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.
When an instance defederates, it means they stop pulling in posts from the instance they defederated from. It doesn’t mean that older posts go away, and it doesn’t mean that other instances don’t see their posts anymore (unless those instances defederate back).
The fact that old posts don’t go away after defederation makes things more confusing. I’ve already had the experience of replying to comments where I didn’t know the originating server had been defederated from mine. You’re just left cluelessly posting into the void, not knowing the other side of the conversation has disappeared. My least favorite thing about Lemmy so far.
Right, that’s my point. Suppose two communities on A and B form a “multi community.”
I’m on C and it mutually defederates from A, but C remains federated with B.
I then engage in a comment chain with someone on B. You’re on A. Do you just see half of our conversation?
More generally, a “community” presumes a group of people who can all mutually interact, like people all having a conversation in the same room. But a “multi community” in a federated structure breaks this assumption. It’s like being in a room where everyone is talking on different group calls via their phone, and you may or may not be allowed to hear parts of the conversation.