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.
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.
Regarding (2), I don’t think it’s a given that all popular communities will end up on the same instances. That may be happening now, when discovery is the main issue; but once communities become established and people become more familiar with them, they’ll gravitate toward the ones with the best moderation. (For example, if you know that most people with a particular interest are subscribed to multiple communities, you’ll post to the one where the mods will remove the troll replies.)
There’s also a scaling issue: reddit’s operating at a loss, and any instance hosting a large number of communities will face similar server cost issues. Either performance will suffer, or they’ll do things like ads or sponsored posts to pay their expenses. Or there’ll be some scandal like reddit is currently facing, and users will switch to communities on other instances.
I definitely agree. It’s so much easier to find communities within your own instance, thus communities on large instances automatically have an advantage over communities on smaller instances. I’m currently having this issue with a community I moderate on lemmy.ml that isn’t even showing up on searches across the fediverse
This is an area that needs big improvement. The home instance advantage is currently driving things towards centralization, directly counter to the goal of Lemmy. An end user needs to be able to easily see all the options available to them in their federation.
If that can’t be improved quickly, then I’d suggest instance owners start to specialize on topics in order to better scale. Have a gaming hub, a lifestyle hub, a politics hub, etc.
Isn’t it possible to have some sort of metacommunities that we could subscribe to and automatically feed us with the contents from several ones?
That could work. Some type of “Super Community” that aggregates (participating) smaller communities with the same purpose could be a solution; at least I think so. I don’t really know how moderation would work… perhaps “participating” communities of a “Super Community” agree to receive cross-moderation support, somehow.
It all sounds kind-of complicated and likely not coming as a feature anytime soon.
Super-community works for subscription
Need another mechanism for posting, as different communities has different rules