this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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Yes this is the biggest flaw of Lemmy. It happens because if you go to /c/books, the default view is not an alglomeration of all /c/books on all federated servers.
There are many bullshit reason why this has been refused. Some people try to push for a useless multi-reddit-like solution instead.
But there are fatal consequence for Lemmy not doing this. Largely it concentrates all the power into the hands of the "one big community" (inevitable under current conditions) in the one big instance.
The decentralization promise of Lemmy has been effectively defused by the Lemmy elite from the get go.
Honestly it shouldn't be either. Moderation requirements are too different and the direction and culture can be way too different.
Multi-subs is better when you have this big differences between subs and between servers and no guarantee that the same name means same content. And what mod/admin gets to take down what and where? Do all the server admins have to get involved to block spam threads submitted to other servers? How do you even know what others can see from the comment threads as a reader in a thread, when propagation and filters can be so different?
What we need is better multi-subs instead. Like having the ability for mods to publish officially approved multisubs, and for coordinating mod actions (like pushing removal suggestions, as a dedicated report moderation queue from trusted mod teams that's separate from normal reports).
The most complicated part here is deduplication of threads. That's easiest to deal with by detecting crossposts and showing them as a single view with comments from all crossposts across all participating subs.
I disagree on all points. Moderation is irrelevant to an agglomerated view and without a DEFAULT view of the entire Lemmyverse, it will just centralize around the "one big community", it is already happening. "Multireddit" feature is useless against this. If full agglomeration view is not the default view of /c/books then it will never make sense to post anywhere but "the one big community". This kills decentralization and dooms Lemmy to be just teddit with extra steps.
It is probably already too late for lemmy, the entrenched Lemmy elites would probably block this from becoming the default even if the codebase supported it.
I think the real trick should be having big communities in many different instances.
It's okay to have a big community on one instance, it's like having a forum hosted at one server. The problem arises when most big communities are on the same big server.
Big communities are the problem. The power of thought control is even more present in moderators as it is in server admins. The idea that server admin are Reddit's problem is a distraction due to that one especially abusive reddit admin but the same problems exists with moderators.
Anything other than a vast array of tiny instances agglomerated into a single view will do. The alternative is the elite captured internet overton bubbles that have been rotting our minds for over a decade now. There should be so many that as a whole they are ungovernable.
Moderation is the user's duty, the position of internet janitor must be abolished as it is always abused.
Once the repugnant moderators are finally finally gone, user based moderation tools will naturally follow, I imagine they will take the shape of a cross between Hollywood blacklists and uBlock origin.
Collectively managed, user selected, personnalised block and boost lists.
There will be many such lists to cater to different proclivities, they will be built on crowdsourcing in user collectives, AI powered reputation and ideology analysis per user history and simple rules like, minimum account creation date, server origin reputation, what cloud-words of communities they are posting to.
Block lists, boost lists and content discovery should all happen on the user's device and under their full control (and complete privacy).
Anyway, none of that happens with community agglomeration by default. And if things remain the way they are then Lemmy is stillborn.
You're basically suggesting bluesky style label services, except as the only solution
And no that can not be the only solution avaliable, ESPECIALLY not in communities around important topics like security, health, or for marginalized communities, etc. Your suggested default would be a trashfire by default until people have opted into some kind of moderation filters. And few will review the filters they subscribe to.
You also haven't solved the issue of how to get people to submit content to smaller communities
You have probably never seen a well moderated community, or at least not participated in one for long.
By making the default view a chaotic mess of free expression would spur the need for efficient and easy to use self-help user-centric moderation tools.
The worse it really is, the more people will be motivated to figure out, basically clicking "subscribe" to a blacklist filter. It could make sense to even have a default suggestion blacklist that are strongly consensus base as one of the first thing the users is told.
The alternative is the currently happening reddit-equivalent centralization which makes lemmy a pointless, far less popular reddit clone.
There is no other alternative.
