Comment on What would you want to see this site do differently from Reddit?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 4 days agoAh, 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.
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.
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Similarly, operating as a ‘sea’ of user suggested heirarchies is just going to be massively fragmented, quickly get out of date, and so on.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. :)