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.
Reddit also had competing communities though like r/tech and r/technology or r/games and r/gaming
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
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.
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?
… 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!
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
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.