If posting in https://lemmy.ca/c/books gets you zero views then nobody will post there instead of https://lemmy.ml/c/books which will get 10k views. So https://lemmy.ml/c/books will gets posts and grow and https://lemmy.ca/c/books will stagnate forever. Once in a a while the hegemonic community moderator will push their corruption so such egregious level that a tiny amount of users will revolt and create a 2nd community and it will get maybe 5% of the viewership of the big community.
This is just the cost of freedom, the user HAS to participate in moderation and moderation has to be a collective effort. The alternative is handing over your thought patterns to an unaccountable anti-misinformation ideological cabal and they will shape your reality into whatever shape they see fit without you even knowing they exist.
That already happens in the global popular feed though, I already see multiple variations of the same subs across different servers without subscribing.
Any shared agglomorated view based just on name needs to allow subs to opt out (I run /r/crypto on reddit, and it's for CRYPTOGRAPHY and I wished all the spammers would go and set themselves on fire) and you absolutely can not force it onto everybody.
You're also stuck with the same problem of less popular subs not getting many views because their content ends up last, because they don't have as big dedicated userbases, and because this just doesn't give them any increased visibility at all.
You also get an even worse problem of malicious servers faking high popularity to dominate (like when /r/T_D manipulated reddit) if you do it the naive way, every admin needs to filter bad servers. And new users won't know the best place to post to (usually the place with the most reliable mods). In fact they won't even understand why they're asked to choose, so they'll prefer what's listed at the top, probably their own server, and thus the .world server keeps dominating.
You also can't do thread deduplication without cooperating mods, so you get intense clutter. You also break apart sub specific culture if they get flooded by strangers.
The only way you can even get close to a sane implementation with your take is by putting a banner at the top of every thread in that view with the host sub description and the rules and forcing everybody to agree before interacting. Otherwise off topic content gets upvoted when it shouldn't, sub specific events gets ruined immediately, and people will get pissed when they get moderated under rules they should've read but didn't.
A hybrid view controlled mutually by mods allow you to advertise the different subs by highlighting their differences.
These problem should all be resolved client side by mutually curated block lists, boost lists, aliases list and many other methods and it should happen with the users final say. They must always be the one to choose which ideological blinders they want to put on. And when posting to any /c/books the default visibility should be the same assuming a neutral reputation server and a neutral reputation user.
Anything else will lead to the one big community controlled by a small caste of moderator-kings forever as has happened on reddit.
To me escaping the filter bubble through decentralisation is the winning promise for Lemmy and it currently falls far short of that. And every day that this remains the case, the lemmy elites are becoming more entrenched and better able to steer the narrative in their favor.
See also https://slrpnk.net/comment/10312933
What you're suggesting can't work
I sympathize with some of it, but you're going too far
Content addressable posts like what Bluesky's atproto does and cryptographic identity allows for portable posts and identities, and it even allows forkable communities as you can import and move entire conversations, and even mirror conversations that one team of mods may not like into another community (I made my first blog post about content addressable forums literally a whole decade ago)
Literally impossible according to the CAP theorem (database terminology) in a decentralized network where not all servers federate with all (often because they just never have interacted and thus don't know of each other)
You have to push the communities to participate in multiple parallel communities, that's much more reliable. Together with a credible threat that the community can depose bad mod teams by forking, you have a much better chance of preventing bad mod behavior
I don't believe there are any real technical hurdle to overcome, except overcoming the current system inertia (which might already be too late and easier to start over)
The thing is that, if posting in say
https://lemmy.ca/c/books
instead of
https://lemmy.ml/c/books
Is the difference between 10k people seeing it and 1 person seeing it.
Then people are going to choose the bigger reach community. And it will in turn grow bigger, attain critical mass and become the only /c/book that most people ever go to.
This is catastrophic for decentralization. The more concentrated the attention becomes in that place the less it will make sense to post anywhere else.
Then the small clique of mods at https://lemmy.ml/c/books become entrenched and all they need to do is manage public opinion to keep their place as the shaper of all book discussion on all of lemmy basically for as long as they want.