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.
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.