centralization, directly counter to the goal of Lemmy. An end user needs to be able to easily see all the options available to them in their federation.

If that can't be improved quickly, then I'd suggest instance owners start to specialize on topics in order to better scale. Have a gaming hub, a lifestyle hub, a politics hub, etc.

AbouBenAdhem,

Regarding (2), I don’t think it’s a given that all popular communities will end up on the same instances. That may be happening now, when discovery is the main issue; but once communities become established and people become more familiar with them, they’ll gravitate toward the ones with the best moderation. (For example, if you know that most people with a particular interest are subscribed to multiple communities, you’ll post to the one where the mods will remove the troll replies.)

There’s also a scaling issue: reddit’s operating at a loss, and any instance hosting a large number of communities will face similar server cost issues. Either performance will suffer, or they’ll do things like ads or sponsored posts to pay their expenses. Or there’ll be some scandal like reddit is currently facing, and users will switch to communities on other instances.

AbouBenAdhem,

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.

konst,

I'm not sure how this would work out with bans + comment moderation. I'd figure we wouldn't want to split up comments by tag and just have comments tied to the post. You can end up with a comment breaking rules of one community, but not another. Since you're following the rules of some communities, but breaking others, you might unknowingly rack up violations.

This might still be fine if we can ignore moderation from other communities, causing blocked posts to be visible again if we don't like a set of rules.

nyanix,

I do like the idea of making x-posting nice and easy so we can hit several communities of similar topic at once

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.

sarsaparilyptus,

You're right, Reddit totally never had a huge and unmanageable problem with fractious duplicate communities for the same thing, not at all.

Balssh,
Balssh avatar

I beg to differ there were multiple subreddits for the same topic (and I'm sure this was more accentuated when the site was in its infancy). I guess over time the community will crystalize around a single instance for a given topic.

cemeterysounds,

deleted_by_author

    •
    spectre,

    redditors bringing their complete inability to recognize a joke that doesn't end with /s with them

    Naminreb,

    I thought you were being sarcastic until you added “with them.”

    Lilkev,
    Lilkev avatar

    I'm pretty sure @sarsaparilyptus was being sarcastic

    lucidwielder,

    Sarcasm lost on the internet, that never happens.

    WouldYouLikeAnyToast,

    Yes it does, as evidenced by this thread

    dan,
    dan avatar

    I’m pretty sure @lucidwielder was being sarcastic

    WouldYouLikeAnyToast,

    thatsthejoke.jpg

    digdug,

    I'm pretty sure @WouldYouLikeAnyToast was being sarcastic

    samus12345,
    @samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

    I'm pretty sure @dan was being sarcastic /s

    mo_ztt,
    @mo_ztt@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    masterspace,

    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?

    Ragnell,
    Ragnell avatar

    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.

    noodlejetski,

    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.

    atypicaloddity,

    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.

    TerabyteRex,

    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.

    atypicaloddity,

    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.

    If you're on kbin and want to be part of the startrek.website community, just subscribe to their magazine instead: https://kbin.social/m/startrek@startrek.website

    4am,
    @4am@lemmy.world avatar

    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.

    almino,
    almino avatar

    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.

    4am,
    @4am@lemmy.world avatar

    We’ve already got linked servers through “federation”. Why not have automatic cross posting through “treaties”?

    FaceDeer,
    FaceDeer avatar

    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.

    !deleted125603,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    FlowVoid,

    And what happens when both pay their bills, and a comment or user is moderated by Melpomene but not Facedeer?

    !deleted125603,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    FlowVoid,

    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.

    4am,
    @4am@lemmy.world avatar

    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).

    FlowVoid, (edited )

    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.

    !deleted125603,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    4am,
    @4am@lemmy.world avatar

    It also means that anything you post on here is also 100% out of your control, and even harder to scrub than it would be had it been posted on Reddit.

    Data longevity is baked into the system. Keep this in mind when posting here.

    !deleted125603,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    4am,
    @4am@lemmy.world avatar

    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?

    Ragnell,
    Ragnell avatar

    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.

    RMiddleton,
    RMiddleton avatar

    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.

    Ragnell,
    Ragnell avatar

    That's a good tip, thanks.

    Yes, I am so much less frustrated here than other places. And I think you hit on why.

    TerabyteRex,

    this is not a bad idea, i think this needs to be figured out before its too late.. lets see if we can get the right people on board

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