[Discussion] I don't think this format makes a lot of sense for the fediverse

DudePluto@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 15 points –

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: fediverse@lemmy.world vs fediverse@lemmy.ml) 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.

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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.

I’ll agree and go one further: the idea of wanting to recreate Reddit is bad.

Most of us left Reddit because of the API crap, but I suspect most of us have not been as happy with the Reddit experience as we once were. The more you recreate a system that’s close to Reddit, the more you make it easier for influence campaigns, spam bots, and disruptive trolls to operate.

Federation, with separate but similar communities, makes it tougher for a massive bot operator to run a monolithic influence campaign. My hope is the design of the fediverse helps to defend against these types of attacks. My fear is the inexperience of server operators with these types of coordinated attacks makes it difficult.

Decentralization is a weakness of the fediverse, but it is also it's most important core strength.

If an instance that you follow goes down, the rest of them are just fine. If it turns out that the admins or mods are nuts on one instance, especially if your home instance is still fine, you just migrate to something else.

It definitely means that things are a little bit more complicated on a day-to-day basis, and it it also means that you can't necessarily have these massive communities with millions of people because people are going to be drawn to different communities on different servers based on a variety of factors. But as you said, that's not necessarily a negative thing. It means that there's a lot more things that would have to go wrong for the entire fediverse to become damaged.

I don't really understand this sentiment from so many regarding how they long for "the reddit of yore". As a user of reddit for 12+ years, I don't really get the complaints... I enjoyed Reddit how it was a month ago just much as I enjoyed it when I started... perhaps even more so. Am I the odd one out, and if so, can someone explain?

I migrated to Reddit after Digg imploded. Here’s a few things I think were better.

Feeds weren’t filled with meme posts. Comments weren’t filled with quick one-liners to get upvotes. Back then, there was much more substantive commentary.

Now, over the years, I’ve subscribed to subreddits that contained the type of content I wanted, plus the default subreddits I was subscribed to as a new user back then are much different than today. Open Reddit using a different browser or a private browser window, so that you’re not logged in. How does that compare to your experience of 12 years ago?

Honestly, much of the things I don’t like are because of large entities wanting to influence social media. That same thing will happen (likely is already happening) to the fediverse. I just hope the distributed nature makes it more difficult.

... 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 fediverse@lemmy.ml and fediverse@lemmy.world

I didn't say reddit was a centralized heaven I was simply pointing out that reddit's model shouldn't be followed strictly here. It's a hypothetical design discussion, not a big deal. If you feel strongly enough about that you struggle to discuss without cussing at others in all caps, maybe you should log off and take some time to chill out :)

Holy shit, they said fuck and even censored it on the internet, the world is falling apart, asteroids are hitting the planet, and demons are overrunning the world....... Oh, wait, nope everything is fine, weird.

some people use those words for emphases and are not even remotely mad, maybe that's what they were doing?

Thanks guys, everyone has so much optimism and friendliness i was starting to worry that this fediverse thing was a cult. Glad to see that the assholes are all still here!

Yes, swearing means that person is very mad and that only, you can not use it for emphasis or comedic effect at all and if you swear at all that means you hate everyone and want the world to end.

glad I could learn so much today.

if the idea of seeing someone swear scares you that much I am not sure an open federated instance were any legal type of community can be made and shared between each other is the place you would want to be, cus sorry to break it to ya, people on the internet are going to swear. We are not on a playground in pre-school.

Wow it's almost like we're in a text-based platform where tone can be confused and there are certain markers we use to indicate tone. But that's cool we can just resort to being smartasses instead of discussing like adults

It would be interesting to have a way to “link” to magazines/communities across servers so everything gets cross posted. That way the content should be less fragmented.

But that's what federation is. What you are saying is that you want the servers to decide which community is the "official" community, then squash the rest. Knowing that some of the most heavily subscribed communities exist on a server with controversial mods...I like having the choice of alternatives.

