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.
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.
Yes, exactly.
One thing that really surprised me with people from Reddit flooding in was the sometimes severe amount of angst being generated by FOMO. The sentiment seems to be “If there are 100 communities dedicated to this topic, I’ll have to subscribe to all of them to see everything!” But this thinking ignores the fact that in super-sized subreddits, they don’t see even 1 percent of posts and even 0.01% of comments in such spaces due to the sheer volume of stuff being posted there.
Anyone who came to Reddit from forums, where stupidly massive forums were those that had like 10,000 users knows that nothing is missed by having communities larger than that. Many of us were on forums with 100 active users or less, and they were incredibly engaging spaces. We remember what it was like to actually get comments on our posts, and replies to our comments, rather than throwing something into the cacophony and hoping that someone pays it any notice.
And anyone who regularly trawled ‘New’ knows that in massive suberddits the same link or fundamentally the same post gets posted a hundred times as people race to be the one to get THE post on the topic and farm that sweet, sweet karma. It’s way, way better to have those 100 posts spread across 100 instances, where they can get attention from 100 different communities, and people can actually discuss them and engage with each other, rather than have just one of them rise to the top and a generating a comment section of 20,000 people fighting for visibility.
I expected these kinds of “how can I see EVERYTHING is everyone’s spread out?!?” feelings from Twitter people coming to the fediverse because how content spreads through communities on Twitter, via re-Tweets. I wasn’t prepared for it from Redditors, since I had kind of assumed that everyone on Reddit was as frustrated and bummed out as I am about posting things to active communities or comment threads that no one ever notices.