I guess one thing I like already is that there’s no requirements for Karma, stupid rules about Reddit’s filters which got my 100k karma account permanently banned for no reason at all.
Would you prefer Lemmy to be smaller like it is now or get to a reddit level popularity but without the reddit jank.
How about community taxonomy?
Say there’s a gaming community.
Then there’s a PC gaming community, then a MMO game community, and there’s communities for individual games subdivided into that.
So if you’re in /c/PCgaming, posts in /c/GuildWars will (by default) show up in your feed.
If you are in /c/GuildWars, you (by default) get the hyper focus, and exposure from your post filtering up to more general tiers.
But this sharing is toggleable too. For example, you could choose to only float it up to the “MMO” level without drawing in the /c/gaming crowd
And this structure kinda naturally fits underlying database structures anyway.
Reddit could not evolve like this, but now that we kinda know what niches exist, that could be constructed from scratch and maintained.
Yeah I like that idea its a good solution.
I 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?
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 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?
Are there federation specific quirks? I’m assuming these hierarchies all have to exist in one server, but would it be technically feasible to have cross-server hierarchies?
And there’s a lot of conflicting incentives there. For instance, you don’t want to give too much power for a bot 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. I’m leaning to configurable defaults of:
subcommunity requires permission from the one directly above, but not the whole chain
all higher communities have the power to hide posts, hide “bottom tiers,” or even completely hide specific subcommunities by default, but logged in community users can opt to show them
each community controls their own moderation unless they opt-in to accept moderation from higher ones
higher ones can post rules required to accept the lower one, but once accepted, this is static text, unless all parties agree to change it
lower communities can be kicked out. Or they can opt to leave the hierarchy system, and rejoin another
lower users are not auto subscribed to higher ones by default, but this can be configured so, say /c/GuildWars auto subscribes you to /c/GuildWarsScenery
Fizz@lemmy.nz you may be interested in this too.
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.