I’ve been looking for a free Reddit alternative and preferably one that was federated. I’m not really sure how federation works with this though. A lot of similar sites are just personal projects that people made as a hobby that lack a lot of important features or the interface was really ugly.
I haven’t seen how to moderate communities though but the Github page says this can be done, which I consider important since I want moderation to be done by communities and users rather then admins. If there’s a quarantine feature similar to Reddit that would be useful too so I don’t just have to ban communities.
Community/subreddit admins can moderate the comment sections of their posts, and hence manage more than just the list of posts. Multireddit creators only manage the list of subs. So no, a multireddit cannot be seen as meta-communities in the sense that you mentioned.
The latter is precisely the reason why I was claiming that a popular enough multireddit can have indirect (sorry if that was not clear enough) power over the content of the sub. The same way that even if you can publish FOSS android apps out of F-Droid, it is interesting to comply to F-Droid’s rules so that your app is published there, because F-Droid is significantly more popular than your app is.
Anyway, this little comment was me trying to anticipate this exception that could be mentioned to the general point I was trying to make : multireddit maintainers usually have no power on the subs’ content, unlike the subs with respect to the posts.
I don’t really understand why one would create a clone community on another instance (call it instance B) if the reason is not to have a different moderation from the original one (instance A).
In fact I do see one reason : to allow people from an instance © that does not whitelist instance A to join the meta-community. In that case, the obvious solution is to allow instance C to whitelist the community without whitelist the full instance A (e.g. because it trusts the community mods but not the instance admins).
Hope that makes sense, as I don’t really know how whitelisting currently works, i.e. whether the instance has power on
on which instances its users can follow a community (that’s the one I assumed)
users from which instances can join its communities
both (1) and (2) from a single list
(1) and (2) separately (that would be ideal I think)
If the new communities are created on other instances. I don’t really see the need for duplicating the existing communities.
If you mean whitelist vs blacklist, I agree ! But I don’t think any of our points rely on that distinction. Do you think they do?
A conclusive remark : if all you meant with this meta-community thing is a multireddit-like aggregate for similar communities, I agree it would be nice. If you actually mean merging two similar communities with a result that keeps living on both instances, I’m still not sure I see either the how or the why you would do that.
I said a meta-community manages communities while a community manages posts. That’s all the sense I meant.
But I believe you now understand what I meant. Let’s not dwell on the semantics.
That’s fine. It’s honestly not a strong enough influence, and you can always make alternative multireddits. Why is that influence bad?
Can you give an example of a multireddit in reddit that has had any influence at all in a subreddit? Because I very much doubt that has ever been the case.
That’s an unfair comparison. Not only is creating an F-Droid repo much harder (creating a multireddit is literally a few clicks and just select what you want, you don’t even need to self-host anything), but also you don’t have F-Droid accounts that keep the settings consistent across devices, you need to manually configure every time (plus you have to manually type the URL, in android… it’s easier to remember the name of a subreddit than the URL of a repo) which makes the defaults much more relevant. For multireddits there are no defaults, people have to actively look for the multireddits they want and make the choice themselves on which ones to subscribe from the start, and once they are subscribed, that subscription carries in their account, from wherever they login.
Exactly. That’s the problem. That’s why I doubt we’ll ever see lemmy.ml stop being the main instance.
I’m not sure if that would work, or at least I think it should not work. If an instance has blocked another instance I don’t think metacommunities should be a way to workaround that (I think the point of blocking an instance is to not have to cache/host its content… this is important if an instance is for example hosting illegal content). I expect metacommunities would only work between instances that have been whitelisted by the instance that is hosting the metacommunity.
However, as far as I know, the blocking is not transitive. So even if server A blocks server B, if both A and B allow connection to C, then C has access to the communities from A and B, even if A and B don’t have access to each other.
If you then make a post in server C, users from A and B can both comment, but the comments from people in A cannot be seen when visiting the post from B, and vice-versa. So I expect a “Meta-Community” (or whatever you wanna call it if you don’t like the semantics) created in C that has communities from A and B, will have the same effect on the posts. People from A visiting the “meta” from C will not see the communities from B on it.
