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.
I see this suggestion as problematic and recreating a problem reddit had. One group could lay claim to territory and everyone was stuck with however good or bad the culture was in the sub and however good or bad the mods were. There were some places with mods on a powertrip creating an exclusionary or outright toxic environment.
One group could lay claim to territory and everyone was stuck with however good or bad the culture was in the sub
This problem is easily surmountable with a new community name. Its not like it doesn’t happen anyway because for example c/trees isn’t about trees across multiple instances. Also i think ‘syncing’ a community could be optional decision between federated instances. If one instance grows to have values that disagree with your instance community you no longer sync that community and possibly defederate.
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Optional syncing is something I could get behind
There are better solutions to the problem. For example, letting communities follow other communities. It’s simple and flexible.
Take a look at the discussion here https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3071#issuecomment-1595303910 or my diagram of one proposed solution.
This is genius, please devs 🙏
What if a post is acceptable by the rules/mods at instance b but the post breaks the rules at instance a?
Options:
- Instantly stop syncing? Seems dramatic
- Mods align rules? Utopia
- Mods keep rules misaligned and users seek out preferred instance? Most likely outcome but this would still create a weird multi-tonal vibe in ‘mixed’ communities at the user level experience unless instances can find a way to express themselves with a localised ‘style’.
Maybe we could add some metadata, like tags, to allow them to cooperate and just block/allow certain tags, that the other sets.
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.
The ability to create multis could solve that. I could make a local Edinburgh multi, sub to both of the communities, and view them together in one feed for example.
That would definitely fix the reading side of things. As would a reader/aggregator app which allows browsing (and discovery) of all the Fediverse instances as a unified feed. It still leaves the challenge of propagating information though communities without either leaving large swaths of the community in the dark or risking multiple posts (for people who do multi./aggregate). The last programming language I can claim to have studied is Fortran (77, no less), so my hope is only that someone competent shares my concern.
The “two Edinburghs” situation already existed on Reddit. You’d get slightly different “competing” subreddits. They’d have to differentiate their names a bit but it still happened.
To flip it round - there was an issue in Reddit that whoever first set up a subreddit with a given name then owned it forever. Let’s say I got there first for /r/london but then I’m a twat and either create a community of horrible people or fail to build a community at all. Everyone in London who wants a city subreddit is worse off, and at best someone has to come along and make a different subreddit with a different name to fulfill the same person. Not having this single namespace with “first mover” advantage is good and democratic. And all we have to do is pay attention to the bit after the @ sign.
That’s fair. Sometimes there are competing/unfriendly communities on the same topic (EliteDangerous and Elite_Dangerous sub mods hate each other with a fiery passion for…reasons). Since writing my post I’ve stumbled upon another poster suggesting a fix may be on the user side (a fediverse aggregating reader) rather than attempting to somehow weave communities together on the server end. That does mostly what’s needed (imho) without requiring any additional overhead on the instance ends.
This kind of reminds me of Android vs iOS. With great freedom also comes fragmentation.
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I agree. I think people come here believing their vision of the fediverse has to be the vision and anything else is a bug, but that’s not necessarily right.
When I first came here from reddit, my vision was heavily skewed by what I’m used to. However, the more I learn about the fediverse, the more I appreciate the differences and the value of small communities.
Imo that’s kind of the beauty. It’s whatever the people want it to be. You can curate your own experience on your end and the users sort themselves out. So as time goes, your experience naturally becomes what you want it to be. It’s confusing at first, but I think it’s actually a good practice in the long term, and even a good way to practice mindfulness in regards to your content consumption.
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’m one of those USENET greybeards and I think this would probably be a mistake. If you let a name be uniquely claimed by an instance, how do you decide which instance gets to be “in charge” of that?
Better IMO would be to update the various interfaces to be much more explicit about including the instance name along with the user/community name. So that it’s always clear that a user or community is at a particular instance.
We do still need better migration tools for moving users and communities around, though.
Reading this just gave me an interesting idea, when you start to post a link that’s already been posted in another linked instance, it will start to show you that it’s been posted elsewhere to different communities in other instances (on Lemmy, I don’t know about Kbin). This clearly shows there’s functionality there to look around when posting links, so I wonder if similar could be implemented when creating communities.
If the interface told you ahead of time that the community you were about to create has already been created in other instances, you wouldn’t be prevented from going ahead & creating your own version, but you’d be more readily aware. Honestly a win-win approach imo, considering it would help you find a community you may have been looking for but didn’t think existed, and it doesn’t keep you from trying to make your own anyway.
couldn’t have put it better myself (also a USENET oldie but w/o the beard)
It’s not about allowing a single instance to own the name. The name would belong to the federation in a global namespace.
A possible scenario is to define multiple namespaces. Each namespace can be local to a single instance, or shared between many. Within each namespace, a single community name is unique.
In this model, each instance would have a namespace that it owns, and the ability to participate in many others.