For Lemmy, just like on Reddit, one community will rise up and be popular and the others won't get traffic. If the mods on that instance are jerks, another will rise up in its place.

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.

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.

Communities with similar goals across the fediverse need to be grouped somehow. Any community called "cats@what.any" should be linked to allow for subscribing en masse. Perhaps "topic buckets" could work, where you can either subscribe to an individual community or a "topic bucket" that includes all communities across the fediverse that are called "cats@" or "technology@" or whatever.

While groups (meta-communities) could be useful, it shouldn't be based on named.

Python@programming.dev and Python@Zoologists.social are likely unrelated communities. Similarly LaTeX@programming.dev and latex@example.nsfw

But, also, hopefully there is a reason for the various similarly-named communities. Different moderation philosophies and rules would be expected. Cats@Midwest.local might be focusing on local cats and Cats@WorldFederation.zoo might be focusing on feral populations while Cats@Lemmy.world is about cute cat pics and memes.

This feels like a feature, not a bug, so I actually think we just need good "sidebar" descriptions that help direct traffic as things grow. Just like r/Trees and r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts helped folks find their place.

Someone else kinda brought up the idea of just adding topic tags to posts, that way the good parts of the current system will remain in place, but users can also browse by topics. Maybe that's a solution?

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 fucking hate tags.

I don’t think I have anything else to add to the discussion, just wanted to get that off my chest.

One thing that could help: We have the tech now to auto-suggest tags, even on images, video, and audio. If you posted a photo and then were prompted to simply Y/N a few suggested tags, would that be better?

You know, I've enjoyed hating tags for so long I'm super conflicted about this. On the one hand, it's quite a useful idea and I like it a lot. But I would have to get over my, currently irrational, hate for tags. I might also need to have the tags hidden on any post, just so that my hatred for tags isn't triggered on a post I would otherwise enjoy.

"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.

I think that we should try to not create the same community in different instances, instead of that we should look for that community in existing instances and join it. So far I've realized the short time I've been in Lemmy, you can cross post between different instances and the local instance will show you if a post is also published in another known instance.

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.

For some reason I suck at long comments, they keep getting destroyed when I try to post.

I had a long written out response about how when you have multiple communities on one subject, moderation responsibilities get dispersed and become easier for everyone. They don't have to set up any division of responsibility on a single board, they don't even have to agree on the EXACT same rules. They simply have to federate and link each other so that the community members know to watch for threads from each, comment where they like, and post on the one that is closest to their instance.

If we throw away the idea of "Redundant" or "competing" boards and just accept that we can have all these spaces coexisting, things could work out pretty nice.

I mean, instead of ONE Sherlock Holmes board that might discourage sexuality discussions and ban BBC Sherlock, you can have 3 that have slightly different rules, different mods but still federate with each other and give you 3 spaces to discuss Sherlock Holmes that are all reachable from your homepage on your home instance.

Interesting idea for sure! Without any thought to the details or technical side of things, how do you figure the community moderators would be appointed (if the communities are created automatically)?

I would imagine it working just like on reddit and lemmy, where it can originally be claimed by the original poster or anyone who wants it. It's obviously not an ideal solution, but it's worked well enough historically. Maybe someone else would have a better idea

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.

Exactly this. I see a lot of people suggesting the fediverse be more centralized because they're so used to centralized platforms.

ex: fediverse@lemmy.world vs fediverse@lemmy.ml

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, “fediverse@lemmy.world” and “fediverse@lemmy.ml” 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.

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.

The solution is to somehow merge all the communities into one list for the user based on keyword or something. That way it foesnt actually matter.

my view on this matter, generally

fediverse currently is in its early inception, so it still need to "emulate" current flow of (popular) web service, so of course it will be some "un-ideal" for the "how the fediverse supposed to work" yet

but in time, when the "internet masses" get a grip of what and how fediverse works, the people will see that fediverse itself will show the advantages over "conventional" monoverse

it takes time, just like how today monoverse social media working, understand and get accepted by majority internet users

You're right, Reddit totally never had a huge and unmanageable problem with fractious duplicate communities for the same thing, not at all.

