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.
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)
Sorry, using Memmy and encountered a bug with posting, can’t edit: continued here:
The best thing would be multiple tags could be assigned to a post (up to a certain limit). Allowing for multiple communities to interact with a single post, bringing people of many related interests together under a single topic.
This also alleviates the confusion new users have with their being multiple version of the same community.
So, what are the major flaws? Centralization of power? Fragmentation via filtering? Naivety regarding what is possible with ActivityPub? Let’s shoot holes in this and see if we can think through any problems.