This is a big problem. It creates the illusion that /c/cats on one particular instance is the real /c/cats.

This is the root of re-centralization and it must be pulled out.

  • Unblended@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    While true, people seem to pretty immediately get it once it’s clear where to see the source instance. If they care, they’re usually surprised, and then the reason magazines on different instances are different makes sense.

    I’m not sure what there is to do about it, the impression that there is one magazine is a relic of centralization, all there is to do is explain that it is not the case when people are inevitably confused. I hate simplifying it to “bob@microsoft.com and bob@apple.com are different people” because I know it feels more complicated than that but it seems like it doesn’t take that long to click honestly.

    Best I figure is to have welcoming communities that don’t turn into asshats if someone is confused or asks questions. This doesn’t seem like something you can force people to understand before they run into a problem and try to figure out what’s going on. Eventually there will be an AI bot that answers questions I’m sure…!

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      It is very obvious what is to be done to honour federation. When you go to lemmy.example.com/c/cats, you get every /c/cats from every instance.

      Then your client applies to personal filter list to hide what you don’t want to see. And then it applies the filters of the moderators you are subscribed to.

      • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        What you’re describing sounds like topics or tags, which have been requested a couple of times to both Lemmy’s devs and KBin’s devs, and both have just about said if they do something like that it would be as a feature release after they hit 1.0.0 types of stability. The idea would be that you could post to a community on a server with some sort of tag or flag or something that another community or person might be interested in. I like to think of the Fediverse being a country, platforms as being metropolises, and servers as being the cities, suburbs, boroughs, and towns that make up that metropolis. So, what I’m using as a metaphor in this case is that !comics@lemmy.ml, !comics@kbin.social, and !Comics@chirp.social are all different comic book stores. You go, and you hang out at the comic book store that feels most comfortable to you, and that’s your community. You all share comics there, but you don’t hear about the comic book discussions happening in one of the other comic book stores unless you choose to go there (and you totally can!). The idea of topics or flags would act like a comic book convention. A lot more people will be there to discuss comics, though you won’t know as many of the people there as you did at your home comic book store. The conversations will be busier, have more eyes on them, and won’t be as intimate, but it will still be a valuable experience for many people. In fact. Both will be valuable experiences.

        The Fediverse is designed less around durability of data, and more around curation of interaction. On Reddit, this was done by splintering communities in some really weird ways. For example, there was r/knives and r/knife_club. It wasn’t immediately obvious which one was which and how they differentiated themselves. But they definitively had a different moderation style and character. You just had to invest yourself in finding out the history of both to figure out which you wanted to subscribe to. On the threadiverse, we can expect these moderation styles to express more on the server level than on the community level. For example, !politics@beehaw.org, !politics@lemmy.ml, !politics@kbin.social, and !politics@lemmy.nz all have RADICALLY different moderation styles and scopes. They’re all about politics, but what you can expect from them is more communicated to you by the server they’re in. The Beehaw one is going to have more discussion around how politics impact women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community based on that the server is explicitly set up to be a safe space for those groups. The Lemmy.ml one will have a more pro-authoritarian communism feel to it because that’s what the moderators over there are all about. The kbin.social one will probably be the one that acts and behaves the most like r/politics worked, since that instance is seen as a general purpose instance good for most people, with a moderation style that fits the traditional mold of online forums. Finally, and this one’s my favorite because it’s communicated to you directly in the URL, the lemmy.nz one will be about New Zealand politics.

        Whether all that about the servers being different is good or not is up to you to figure out for myself. Me, I like it because community moderation is critical to community curation, and the Fediverse gives you infinitely more flexibility at the administrator level to find what works for you than a centralized corporation ever could. At Reddit, the admins were the admins, and there was nothing you could do if they refused to step in to stop a Subreddit from breaking Reddit’s site wide rules about gaming r/all to get more eyes on propaganda, and nothing you could do either if they banned a community that you felt was really valuable. Here, if you don’t like how Beehaw is administered, don’t join Beehaw.

        With all of this said, reading through your comments, it sounds like you don’t like that core concept and would prefer something like Nostr where anyone can post anything and anyone can see it and there’s no moderation whatsoever. Unfortunately, there is not at present any kind of link aggregation or community curation aspect built on the Nostr protocol, and I’d have some serious concerns about how you would do that from a technical level. If you’re dealing with an infinitely diverse network topology of peer to peer hosting, how are you going to define what the community is even about? If I create t/pocket_dumps, how do I ensure it stays on the topic of pulling everything out of your pocket and putting it on the table, instead of say, people pooping in pockets. Ultimately, if we leave it up to the user to define for themselves what a community should be or shouldn’t be, they’re going to spend all their time on the network playing a game of Whac-A-Mole blocking users who post material they don’t want to see, trying to filter uncurated communities, and also dealing with the problem Nostr and SSB both have where it’s REALLY hard to sign up.

        Ultimately, where I land is that the threadiverse topographic landscape is intrinsically different from the Reddit one. It takes some getting used to, but I don’t think you could make it more like Reddit without losing what makes the threadiverse special, or without significantly reducing the ease of adoption (which is already a common criticism anyway)