Hey all, so I’ve been trying to embrace the fediverse life. My background - I’ve been on the internet since pre-WWW, so I’ve seen it all.
I think there’s a structural issue in the design of Lemmy, that’s still correctable now but won’t be if it gets much bigger. In short, I think we’re federating the wrong data.
For those of you who used USENET back in the early days, when your ISP maintained a local copy of it, I think you’ll pick up where I’m going with this fairly quickly. But I know there aren’t a ton of us graybeards so I’ll try to explain in detail.
As it’s currently implemented, the Fediverse allows for multiple identically named communities to exist. I believe this is a mistake. The fediverse should have one uniquely named community instance, and part of the atomic data exchanged through the federation should include the instance that “owns” the community and a list of moderators. Each member server of the Fediverse should maintain an identical list of communities, based on server federation. Just like USENET of yore.
This could also be the gateway into instance transference. If the instances are more in-sync, it will be easier to transfer either a user account or a community.
This would eliminate the largest pain point/learning curve that Lemmy has vs Reddit.
Open to thought. And I’ll admit this isn’t fully fleshed out, it was just something I was thinking about as I was driving home from work tonight
Lemmy is good, but it could be great.
The way I see it everyone naturally assumes we’re trying to recreate Reddit but with distributed computing.
I think instead we should be trying trying to create something that gives us the community and communication that Reddit gave us, but democratically and without reliance on or control from any one organisation.
This is going to result in some things that work differently from Reddit. We should work to make the experience smooth and intuitive, but it can end up with a different way of working.
100% agreed. I’m not advocating we “clone Reddit”, however I do think we should think about and take meaningful steps to improve accessibility to non-“techy” people even if that means borrowing a few things from Reddit here and there.
Because let’s face it, Reddit wasn’t a whole-cloth original creation of spez and kn0thing. It’s bones can be traced back to Digg, vBulletin, earlier BBS incarnations, in some respects even USENET - especially the way users can create topics/communities/subreddits on their own (yes, I know this isn’t how USENET works now, but I promise it used to work this way if you were outside the main controlled newsgroups).
I’m a smart guy. I’ve got a lot of years of internet experience. I can make Lemmy work, and find content on it. It’s cumbersome. My wife, is very techy by any reasonable standard but not as much as I am, has difficulty using it. She finds the structure unintuitive and confusing.
If those of us participating in this thread are the 0.1%, she’s the 1%. To me, this moment, this movement, is about ensuring there’s a place where people are free to discuss things that monied interests can no longer control. That’s what makes the fediverse great - we can spread the load and demand out and make it manageable for normal people to do this.
I don’t want another schmuck coming along telling me what ad I have to look at, or what I’m not allowed to discuss, or what app I have to use ever again.
I’m not the smartest guy in the room, I’m not claiming to have the answer only a suggestion. However, I am confident that this is a problem we need to tackle in some way if we ever want to achieve growth in “normal users”.
Completely agree that there needs to be some strides in usability. I’m in exactly the same situation with myself and my wife in terms of what’s needed to be able to recommend Lemmy to her.
I just wanted to get people thinking about a “product” direction and set of solutions to these problems that weren’t only aimed at replicating Reddit.
I think that would defeat a piece of the point of a decentralized system. In the current design, what will naturally happen is that if one instance has all the good content on a particular topic, most users will gravitate toward it anyway. We can read across federated instances anyway so I, a kbin user, have no problem reading something on lemmy like this.
Then let’s say one day lemmyworld@lemmy.world gets taken over by people who want to post stuff I don’t want to see. If I miss how it used to be here, I could go make lemmyworld@kbin.social and it would be fine.
As I’ve said elsewhere the communities sharing the same name is just a temporary problem. As the system grows one of the identically named communities will become dominant. Because of that small new communities that want to have the same topic will be incentivised to have unique name just to be able to be found.
I disagree respectfully, as I think this is a feature and not a bug of a federated structure. It’s well known that reddit suffers from the “20K Law”, which is that “The quality of any subreddit drops off a cliff after it gets more than 20K subscribers”. Which is likely because that is the limit of effective manual moderation.
So, having multiple communities on the same topic would be a fundamental fix to that issue, as instead of one giant community, instead you get different, smaller communities with different culture on the same topic, whose users can still talk to each other.
I think the current system is fine as is, we’re not trying to remake a better reddit, we are trying to be better than the limits of reddit.
deleted by creator
Couldn’t agree more. Naturally, the best communities will become more used and have better content over time, but de-federation is the key feature of all of this. It’s necessary.
I understand your idea, but I think it would defeat the purpose of the fediverse. It would create single points of failure that are un-correctable.
