Fediverse

That doesn’t seem practical to me — for instance, who would make the rules and appoint moderators for auto-created communities?

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.

I do like the idea of making x-posting nice and easy so we can hit several communities of similar topic at once

this is not a bad idea, i think this needs to be figured out before its too late.. lets see if we can get the right people on board

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)?

ex: [email protected] vs [email protected]

Isn't the point of federation that those communities would federate and then have merged comments sections? Or am I misunderstanding how it works?

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.

Partly in jest, but partly not:

Webrings, fam.

The old, glorious webrings of the 80s and 90s should return. That's what'd connect your various "cats" instances, without the need for any of them becoming the Official And Only "Cats" Community.

Other than that, I don't really like the idea that you describe that a generalist principle like "cats" should be "owned" by an automatic system. That's kinda yet another problem that we're trying to escape from (evenmore now with AIs). And made it worse when in order to participate in a "smaller" community which is still about cats, you have to "steal" another noun that describes a different community, such as "toebeans" (which could also be for eg.: furries).

I like the idea of articles and magazines, microblogs and tags, and collections.

You can build a collection of magazines and tags for whatever reason you choose. Apollo used to allow something similar, I had one for ‘news’ one for ‘Ukraine’ and one for ‘wholesome’ when reading the news or reading about Ukraine got to be too much. It could work well with this system (I’m familiar with kbin you can use whatever terms you like).

You can see a list of articles from all the magazines in the collection in article view, and all the tags in the collection on microblog view. You can choose to have your collection set to private, or you can share it as a public collection.

Other people could then subscribe to your public collection if they didn’t want to build their own collection from scratch.

You wouldn’t be able to post to a collection, and if you replied, the reply would go to whichever magazine article or microblog you replied to. If you wanted to post you’d have to post in the relevant magazine or system.

I don’t like the microblog firehose and I find tags confusing. I wouldn’t want them all muddled up in my nice categorised and indented article feed, but kbin’s ‘articles vs microblogs’ system gives you the best of both worlds by choosing which feed you want to look at separately according to your mood.

I am liking this format a lot! Simple and easy to doom scroll for hours.

Actually got me thinking. Would love to see a fediverse app like Lemmy or kbin but with tags only instead of communities. A user would need to create a tag the same way a community is created now, and moderators would be assigned to tags they way they are to communities. Tags would have rules and a “sidebar” just like communities.

So what. The difference? Tags would not be instance specific (although due to the way activity pub works, posts would still need to live on their own instance; rules of federation still apply). So if you visit taggit.com/t/technology it behaves just like a subreddit but we’re still getting the benefits of aggregating across the fediverse.

Posts would still show their originating instance, and tag moderators could add posts from other service’s Communities or Magazines - to continue my example, the technology tag could include posts from [email protected], [email protected], kbin.social/m/tech, and even Mastodon toots with the #tech hashtag.

Tags would be able to filter content using Treaties and Embargos - a “Treaty” would allow other services to receive content posted with tags in their communities (although this would require some work as other services would need to support this) and an Embargo would be a way to filter only specific tags from specific instances, rather than defederate the entire instance when such a move is too drastic (instance owners would still be able to defederate of course)

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