I don’t necessarily agree that competing communities is something bad, especially once a “lists” and “sharing lists” feature is implemented. It’s only a matter of time.

… Are you guys for real? Since when is Reddit this centralized heaven you describe? You have r/news and r/worldnews. You have r/funny, r/memes and r/funnymemes and probably dozens of others I don’t even know about. NSFW subreddits are like on another level where every single NSFW category has like at very least 5 subreddits and people who post there crosspost constantly.

And every single other platform for commuities has the same situation - on Facebook you could have found groups NHL, NHL fans, NHL 4 life and like ten other NHL communities with duplicated names.

And yet when we come to Fediverse, the BIGGEST F*CKIN ISSUE of the entire platform is that there is [email protected] and [email protected]

So I get the concern, but honestly I think in practice fragmented communities are fine. If anyone’s old enough to remember Fidonet and WWIVNet, they worked great – you had some “local” communities with a lot of duplication and fragmentation, but smaller so you could start to recognize people and have some semblance of a community, and then you had bigger networked communities that were more akin to Reddit forums. They were both good things to have; I don’t think it’s automatically bad to have many smaller forums that cover more or less the same topics on individual instances.

The tags thing sounds great too, of course – it could be a good way to discover new communities or browse everything related to some topic if you decided you wanted to.

The issue with tags is who’s going to moderate them.

The reddit model has an owner responsible for each community. Tags don’t, and as such the moderation responsibility over everything falls on server administrators.

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.

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.

I think I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but a lot of these issues of structure I don’t think need to be solved on content creator/admin side, but rather on the end user UI side. The fragmentation is good for the network as a whole, but as an end user, I want to group similar communities together into one. Let me bulk subscribe to cats, toebeans, kittens, etc. I’ll do that action once. Then if one of those goes defunct, I won’t really care. I also won’t really care which community I’m posting to (except to ensure I’m following the rules), because ultimately most of the savvy users will be mass subscribed to topics as well.

This preserves control (I can opt out of toebeans if I don’t like that community for some reason), while keeping the distributed nature. No one would truly ‘own’ the cat pics community as it would span across multiple instances and communities.

“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.”

You just described Mastodon. Many instances stick to the default character limit which is still bigger than twitter but some instances don’t have the limit or the limit is much much larger.

Reddit also had competing communities though like r/tech and r/technology or r/games and r/gaming

I think what we are seeing now is the effect of being in the “land rush” phase of lemmy build out, and won’t be the norm once things settle down. Really the biggest thing to improve things would be for admins to pre-federate common communities so that when new users search for them they are found, instead of getting “not found” then creating yet another duplicate of the same content.

Eventually people will coalesce around certain communities and bail from others, and that will likely morph over time. I’ve dropped my subs to all the beehaw communities due to their isolationism, and I suspect others will do the same. Some will like their walled garden, and that’s fine - that’s what makes the fediverse strong.

What might be worth considering is an option for like-minded communities to soft-merge, so someone going to X will see everything from Y as well and vice versa. That’s obviously not part of the federation thing right now but I think it would be useful. Users could perhaps opt out of the soft merge by clicking a check box to see/not see affiliated communities/magazines.

I think it’s more about the individual users you find in each of the duplicates. It’s like old forums. There would be several different sites hosting their own forums with plenty of duplicated topics, but you would choose one based on who was there. Multiple small options makes it easier to find the place where you fit in and can actually make friends instead of having fleeting interactions with strangers with whom you’ll probably never speak again.

I remember arguing for a tagging approach on reddit, way back when subreddits were first introduced—I (correctly) feared the subreddit approach would fragment the community and create echo chambers of users who never interacted with anyone outside of their subscribed subs.

But it does have some strengths that perhaps work better in a decentralized environment. One is easier and more explicit assignment of moderators: you mention “appointed community moderators” for tag-communities, but who would appoint these moderators? And what happens when people use new tags that don’t have existing communities?

Another strength is the ability to create communities on the same topic with distinct moderating/curating styles. Take s/AskHistory and s/AskHistorians: both addressed the same general type of questions, but the latter’s more rigorous moderation resulted in a very different type of response and both had their place.

I think it will take time for communities to develop distinct moderating policies and for users to become familiar with them; but in the case of redundant communities, eventually users will gravitate toward those with the best moderation.

Multiple communities allows for multiple approaches to moderation, and IMO that’s a good thing. Ironically given Spez’s latest “landed gentry” justifications for his actions, it really was a problem on Reddit that a subreddit name could be controlled by one guy and anyone trying to build a rival subreddit had to fall back to a less obvious name for it.

There’s an issue for Lemmy to support some form of “multireddit” that would allow multiple communities to be “merged” as far as the end user is concerned. Wouldn’t be surprised if Kbin has one too, I haven’t dug for it. I think that’s a better approach, that would let people include or exclude communities as they desired.

I would have preferred to be able to use /r/linux over on that old platform, but I found that at least some of the mods were imbeciles. I like the option of competing communities for the same topic. Mods will have to do a decent job if they want their community to be the leader for that topic.