I also think many people forget that Reddit never functioned any differently. Everyone seems to have forgotten (and I’m not saying you have!) that there are and were always multiple subreddits for any given topic. With slightly differing names. The only reason people are forgetting this is because eventually one or a handful became pre-eminent and the others died or became transformed into something more niche.
I think it’s a problem that will ultimately correct itself, but I think a tags based system, like hashtags in Mastodon, would be a better solution for tying communities/magazines together through metadata.
To your point, Seattle had 2 subreddits due to disagreement on moderation lol.
I’m not understanding how this would work with instances who wish to defederate and segregate their community? It seems like an “all or nothing” approach that instances who have defederated already wouldn’t be on board with… For instance what happens if beehaw owns the “gaming” community, and then defederates from lemmyworld. Lemmyworld users just no longer have a “gaming” community?
Best example and reply IMO
Unless I’ve misunderstood something, community names are already globally unique and multiple identically named communities cannot exist, you’re just not looking at the full name.
Memes@lemmy.ml and Memes@sopuli.xyz are different names, for example.
Sometimes we ignore the part of the name after the @ if it’s unambiguous, but it’s still there.
tl;dr: I agree with OP that the ability to have multiple, identically named, disconnected communities on different instances will be a severe detriment to the adoption of the Fediverse by the general public.
community names are already globally unique and multiple identically named communities cannot exist, you’re just not looking at the full name.
That’s part of the problem. The simplest UI generally exposes the community name without the instance, !memes for example, but the backend is really !memes@lemmy.ml which is an entirely different community from !memes@sopuli.xyz. Now, that’s not really a problem - memes are memes. But what about a community for Edinburgh, UK? There are already two - !Edinburgh@sh.itjust.works and !Edinburgh@feddit.uk. That’s going to be an issue because if you choose one to participate in, you’ll miss all of the content in the other. If you’re a member of, say sopuli.xyz, you won’t even know that either exist because their community search doesn’t actually search all instances and might start a third. The whole idea of the Fediverse is to have a federation of instances which share information, and there is already talk of the biggest instances potentially creating a problem with the democratic ideals of the system (6 days into the reddit migration and three of the largest instances have defederated from one another). To have a thousand instances each with their own !Photography or !ManchesterUnited community dilutes the content and interaction.
I agree with OP ( I actually don’t know how to link to a profile yet or I’d tag @TerryMatthews) that there should be some cross-linked mechanism to merge identically named communities across instances. There could still be detached instances - defederated content would not have their content propagated - but the content for each unique community would be co-mingled.
I would expect that moderators would be limited in scope to their own communities. So a mod from feddit.uk could block a non-instance post or user on their instance but it would be present on other instances. They could also block a local post on their instance and it would not be propagated at all. Pinned posts get a little more hairy - would every mod have a separate set of local instance pins? I would think that would need to be the case. The issue of sidebars is also an issue.
This kind of reminds me of Android vs iOS. With great freedom also comes fragmentation.
As it’s currently implemented, the Fediverse allows for multiple identically named communities to exist. I believe this is a mistake. The fediverse should have one uniquely named community instance, and part of the atomic data exchanged through the federation should include the instance that “owns” the community and a list of moderators. Each member server of the Fediverse should maintain an identical list of communities, based on server federation. Just like USENET of yore.
Hard disagree. This allows abuse by moderator abuse similar to how reddit does it. Ideally the UI would allow you to create collections of communities based on your own groupings. And search could be expanded to find more similar communities (ie: based on keywords).
The way loading/finding and joining a totally new community into a new external instance is kinda buggy.
If you disagree, how would this be different from google then?
Sorry. Was getting late and comment submissions have been weird.
Personally I am hoping for 2 or 3 changes thst I went into here.
https://lemmy.pub/comment/2889
-1. Create multi-communities thst you can group together multiple different communities across instance into a single place based on whatever criteria. Basically like multi-reddits and allow them to be public/shared or private. This would allow the load to be spread across instances and different moderation strategies to take place without a single community becoming some weird power grab.
-2. Makes links to other instances and communities always open in your instance so you dont have to constantly create a https://my-instance.com/c/community@othernstance.com style link. Basically what this site is doing, but integrated into your own communities section.
-3. Like above, Improve search and communities to index basic stats before you have to externally find and, search multiple times to get your instance to discover the communities then open the federated link an subscribe. And when on a multi-community aid it discovery of new additions with a basic keyword search. This one is probably the most difficult and may scare some folks from privacy standpoint. But could be mitigated a bit if you can make option one public for others to subscribe to or use mutlis they didn’t compile themselves.
Nah, think of it like subreddits, there are many subreddits for technology, people will use the ones they like and you can easily subscribe to several, it’s fine.
