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.
I agree, but imho it is a big deterrent if making a community in a smaller instance means competing with bigger instances that are way more popular.
Personally I’d actually like to self-host my own instance just to register myself on it (just like with email or XMPP), manage my own identity, my own profile, and don’t depend on whether any particular small instance is gonna dissappear tomorrow, or if the allowlist of that instance isn’t what I’d like, or if I’d rather change the UI in this or that way.
I didn’t say “cross instance communities”, I said “topics” or “categories” because I don’t think it necessarily has to be “communities” what needs to be cross-instance.
I was presenting a problem, not a solution. You made 2 proposals: the merging of two communities as “option 2” that I think might mitigate the issue (I agree it might not solve it, it depends how it’s done) and your “option 1” which might also help if it were possible (but it’s probably more complex).
What could that be except communities? Hashtags maybe? Or maybe having communities that affiliate with each other, not as a full merge, but providing a mutually agregated feed, something like a multireddit but that would be accessible from the communities’ respective pages.
Yes, all those are valid ways to approach it, imho.
(Hash)tags is the obvious one. Also the most chaotic and mob-driven. But it would be the least centralized and more community-driven way to approach it. I expect each community would be able to moderate what tags are allowed for the posts that are submitted to it, and/or be able to correct mis-tagged posts. And ideally each user browsing by tag should be able to add his own blocklist to exclude communities he doesn’t want content from. This approach has the advantage of being more granular and offering a categorization that is “perpendicular” to communities. So you can actually browse by tag in only one community (as a way to subdivide it further) just the same as how you can browse by tag on a particular instance or on the whole fediverse.
Multireddits are curated aggregations of subreddits, but that means it requires maintenance and in the end it has a centralized point of control. In the reddit example, any user can decide to make a curated list of subreddits to form a multireddit, when people “follow” the multireddit the user who created it is the authority to decide what new subreddit might be added/removed. I guess it could be seen as meta-communities (a community that instead of managing an aggregate of post manages an aggregate of communities). This way you can have multiple meta-communities for the same topic that organize communities in different way, or that gave different “authorities” so if a meta-community disappears, stops maintenance, or you don’t like the set of communities one person has chosen, you pick another (or make your own), so even if the authority is centralized, you can switch it around and have it your way without really losing content. This means centralization of that control is not a big a deal as long as you can fork it with no further consecuence.
Whichever path is taken, the goal is being able to subscribe to a topic in a way that’s cross-instance, without having to manually keep track of each instance, taking advantage of the federation and not having to rely on big community nodes to form around one server. Ideally even if there were many small communities in separate instances it should work just as well as if there was only one big one.
Without something like that, I don’t see what advantage federation has for a reddit-like service (the main advantage I see right now is shared user accounts, but you could have also done that without needing federation, by separating the user/session management to a different service/API that independent servers could use for their own communities without needing to federate with other communities).
I don’t agree : “managing” doesn’t mean the same thing. AFAIU, there’s nothing more to managing a multireddit than updating the list of subs it contains. Managing a community (or a sub) includes moderating the content. The only way for a multireddit maintainer to have any control is that the multireddit be more followed than the subs it contains, so that being part of the multireddit is in the sub’s interest.
I don’t think one has to manually keep track of the instances. One can subscribe to a community on another instance, follow the updates in their subscribed feed, and comment from their instance.
Ok, if there are two communities on the same topic on two different instances, that’s two communities that one has to subscribe to, but that’s a one time operation, right? Also if the communities have to be created on two instances, it probably means that they don’t share the same code of conduct (CoC). So it does result in two different communities being created, right?
Maybe what you are asking for is that instances being able to whitelist only a community from an instance, e.g. if the community has stricter CoC than the instance? I have don’t have any idea about whether it already works that ways, or about how hard it would be to implement that.
I just read in another comment that there is an issue for that: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1576
To me, “manage” in the context of an aggregate means “add and remove”, sometimes edit.
A meta-community adds/removes communities to its aggregate, a community adds/removes posts to its aggregate.
Moderation is a separate topic. I expect the only ones who add/remove communities to a metacommunity are already the admins/moderators. Though I guess if you allowed users to submit/propose new communities to add to the meta-community, then in that case moderation would make sense.
A multireddit never has any control over the posts (not even if it had more followers than the communities). That’s the job of each individual subreddit.
The only thing a meta-community has control over is which communities are added/removed, not the posts that get shown. It’s a “meta-community” not a “super-community”, it does not have authority over what the communities post.
If a admin/mod in a meta-community does not like the posts or the CoC of a community, then he can just remove that community from the meta-community. But that would not make the community stop existing or posting. It simply won’t be part of that meta and users subscribed to the meta won’t see those posts as part of it.
When you want to post something you still need to choose a community where to post it. Meta communities aggregate, but they do not add new posts. The point is you can still follow the meta-community and get an aggregate of news from a curated set of communities, which will be cross-instance if it’s used for communities in different instances.
That’s what I mean by manually tracking each instance. You have to manually subscribe to a separate community for each instance.
For 2 communities it’s 1 time, for “N” communities it’s an “N-1” times operation. Where “N” is an evolving number determined by the number of instances that exist at any given time and how many communities on the same topic they create. If you want to follow a topic cross-instance you need to actively keep up to date on what new instances have been created and what new community on that topic have the instances (old & new) added.
Proof that users are required to track this evolution is how the most subscribed community in lemmy.ml (https://lemmy.ml/c/announcements) is about announcing new communities.
It’ll always result in two communities being created, even if they had same CoC. And in fact, to avoid centralization (which is the whole point), it shouldn’t matter if the CoC is the same, they should be usable communities even if they have few posts and are otherwise identical to lemmy.ml, otherwise there’s very little reason to have (or join) a community outside of the big central one.
The fact that you think that in order to create a community in another instance for the same topic the most probable reason is CoC discrepancy shows that there’s very little incentive to de-centralize the communities. I don’t see how lemmy.ml will stop being the central community node if that doesn’t change.
I don’t understand, how would that help?
Wouldn’t that essentially make things even more centralized since that would further restrict lemmy.ml federation?
The whitelisting (or allowlisting) itself is playing against the idea of federation. If you block it all except selected servers then you are essentially creating your own walled garden. Anyone is allowed to make their own walled gardens, or contribute to it. But that’s just the same as how everyone is allowed to make an open source reddit clone or contribute to it. Personally, if we were to go that route I would have preferred if instances did not federate among themselves and instead they relied on a common user/session authentication system, with the servers being decentralized in the same sense as how “The Web” itself is decentralized, with no need of server-to-server federation. At least that way the user is the one who decides which instances is he allowed to use his account on. Otherwise, as it stands, it makes no sense to make a personal instance, not even to host your own identity, much how it makes no sense to make a personal reddit clone, since you won’t be able to use that account in other servers without being explicitly allowed (and it would make no sense for lemmy.ml to add a personal server with no communities to their allowlist).
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.