this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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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.

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[–] itadakimasu@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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?

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[–] almino@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] arquebus_x@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Melpomene@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I was actually going to say this too. A system that allowed both macro level federation (instances) and Magazine level integration would be ideal. Not only does it have the advantages you mention, but it would also provide both fault tolerance for the community (if that slacker Melpomene forgets to pay their bills and awesomemag@melpomene.slacker goes down, Facedeer's awesomemag@notaslacker.yay keeps the community alive) and would suit the federated philosophy well.

[–] FlowVoid@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] Melpomene@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Those are challenges to be sure, but...

  1. If both pay their bills, the Magazines co-exist and show up (if they choose) as a unified Magazine.

  2. A few options here. Maybe we offer different ways for Magazines mods to interact? First option, each magazine moderates its own users / posts, can remove a post or a user's right to share to the instance (single user defederation.) Second option, moderators can agree to have federated moderator rights, so they (by agreement) can cross-moderate their magazines?

[–] FlowVoid@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] deergon@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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_@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

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