Would you mind elaborating why it’s a bad fit? No shade to Lemmy, but if anything I feel like that would be a worse fit. People always talk about how the best part of Reddit was the niche subs, and a big issue here is that now instead of one small community you end up with 50 communities that all have one subscriber each. Also, there’s a lot of reposting and cross posting to the same community on separate instances. Instances on what is functionally a more social network like mastodon make more sense, so you could for example have all players of a specific team on an instance just for that specific team, or government employees on a government instance. Make up and beauty influencers could for example be all on another instance, making their work easier to find.
I was never on any microblog sites though, so maybe I don’t really understand them.
Well, since all the variants of a community are visible from everywhere if this ever got big you’d think users would consolidate around thing. And this does happen with some. There are many groups around gaming or tech or Linux, but there’s typically a bigger one among those and as a new user you search and look for the one with the most people. And you can just follow them all and your feed just does the job of surfacing them for you together.
And there are some tools for managing reposts and the like that aggregate identical posts. It’s far from perfect, I agree, but it is functional.
But for a Twitter-like the idea is that people would group in instances based on interests and instances would revolve around interests. But that’s not how those work. You don’t follow twenty people that only talk about one thing each. People talk about a bunch of stuff. And people don’t stick to a theme within an instance in the first place, they just need an entry point to the firehose, and all entry points give you the firehose. You can host a hundred people with one thing in common, but their output won’t be the same and you will also be hosting a number of randos unless you’re strictly invite-only.
That means that using defederation as a moderation tool has a ton of collateral damage. People who chose an instance at random and got cut off with it. People who chose your instance and were following legit users of an instance you defederated. People who are on a solid instance but some bad actors joined it. People who disagree with a defederation choice on principle. And since Masto’s instance migration tools are even worse than its moderation tools when inevitably some petty bullshit leads to federation wars you’re going to end up having to migrate and rebuild a bunch of stuff. The opposite is also true, there is no guarantee that the bad actors will stay put in an instance if you cut it off defensively. And individually blocking them is pointless, since whatever new user they create will be fundmentally different and distinct despite looking the exact same because with the way accounts work across instances there is no way to prevent duplication on short handles. It’s a mess.
Here you’re subscribed to a subreddit thing that IS tied to an instance. If that gets really bad then sure, some of that collateral damage may also happen, but at least regrouping around a different version of the same thing is a communal process. You don’t have to track down every individual user again, you just start posting on the second most popular version of that thing and go from there.
Would you mind elaborating why it’s a bad fit? No shade to Lemmy, but if anything I feel like that would be a worse fit. People always talk about how the best part of Reddit was the niche subs, and a big issue here is that now instead of one small community you end up with 50 communities that all have one subscriber each. Also, there’s a lot of reposting and cross posting to the same community on separate instances. Instances on what is functionally a more social network like mastodon make more sense, so you could for example have all players of a specific team on an instance just for that specific team, or government employees on a government instance. Make up and beauty influencers could for example be all on another instance, making their work easier to find.
I was never on any microblog sites though, so maybe I don’t really understand them.
Well, since all the variants of a community are visible from everywhere if this ever got big you’d think users would consolidate around thing. And this does happen with some. There are many groups around gaming or tech or Linux, but there’s typically a bigger one among those and as a new user you search and look for the one with the most people. And you can just follow them all and your feed just does the job of surfacing them for you together.
And there are some tools for managing reposts and the like that aggregate identical posts. It’s far from perfect, I agree, but it is functional.
But for a Twitter-like the idea is that people would group in instances based on interests and instances would revolve around interests. But that’s not how those work. You don’t follow twenty people that only talk about one thing each. People talk about a bunch of stuff. And people don’t stick to a theme within an instance in the first place, they just need an entry point to the firehose, and all entry points give you the firehose. You can host a hundred people with one thing in common, but their output won’t be the same and you will also be hosting a number of randos unless you’re strictly invite-only.
That means that using defederation as a moderation tool has a ton of collateral damage. People who chose an instance at random and got cut off with it. People who chose your instance and were following legit users of an instance you defederated. People who are on a solid instance but some bad actors joined it. People who disagree with a defederation choice on principle. And since Masto’s instance migration tools are even worse than its moderation tools when inevitably some petty bullshit leads to federation wars you’re going to end up having to migrate and rebuild a bunch of stuff. The opposite is also true, there is no guarantee that the bad actors will stay put in an instance if you cut it off defensively. And individually blocking them is pointless, since whatever new user they create will be fundmentally different and distinct despite looking the exact same because with the way accounts work across instances there is no way to prevent duplication on short handles. It’s a mess.
Here you’re subscribed to a subreddit thing that IS tied to an instance. If that gets really bad then sure, some of that collateral damage may also happen, but at least regrouping around a different version of the same thing is a communal process. You don’t have to track down every individual user again, you just start posting on the second most popular version of that thing and go from there.
Valid points. Thank you for your insight.