Comment on What would you want to see this site do differently from Reddit?
Cricket@lemmy.zip 5 days agoI think this is an awesome idea! It would allow people to have the freedom to create any community they wanted, but still keep posts concentrated enough for visitors to see activity they can participate in. Excellent, maybe you could propose this to the developers of Lemmy and Piefed? Is Mbin still being actively developed?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I’ll make an issue in Piefed for sure! Probably Lemmy too.
I’m still thinking some things through for an initial post. For instance, how would moderation work? What level of control do in the ‘higher’ community have over the lower one? Can mods ban posts, or throw the community out entirely? Or are they limited to simply hiding the lower community’s posts a la carte? Should they be able to hide the lower community without banning it?
…And is there any granularity for how that filters down the chain? For example, could /c/MMO be hidden in /c/PCgaming while allowing /c/GuildWars?
How does the integration start? Does it require approval from the “higher” community mods to join a taxonomical hierarchy?
…Can there be multiple parent communities, or max of 1?
And there’s a lot of conflicting incentives there. For instance, you don’t want to give too much power for a spambot or troll to infiltrate a community via a subcommunity.
On the other hand, the fear of power-trippin’ mods may discourage linking under another community, so you want to give the subcommunities sufficient autonomy as well.
Cricket@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Those are all good questions. I’m inclined to think that keeping this as simple as possible and following similar principles to the existing moderation environment would help make this useful while not creating too much extra work for moderators or admins, as both groups already seem overworked. I think this will already be complicated enough to begin with (for instance, how will communities in other instances be handled?) and fraught with potential for conflicts (for instance, include or not include communities of certain political slants?), so care should be taken to keep this somewhat minimalistic.
With that in mind, here are some possible concepts to consider:
Moderation: following the principle that Lemmy/Piefed allows moderation by users (through blocking users, communities, and instances), community mods (through removing posts and banning users), and instance admins (through overseeing mods and defederating or default blocking other instances), in that order, how about if the users themselves were the first (and perhaps only) ones to decide and control which lower-level communities they want to see structured in their feed and how? It seems to me that community mods should only be able to moderate their own community at each level, and not be able to moderate posts from levels below.
Creation and use of taxonomies: should the creation of the taxonomy be the job of users, community mods, or instance admins? I’m inclined to think that this should also ultimately be left to users to determine, but there could be a mechanism that allows anyone to share/publish a taxonomy that they find useful (or perhaps branches of a taxonomy, like Gaming), and allow other users to either import or subscribe the taxonomy or branches that they like, from a list of different available ones that have been shared/published. Admins could then have the option of setting entire taxonomies or a group of branches as defaults for users of their instances. This would allow users the freedom to create the structure that they would like to see while also allowing others to benefit from that work and not have to duplicate it, and finally also allowing for different competing structures to exist. Community mods could informally ask creators/maintainers of taxonomies or branches to include their communities in that structure. To add communities to a structure, there could be a simple button in each community that said something like “add to structure”.
I think that doing things this way would allow the most freedom, flexibility, and utility, while also minimizing additional work for mods and admins, as well as any potential for conflicts. Another factor to consider would be how much impact would this kind of thing have on resource utilization of instances?
I hope this all makes sense and helps provide some ideas for how this could work.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Ah, see that’s what I’m also trying to work around.
I don’t want “make-your-own-multicommunities.” Reddit has that, it doesn’t help with small-sub exposrue, and I’m not interested in using it myself. Fact is, most defaults stay as defaults, so if the goal is to drive exposure to lower subs, users having to opt in to see organized communities is not going to do that.
While this is a neat idea, I think requiring admin confirmation is too much work for them. Especially as lower levels shuffle around: think of all the new games rolling under the ‘gaming’ heirarchy, for instance. Admins can’t deal with updates by-the-minute.
Similarly, operating as a ‘sea’ of user suggested heirarchies is just going to be massively fragmented, quickly get out of date, and so on. Take the gaming example again: say an admin adopts a ‘user’ preset… Who’s job is it to maintain it? Who’s gonna track all the new games that come out to try and group them sanely? Even if the user does, what if they leave?
I think its better for community creators to shoulder the load of finding a place in the tree, as they’re the one with the passion, expertise, and motivation in their niche to slot it where they want.
I’m also very wary of ‘recommendation’ subsystems like Reddit has bloated their site with. I don’t want lists of auto-suggested heirarchies belpw my community view, I want some sane structure there transparently, to the point that the Lemmy/Piefed user UI requires close to zero changes.
…Hence, it’d be nice if users could organize taxonomies however they want for viewing (which is a lot of software work on its own), but having a sane default taxonomy is extremly important.
Mind you, I am thinking out loud here.
Cricket@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
I can understand that. I didn’t realize that Reddit had that feature. I totally hear you that defaults stay defaults.
I may not have been very clear, but what I meant was that users would be able to create and share their own structures without approval or interaction from admins or mods, then admins would be able to pick and choose from those structures that users created and shared, and then the admins would have the option to make those structures the defaults for their instances if they wished.
However, I can see that having this kind of sharing structure could get pretty messy with tons of different structures around. I can also see that the structures could get outdated quickly. I also agree with you that it would probably be better for community creators/mods to self-organize with other communities to structure this.
I think you’re probably right in your approach, but like I said before, it would benefit from being as simple as possible. Perhaps it would be the best to break down your ideas into smaller sets of features so they can be implemented in phases, or maybe even eliminate some features?
Like, for instance, why have permissions, hiding, or cross-community moderation? Why not simplify it to its most basic level: allow two communities to be linked with each other (at the request of either and agreement from the other for them to be in a specific hierarchy) and allow either community to rescind that linkage at any time? This link would make it so that users who subscribe to the “supercommunity” would also get all posts from any “subcommunities” (unless the same user has blocked any particular “subcommunity”, in which case they would still not see that sub’s posts). I think that just these two features would implement most of what I think we would both like to see, while being straight-forward. This could even be thought of as similar to a type of inter-community federation.
I’m thinking out loud too. :)