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.
@[email protected] Okay so, lol, dunno if you see this because I don't think mentions works, I've been unable to respond to things from kbin.social for awhile now. It might just be some fuckery with me, like you can see my comments and reply, I can see kbin comments and posts, but I just can't get a reply to go through.
Here's what I wrote: I wouldn't have assumed it on Reddit because subreddits are in practice different communities, with some cross over at times. While very corporate, it seemed somewhat similar in mindeset to lemmy/fedi. I didn't anticipate them to be upset that they can't see all of EVERYTHING would be such a big deal, as I thought most people had specific subreddits they enjoyed more than anything. I know very many browse r/all, I did too, but you can still get a metric fuck ton of that from the lemmy instances these complaints come from. I didn't realize the idea that there might be content out there they potentialy can't see would be such a trigger point. They probably don't see 90% of all reddit content out there. It's like a kid not playing with a toy for months, and when you take it away to give to someone else who would use it, they freak out that they won't have it anymore, despite not wanting to use it.