I beg to differ there were multiple subreddits for the same topic (and I'm sure this was more accentuated when the site was in its infancy). I guess over time the community will crystalize around a single instance for a given topic.

i think the last person was being sarcastic :)

redditors bringing their complete inability to recognize a joke that doesn't end with /s with them

I thought you were being sarcastic until you added “with them.”

I'm pretty sure @sarsaparilyptus was being sarcastic

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 was actually going to say this too. A system that allowed both macro level federation (instances) and Magazine level integration would be ideal. Not only does it have the advantages you mention, but it would also provide both fault tolerance for the community (if that slacker Melpomene forgets to pay their bills and awesomemag@melpomene.slacker goes down, Facedeer's awesomemag@notaslacker.yay keeps the community alive) and would suit the federated philosophy well.

And what happens when both pay their bills, and a comment or user is moderated by Melpomene but not Facedeer?

Those are challenges to be sure, but...

  1. If both pay their bills, the Magazines co-exist and show up (if they choose) as a unified Magazine.

  2. A few options here. Maybe we offer different ways for Magazines mods to interact? First option, each magazine moderates its own users / posts, can remove a post or a user's right to share to the instance (single user defederation.) Second option, moderators can agree to have federated moderator rights, so they (by agreement) can cross-moderate their magazines?

Ok, suppose there is a unified magazine. I post to it, now which instance hosts my post? Then my instance defederates from that of one of the two magazines, but not the other. Do I now see only half the posts? If I engage in a comment chain, will users on the instances that defederated from mine see a weird half-conversation?

I think there is a fundamental difference between centralized formats like Reddit and federated formats like this one. Trying to simulate one with the other will always be unsatisfactory. So if Melpomene and Facedeer really want to join forces, the best way is simply to close one community and let them comoderate the remaining one.

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).

But this already works for magazines hosted on one instance. My understanding is that if we defederate, a copy of those posts would still be hosted on my instance, but further updates would be solely "my" instance's version. The posts from the other magazine would remain as local copies, they would not be removed... they'd just be standalone copies for the defederated instance.

It also means that anything you post on here is also 100% out of your control, and even harder to scrub than it would be had it been posted on Reddit.

Data longevity is baked into the system. Keep this in mind when posting here.

Absolutely right. People should be aware of that and they should be careful posting PII both here and anywhere online. Maybe we need a guide to being semi-private on the fediverse and the internet generally?

I mean it’s true that people need more guidance, but here especially; how can you GDPR A thousand instances? How does a small server maintainer deal with privacy laws in international jurisdiction? Especially when their server is only caching posts?

This gets even more dangerous sounding when you get into revenge porn, CP, etc territory. Can you go to jail for caching a post that you’ve never seen or intended to capture because someone on your instance was subscribed to a community that got image-bombed by trolls? Is there some kind of audit trail or emergency fediverse-wide delete command for when mods clean out garbage like that?

What if you could link communities in the settings? So that any posts to the linked communities also appears in your favorite instance's community.

Maybe both communities have to approve the link to avoid SPAM or any other type of attack.

We’ve already got linked servers through “federation”. Why not have automatic cross posting through “treaties”?

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.

Some kind of multireddit-like feature would be pretty nice, where it can aggregate posts from multiple communities across multiple instances, and presents them as a single post. Commenting on them would just take you to the post where things would work as normal.

Although the hard part might be figuring out how to make sure that it doesn't get abused with spam or something along those lines.

I'm thinking when you hit subscribe, it presents a box of other communities that the community owner suggests as the same topic. Then I can also subscribe to those at the same time if I want.

If I run a D&D community I could suggest D&D 5E community as well and a TTRPG community too. Or also another D&D community from a different instance.

Less about structure and more about easing end user friction to get to content

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.