Fediverse

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.

... 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 [email protected] and [email protected]

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think I've mentioned this elsewhere, but a lot of these issues of structure I don't think need to be solved on content creator/admin side, but rather on the end user UI side. The fragmentation is good for the network as a whole, but as an end user, I want to group similar communities together into one. Let me bulk subscribe to cats, toebeans, kittens, etc. I'll do that action once. Then if one of those goes defunct, I won't really care. I also won't really care which community I'm posting to (except to ensure I'm following the rules), because ultimately most of the savvy users will be mass subscribed to topics as well.

This preserves control (I can opt out of toebeans if I don't like that community for some reason), while keeping the distributed nature. No one would truly 'own' the cat pics community as it would span across multiple instances and communities.

"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."

You just described Mastodon. Many instances stick to the default character limit which is still bigger than twitter but some instances don't have the limit or the limit is much much larger.

I think what we are seeing now is the effect of being in the "land rush" phase of lemmy build out, and won't be the norm once things settle down. Really the biggest thing to improve things would be for admins to pre-federate common communities so that when new users search for them they are found, instead of getting "not found" then creating yet another duplicate of the same content.

Eventually people will coalesce around certain communities and bail from others, and that will likely morph over time. I've dropped my subs to all the beehaw communities due to their isolationism, and I suspect others will do the same. Some will like their walled garden, and that's fine - that's what makes the fediverse strong.

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.

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

I think it's more about the individual users you find in each of the duplicates. It's like old forums. There would be several different sites hosting their own forums with plenty of duplicated topics, but you would choose one based on who was there. Multiple small options makes it easier to find the place where you fit in and can actually make friends instead of having fleeting interactions with strangers with whom you'll probably never speak again.

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.

I would have preferred to be able to use /r/linux over on that old platform, but I found that at least some of the mods were imbeciles. I like the option of competing communities for the same topic. Mods will have to do a decent job if they want their community to be the leader for that topic.

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

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.

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.

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.

I've been brainstorming things like this, too, and have come up with some similar thoughts. I think we can have both tags and communities. Suppose there's a trust model. A community on an instance will entrust certain members to whitelist posts that are in an approved list of tags. Anything on any instance that gets tagged with one of the approved tags would go into a queue. You could employ a bot to work the queue to eliminate low hanging fruit, and then trusted community members would work it to approve posts.

Likewise, an instance community could have a trust relationship with a community on a different instance. They could say, "Any posts approved by the cats community over there are automatically approved here." This could help distribute the load on the queue. As a side note, there would need to be logging of metadata so an audit trail could be analyzed in case problems arose in the trust circle.

So, that addresses a way to handle submissions. There's another ball of wax with comments. Ideally, a comment section would be a way for users to discover new communities. You might be reading comments on a #cat submission and see a comment from someone in #toebeans and go, "Oh hey, that looks interesting," and you can jump to the community and/or subscribe to it. It's not immediately obvious to me how an app could aggregate comments across multiple communities or if ActivityPub could facilitate it. Seems plausible.

I really hope we eventually get a richer platform out of all this. It's a great opportunity for people to put their heads together and think of new improvements.

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.

The solution is to somehow merge all the communities into one list for the user based on keyword or something. That way it foesnt actually matter.

I agree your points represent challenges, but I think they are opportunities rather than fatal flaws.

• Community collapse = intra-instance interaction = success of the model.
• Community splintering among instances = greater opinionation, fit between user and community = success of the model.
• Spicier domain names, content, and users are likely to attract eachother over time. Blocking that domain or choosing an instance that is defederated with it then becomes a powerful tool to shape your experience.
• Unlike the corporates, instances don't need active users or growth to survive. They exist because someone with the skills and resources wants them to. If anything, some of them may benefit from users moving on to more popular instances.
• I concede that getting a healthy supply of mods and content is the biggest challenge for Lemmy right now. However, I more would be lost than gained by replacing communities with tags. I'm tempted to go on here about the virtues of subreddits/communities vs. tags here, but I think anyone that's here instead of on Mastodon probably has an idea of that already.
• To bring it home, I think this type of social network is inherently decision-focused. The federation model amplifies that, which is intimidating and challenging, but I think ultimately to its benefit rather than its detriment.