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.
Isn’t the point of federation that those communities would federate and then have merged comments sections? Or am I misunderstanding how it works?
no. they’re two separate communities, the federation makes sure that people on lemmy.ml can subscribe to [email protected], as well as post and comment in there, and people on lemmy.world can do the same with [email protected].
No, “[email protected]” and “[email protected]” are like different subreddits would be on Reddit. You can follow both (and you can see both from either instance), but posts from one are only on that one. You’d have to subscribe to both to see them all.
A post to [email protected] exists on lemmy.world and is mirrored to other sites, where users can see it and comment on it (and those comments are also visible on lemmy.world.
But it wouldn’t appear as a post in [email protected].
right but if someone creates [email protected] then you have completely different communities. this is currently happenung with startrek. the subreddit people created [email protected] (their own server) but if you search startrek on kbin, you get a magazine here thats full of startrek memes.
And that’s fine. If I make my own kbin instance for my friends and make a magazine called startrek filled with longform erotic roleplay about Picard, our posts shouldn’t be automatically bundled into [email protected]’s. Magazines with the same name on different instances don’t necessarily cover the same topics.
If you’re on kbin and want to be part of the startrek.website community, just subscribe to their magazine instead: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]
Right now it’s basically you post on the one on your instance and follow the others and can comment anywhere. I think it’s an eensy bit chaotic, but it works.