Why Lemmy/Kbin are fundamentally broken (and how to fix them)
Why Lemmy/Kbin are fundamentally broken (and how to fix them)
This post assumes you have a basic understanding of what Lemmy and Kbin are. Which, in turn, assumes you understand at least the concept of federation. The Issue Currently, the way Lemmy/Kbin (which I will refer to simply as “Lemmy” for the rest of this article) work like this: Cool, so our user can...
I don't understand. Reddit is exactly the same, it has thousands of different subs, many with overlapping content, many duplicated because someone didn't like the mods, yet I don't recall people saying reddit was broken because of it.
Why is Lemmy suddenly broken just because people naturally do the same reddit thing here?
Can't we just ask for a feature like multi-reddit that lets users aggregate different subs into the same feeds (like sort of collections) instead of trying to reinvent the wheel?
Tags is a cool idea to help users find posts or communities on specific topics.
But taking away the different communities on the same topic is misunderstanding one of the key benefits of the fediverse over Reddit. I might want to talk about horses in a different way, with different people, operating under different rules, to the way others might want to talk about horses. The fediverse allows that, without having RealHorseTalk and RealRealHorseTalk nonsense.
Better UI and categorisation tools, yes. That'll help make sense of this for new users. But don't take away an actually positive aspect of the fediverse just to make it look more like Reddit.
This is exactly how i felt reading the article, part of the point is to empower users to be able to make a community on a different instance if the first instance has poor moderation, a crazy admin, or just isn't the vibe you're lookimg for.
I think a better solution is something similar to multiredits, where users can group communities together on their own. Which also opens up opportunities for someone to view only tangentially related feeds in the same view (i.e c/news and c/canada, or c/technology and c/linux)
The part about instances moderating content they receive seems like an issue. Every instance, including small ones run by one person, will go from moderating their local communities to basically moderating every community anyone on the server reads, which probably includes a lot of very large and active ones (larger than any current ones, since they'll basically be several existing communities combined).
Local communities have a purpose. I live in Northwest Arkansas, a vibrant, slightly more liberal region of the state. I can envision a hyper local instance for all things NWA. For example, a community on trails and trail riding/hiking would focus on the area’s trail system instead of the general topic.
Now, I might want to subscribe to both the NWA trails community as well as the mote general purpose “global” trails community. So, having them distinct in some way is helpful.
Maybe it makes sense to have local communities that function as “satellites” of the global community of the same name. In this model, I could post to NWA trails and optionally choose to have my post broadcasted or cross-posted to the global community.
In the USENET era, we solved the problem with a hierarchical name space. Hierarchies are great, as long as everyone agrees on the structure. The problem is that most hierarchies are completely arbitrary. We would need a consensus group, like the Big-8, ICANN, or IETF that could manage the global community name space. This shouldn’t stop a competing group from standing up a separate, independent global namespace, though.
Maybe the ETA of the global namespace is past. Maybe there are better ways to achieve these goals today.