I actually expect the logic for aggregation would happen in whichever server you are using to access the “meta”. So it’s not C (the creator of the “meta”) the one who aggregates the posts if you access from A. I expect A will just collect the list of communities from C and just aggregate them on their side when showing to their users the “meta” created in C. The same way as it happens with comments. But all this is just implementation details that are besides the point.
There’s a limited amount of topics that are interesting enough to gather a big enough audience. if communities cannot be duplicated I seriously doubt there’ll ever be a big number of federated instances… maybe a few docens being optimistic, but without ever reaching the hundreds. So I think lemmy.ml will continue being the central node if there isn’t a change in philosophy.
Multireddit-like meta-community
And I said “manages” doesn’t mean the same as a community is more than a list of post (so its management includes moderation), while a multireddit is a list of subs. You then referred to the meta-communities as a form of authority, as if the communities were grouped under a centralised authority who actually had some power over the federated commus; which is why I thought it would be appropriate to insist that it is not the case.
I agree. That was meant as an anticipation to a counterpoint, which I thinl it is now clear that you wouldn’t have tried to make. Sorry about the generated confusion.
Smaller instances
Note that I was only talking about two simultaneously existing communities with exactly the same topic and CoC. This does not prevent a community from migrating, by which I mean the old one blocking new post submissions and linking to the new one in a pinned post and/or sidebar.
To gather an audience big enough for what? There is an infinite amount of topics, and there are also several communities that can be constructed around the same topic (with different CoC, or focusing on different aspects, media,…)
I didn’t imply that meta-communities have to necessarily be identical to communities, I meant they manage communities in the same way communities manage posts. The only reason I said it is to illustrate how they could fit in the model within lemmy. If you understand what I mean, then that’s all that matters.
But if you wanted, the same kind of moderation and additional elements could in theory translate to meta-communities. I just don’t think that’s the interesting part… but in theory you could make it so users can post new communities or comment about the addition of the community (not comments in a post, since it’s not posts what a meta-community manages), and in that case moderation in the meta-community would make sense. In theory you could also have bans/kicks and all the same things you have in communities. But I’d be ok with meta-communities being locked down from user submissions or comments. I think the interesting part is just having an aggregate of communities that is cross-instance and that any user can make, without disrupting the communities themselves.
You could essentially make a meta-community by making a community where every single “post” is actually a link to a community, and having some alternative view that shows the posts of all communities posted, aggregated, instead of showing the actual “posts” of the meta-community (which will be just links to communities).
This is not necessarily how it needs to be, but it could be one way to do it that illustrates why I was calling them “meta-communities”. But if that term is confusing, we can call it other way.
I didn’t mean meta-communities (or multireddits, or whatever naming) have authority over the communities they aggregate, whether the meta community has moderation for the submissions (communities, not posts) that happen in that meta-community (not in the communities) or not. For sure it’s good to clarify that. Thank you.
That’s how migration in centralized networks work. If that’s the intended approach I don’t see what’s the benefit of federating server-to-server.
Just create an open source reddit clone and decentralize the aspects that you want to share cross instance. You don’t need the instances to federate if you want to centralize the communities. If communities are meant to not federate, then use cross-origin from the client requests instead of serving one instance through the other… that way you reduce the requirements on the servers, simplify the whole model, don’t need whitelisting/allowlisting and give freedom to the user to move freely cross-instance by having the account management in a separate independently hosted service, like I already proposed before. You are not benefitting from federation if communities are meant to be centralized.
Enough to be actually useful/used. Reddit has 1.2 billion subreddits but only 138k are active. And they have 430 million monthly users.
You can create an infinite amount of topics, but the number of topics that can be active is not as big. It makes no sense for a user to subscribe to an infinite amount of topics, let alone be active in all of them, so in the end there’s always a limit in the number of useful topics, and this limit is relative to the amount of users, their engagement and diversity.
But they don’t. A community contains post who are written for the community by its users. If a community refuses a post, it basically doesn’t exist. A meta-community refers to communities who exist independently from it.
Sure, one can imagine giving community-like features to a meta or vice versa to create an hybrid of the two, but the two things are just very different to start with.
