Thanks!! I posted here thinking it would "be the place to have a discussion" but then realized - hey, GitHub already does that. I'll get over there soon, if I'm enjoying the discussion here.
Exactly! Except that doesn't exist over here in Lemmy.
Hashtags aren't bad - but I've seen so few posts/comments with hashtags, and... there's no mechanism for subscribing to hashtags via Lemmy/kbin as far as I've been able to tell?
Additionally they require users to tag their own content, rather than just post to a community - why leave all of that to the poster?
Not sure you've bothered to read the post, as you've strawmanned my argument into "Why isn't the fediverse reddit?" and failed to address any of my points about the fragmentation of communities versus the creation of echo chambers.
Beyond that, I've seen maybe 10% of comments or posts out here with hashtags, unless I'm missing something (I could be, I'm new!). I also assume that means the only mechanism for finding groupings of posts is then through search? That's a terrible user experience.
For someone so loudly proclaiming this isn't reddit, you're certainly making it feel like I'm back there.
That's what I'm asking, but with a little new functionality. Either way the core thing I want is meta-communities, aggregating whatever communities users might want into a single feed.
Sure (and hi!)
The first part of an idea is just the aggregation of communities into a meta-community, like Reddit used to have meta-reddits that users could build, taking multiple subreddits and joining them together into a single feed. Here instead, we would be joining together multiple community instances - for example, say, !android@lemmy.world and !android@lemdro.id, both instances of "android" communities with different users and different feeds. I want to be able to join these two "android" communities into one feed and interact with them as if they were the same "community".
The second part of the idea is that users could create these meta-communities (lists of communities) and share invites or links to them, similar to Spotify playlists. Subscribing users could then choose to "update" their meta-community along with all of the other users following that meta-community to match the list of the originating user.
The third part is that the system would check to see if the subscribing user (or creator of the meta-community) could actually interact with all of the instanced communities from the one they are currently at, and let them know if there were issues with federation.
I like this idea as well, if it would do a different kind of work at a different community level. The thing that's missing here is that it recenters control at the mod level, rather than at the user level - and I can see how that might be more appropriate, if I'm also enamored with the idea that individual users would gain access to a new kind of influence (should they get popular enough with their community sorting).
After a week on Lemmy/kbin it strikes me that one of the major oncoming problems that the Fediverse has is the fragmentation of communities across multiple instances that were formerly centralized in reddit. While this fragmentation into instances has significant upsides, it shifts responsibility for finding and subscribing to multiple similar communities to individual users.
While the diversity that instanced communities provide is a significant benefit, I guarantee most users - including myself - are just waiting for frontrunners to emerge. This will eventually kill most of the potential upside to instanced communities, which arguably should develop in slightly different ways, to specifically push against echo chambers.
As far as I've been able to tell, there's no good way to create meta-communities either collectively or individually. So, rather than rebuild reddit functionality (that I would only find useful here in the Fediverse, due to the fragmentation) I had a thought.
Would it be possible to create either explicit Lemmy/kbin functionality that allowed both for the creation and centralized updating of meta-communities?
The thought would be that individuals and groups could effectively add new community instances to centrally managed lists - like a package manager, of sorts. Users could generate lists of communities/magazines, and then (if the meta-community was public) invite people to subscribe to that list for future updates. Upon joining a or running an update to an existing meta-community, the system would check to see if the current instance and user was properly federated in order to engage with that specific instance of the community.
I'll admit, I'm new, and haven't dug deep enough into any of the technical documentation to see how much of this is possible, and I'm willing to bet it could be layered on top of Lemmy/kbin via plugins and apps. That said, I'm not sure that's how it should be done in the future. Thoughts?
edit: more clear detail from comments below:
The first part of an idea is just the aggregation of communities into a meta-community, like Reddit used to have meta-reddits that users could build, taking multiple subreddits and joining them together into a single feed. Here instead, we would be joining together multiple community instances - for example, say, !android@lemmy.world and !android@lemdro.id, both instances of “android” communities with different users and different feeds. I want to be able to join these two “android” communities into one feed and interact with them as if they were the same “community”.
The second part of the idea is that users could create these meta-communities (lists of communities) and share invites or links to them, similar to Spotify playlists. Subscribing users could then choose to “update” their meta-community along with all of the other users following that meta-community to match the list of the originating user.
The third part is that the system would check to see if the subscribing user (or creator of the meta-community) could actually interact with all of the instanced communities from the one they are currently at, and let them know if there were issues with federation.
Absolutely.
Going deep into the academic rabbit hole (and pushing myself to contribute more) - take a look at Julie Cohen's work if you haven't. She frames a lot of this out - namely the need to actively code the conditions for human flourishing into digital architecture - and It helps her book (Configuring the Networked Self) is freely available online.