The trick is in how we name the namespaces and communities. We could do this the USENET way and do something like <namespace>.<community>, so beehaw.gaming vs. global.gaming. There are other models that could work too.
I’m not sure how that would be different from what we’ve already got.
IMO the main feature kbin/Lemmy are missing is an equivalent to “multireddits.” That would allow multiple communities to be seamlessly aggregated for a user, they’d see all the content blended together as if they were one. I remember seeing a Codeberg issue over on the kbin repo discussing how to implement that, and I’m sure Lemmy’s devs are working on it too, so that feature will probably come along fairly soon. Then it shouldn’t matter much if the same subject has had multiple instances set up communities.
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.
They may have the same name, but they have suffixes that don’t actually appear, such as @lemmy.world @lemmy.lm. I oppose this idea. Because when the servers do the defedere people don’t have access to that community. We have recently seen an example of this. It’s okay to have more than one community with the same name, but a lemmy grouping feature can bring. In this way, we can eliminate clutter by grouping communities with the same name. At the same time, the fact that different communities with the same name have different moderation understandings provides people with an alternative in community selection. Reduces moderation pressure
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.
Good point. Also on reddit there are/were multiple subs for one topic with one or two gaining major traction over time (while others continue to exist alongside)
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’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
I figured it was relevant :)
It seems like this concept is “orthogonal” to the current federation concept, proposed by the ActivityPub protocol.
In the proposed case, the instances act as a pure “computational and storage fabric” or some kind of a “cdn” of a service, without any “personality” incorporated in them.
So I would not say that this is “better” or “worse”. It is just another concept.
Yep, I think this concept is actually going to be necessary moving forward, some kind of caching/relay infrastructure, owned by others but lightening the load for other instances and providing a good starting point for newly created instances that just want a stream of content right away.
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.
Yeah, basically we need somthing like public and private multireddits. Public, so you can sub to one thing to get content from many similar communities, and private, for people to organize their own stuff.
Yeah agree totally. Kinda what I was trying to get at below. https://lemmy.pub/comment/9124
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.
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.
Having sibling communities would be another approach.
Each one is still homed on their instance, but if the instances are federated the posts from the other instances automatically flow into the community. They would still show the originating instance, but content would be comingled.
Along those lines, what if communities could suggest other related communities, and clients could (by default, but optionally) also show posts that the communities your subscribe to recommend?
It’s a little like soft federation, but on the client side - or, think of it like an automatic way to make multi subs while still allowing users to change it, and giving mods a less nuclear option if they don’t like how a community on another instance is going.
Wow yes this sounds great, if a community or commune becomes big enough, multiple instances can share the load and carry content for said community, provided that the people running the instance and the people modding the community can come to an agreement, and for private communities, well we’ll see further opportunity for access and more vetting procedures etc
The biggest problem with this approach is the potential headache for mods, and it might actually make things more confusing for the general public.
But OP’s approach has a technical issue with a federated system: when two instances federate and each has a community of the same name, who gets to keep it? There’s no central authority for such things–that’s the point of decentralization.
So I guess it’s just a complicated situation.
I think it’s a feature, not a problem. If you have multiple communities for popular topics, if one or two of them turn toxic or have unpopular moderation policies you have other places to go. Think of it like forums, popular topics had many forums to choose from - but each had slightly different cultures. Also since forums could individually be quite small, they were often a lot friendlier.
Federation makes it easy to explore different communities, but we don’t need to import the bad parts of centralisation.
I agree that this is a useful property of Lemmy once things get going but I think right now what we need if Lemmy is supposed to be a going concern is a less fractured landscape so people can actually find the content they are looking for. Some kind of global directory might be really useful there, just to make sure people interested in similar things can find each other.
The easiest to search directory I’ve found is https://browse.feddit.de/ (although I don’t think that picks up Kbin). A directory doesn’t need to be centralised, it just needs someone to make a good one. I think what will naturally happen is one or two communities for a topic will become prominent and will emerge as the obvious place to go, and I think it’s best to let that happen organically.
I’m partial to lemmyverse.net myself. I don’t doubt the need for more discoverability, but I think recentralizing things is not in the right spirit.
What if there was a way for communities to self opt-in to an aggregate name. The magazine settings could have an aggregate name that makes them show up under the aggregate tag. Kinda like a hashtag, but controlled at the mod lvl, and completely separate from hashtags.
Trouble is unless that aggregate name has some kind of maintainer or moderator, anybody could just make a community and troll the aggregate name with irrelevant posts and upvote it themselves to make them pop up to the top. I mean, I don’t know why you would but when they know they have access to tens of thousands people and can ruin their experience, some people just do. And if it does have a global maintainer, well, they have a lot of power. I like the aggregate idea, and actually so do the Lemmy Devs, but I think that it shouldnt be global. Each instance can maintain one, people can subscribe even from other instances, but I’d be wary of anything that concentrates users into a single entry point because that then becomes a vector for attack.