The difference is that the users don’t need to register on the instance where the community is going. All the instances that federate with each other share a pool of users that can register to any of their communities.
You were complaining that leemy.ml will never stop to be a central place if its communities don’t share content with other instances, but communities could simply migrate from it to other instances.
The communities are not the only actors on the instances: federation allows local users to interact with remote users and communities. That each community is centralized doesn’t mean the whole network is.
Define “actually useful”. An instance with 2 users who post once a year to wish each other a happy christmas is useful for them. Federation allows everyone to create their own niche community on their own instance. Even if none of them ever reaches a thousand of users, the mere possibly is already an accomplished goal of the federation justifying its existence.
Do you thing lemmy.ml already has all of them?
The link posted (if it has it) does not disappear from the internet. The data attached to the post does, but the same would happen if you delete a community in a meta-community, any related data to the post would disappear too. If the post is not a link then that’s something that would not be comparable because the one limit that meta-community imposes is that all posts should be links to communities, by its very definition it is a community that has that constraint, so if your point is that it’s different from communities without that constraint, then sure.
But let’s agree to disagree. The fact that you later acknowledge that a meta-community can have community-like features shows you understand what I meant. You are discussing semantics of a concept that I made up, this direction is not bringing us anywhere useful.
Only if you compare it to a website where users need to register on the instance where the community is going. But you can have a network of instances that do not ask people to register on them and that rely on a common authentication method provided by a third service (which can also be decentralized). So they share users without the community hosters having to federate between themselves.
I already mentioned decentralized sharing of user accounts/sessions between non-federated instances. I mentioned it in at least two of my responses to your comments in this thread already.
As mentioned before, you can do this without federating between instances. In fact every user can be remote (ie. its account hosted in a third party service), no need to have any instance be the “owner” of any accounts. You can have user accounts managed by a separate service (similar as how it’s done in OpenID) with no need for communication between the instances that host the content. In fact this gives much more freedom to self-host your own account and does not have the problems of instances needing whitelisting to prevent caching/hosting content they don’t want.
I said “useful/used”. So you could also say “used” (ie… people actually use it, it’s not abandoned). And in a sentence after that I used also the term “active”.
No.
Meta-communities
Sorry, but I am still trying. What you first said is that a multireddit can be seen as a meta-community, which I didn’t understand because the only similarity I see (between multi and community) is that there is somehow a list involved. Were you really talking about multireddits or are you building a concept of metacommunity around it but more similar to a community in some way ? (justifying the comparison)
So the way the content is added is the one of a multireddit, not a community.
And so is the content.
So to me it seems that your concept of metacommunity is identical to the one of multireddit rather than something you are making up. Please correct me if that’s wrong and explain how it’s different, that’s exactly the thing I’m trying to understand with this discussion.
So, if what I said above is correct, what you are doing is stripping a post of its body, title, community, comments down to a link, so that the community (now a mere list of links) can fit the comparison with a multireddit.
Federation
You need to federate the instances where the users are. Now Lemmy has only one kind of instance, for both communities and users. You propose a model where there are two (user-instance and community-instance), that’s interesting.
Community-instances would still be able to accept or reject the communities that they host, and that is not really about federation.
On the other hand, user-instances and community-instances would still be able to accept or reject each other.
Ok but communities about any kind of niche topic can be active, all you need is at least 2 users ready to publicly and regularly communicate with each other. In particular, being active does not require thousands of users, so is not bound to the big topics who already have pages on lemmy.ml.
Meta-community definition
You also cant add it to a meta-community, “the content” that is added is community links, not posts. Remember, that’s the main difference between meta-community and community. When you want to post something that isn’t a new community, you don’t post to the meta-community, you post to a community.
If you just make a community where every post is a link to a community (which in theory you can even do right now without any code changes, as long as you moderate it to be so), then conceptually you have already the data model of a meta-community. And doing this does not necessarily stop you from having moderation, comments, and everythign a community has (because it is a community, just one where each post references a community).
But of course to make it useful as a feed, you need to add a new interface where you can see an aggregate of the posts of the communities referenced (because the posts of the meta-community would be just references to communities). And a way for users to subscribe to that aggregate instead of (or in addition to?) the aggregate of references to communities.
