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: [email protected] vs [email protected]) 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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[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think you should question your assumptions.

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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)