However, this last thing is just a different “view”. Meta-community mods do not actively “manage” the posts/comments in that view (because it’s not posts/comments from their community), they only manage the posts/comments in their (meta)community (in which posts happen to be references to communities whose posts show in that “view”).
Multireddits are just a particular case of “meta-community” (one that does not allow user submissions or comments and has only one admin who submits/deletes entries, which is fine since the thing that makes it worth it is the aggregation of subreddits).
We are still discussing semantics on a particular made-up definition involving small details that don’t necessarily matter that much, imho. I don’t think we are going anywhere.
Federation
Well yes, but that’s not related to instance whitelisting, plus it’s a restriction totally valid.
Instances should not be forced to host content they don’t want to host. Imagine if a community is about sharing ilegal content (copyright-infringing stuff, child pornography, etc.) the instance could be held responsible if it knowingly hosts that content publicly and does not delete it, even if it was uploaded by other people.
This would be comparable to lemmy.ml accepting/rejecting accounts based on whether the account email is hosted in “gmail.com”, “hotmail.com” or whichever other third party service.
It’s true that user-instances and community-instances can block each other, but I think it’s less likely. I think whitelisting makes sense when instances have to serve or cache content from other instances, something lemmy does in order to federate. But if we stop federating and let clients access multiple instances directly (instead of each user accessing only one instance to access others through federation) then no instance has to serve content from instances that have content they dont want (or content that’s ilegal). They’ll no longer be responsible for the content from instances they federate with since it’s no longer offered through your instance. The user-instances in my example also do not serve content from other instances, so they are also very unlikely to see a need to block anyone.
Also note how the blocking in lemmy is not transitive (if A blocks B but not C, you still can access both A and B through C), this shows they are ok with people going to other instances that migth be more permissive in their allowlist, while still allowing those users to federate with lemmy. I suspect the primary reason for the whitelisting is to avoid actively participating in the distribution of content they don’t agree with.
Even if you really want to consider that level of activity (which shouldn’t really be significant when we are talking about communities that become centralized nodes on a topic for the entire network). The point was that the number of active topics is limited. Those 2 users can’t be active in an infinite amount of topics. At the end of the day the number of active topics is limited by the user engagement. And looking at reddit’s numbers, we can see that in a mature social network there’s much less active topics than active users (over a thousand times less!).
Remember the reason we talked about this: if you don’t duplicate communities then the fact that the amount of popular active topics is limited can lead to huge centralized nodes forming around the active communities.
Sure, but I never said lemmy.ml is the only instance that has active communities. I’m saying it’s where most of them are.
That’s true if nothing is expected from the user-instance side. But for example a community-instance may expect from the federated user-instances that they ban user who are repetedly reported for bad behaviour.
This will be all the more true when Lemmy will federate with other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. There, there is a public user to user interaction and so it may be desirable to block the instances that allows undesired behaviours, because most users from there will make no difference and act the same way on Lemmy communities.
They serve content from the community instances to their users, whether they host it or not.
If you really want those instances to disappear altogether and the user accessing communities from client, we lose the feature of user-instances blocking users for all their members, and the members will have to block e.g. all nazis one by one.
They can form, true, but they can also stop growing at some point, as a result of either their own will, the new communities being created elsewhere or cpmmunities migrating elsewhere. In fact, shared communities also don’t prevent these instances to become bigger and bigger.
Of course I didn’t mean that litterally an infinity of communities will exist some day, just that there are way more topics than what is currently on lemmy.ml so there is a lot of room for other instances to grow.
Also, the limit of topic that they can discuss simultaneously is not the same as the global one, considering that new communities (dis)appear everyday. And sometimes one will create a new community instead of one that is dying, e.g. setting new rules that they think will improve it. Maybe creating a community on a new instance with different CoC.
Ok so you do mean to incluse user submissions and comments, thanks ! That was not clear to me.
Now, if the idea is really to base the meta on a community, how is its list of communities established? I see two sensible options :
The admin can (un)pins posts, the links of the pinned post make up the list.
A upvote threshold decides which links are on the list. That way it’s really community driven.