Generally, the lens I’ve come to criticise any/all fediverse projects is how well they foster community building. One reason why I like and “advocate” for the lemmy/threadiverse side of things is precisely because of this and how the centrality of the community/sub/group is a good way of organising social media (IMO).
Also, because of that, I recently came to be skeptical of the effects that the “All” feed can have. I didn’t even realise that people relied mostly on the All feed until recently.
I think I’ve reached the point now of being against it (at least tentatively). I know, it’s a staple and there’s no way it’s going away. And I know it’s useful.
But thinking about the feature set, through the community building lens, I think it’d be fair to say that things are out of balance: they don’t promote community building enough while also providing the All feed which dissolves community building.
Not really a criticism of the developers … AFAIU, the All feed is easier to implement than any other community building feature … and it’s expected from reddit (though it isn’t normal on forums AFAICT, which is maybe worth considering for anyone happy to reassess what about reddit is retained and what isn’t).
But still, I can imagine a platform that is more focused on communities:
- Community explorer tool built in.
- Could even be a substitute for an All feed … where you can browse through various communities you don’t know about and see what they’ve posted recently
- Multi-communities (long time coming by now for many I’d say)
- Could even be part of the community explorer tool where you can create on-the-fly multi-communities to see their posts in a temporary feed
- Private and local only communities (already here on lemmy and coming for private communities)
- Post visibility options for Public communities (IE, posts that opt-in private)
- More flexible notifications for various things/events that happen within a community
- Wikis
- Chat interface
- I’m thinking this is pretty viable given that Lemmy used to use a web-socket auto-updating design … add that to the flat chat view and you’ve got a chat room. There are resource issues, so limiting them to one per community or 6hrs per week per community or something would probably be necessary.
A possibly interesting and frustrating aspect of all of these suggestions/ideas above is I can see their federation being problematic or difficult … which raises the issue of whether there’s serious tension between platform design and protocol capabilities.
I think a significant issue here is that Reddit is not built for fostering communities, and things that mimic Reddit will not foster them, either. The whole model is built around an endless number of very large, single subject discussion spaces with functionally no globally consistent moderation or oversight.
This is a model of content categorization and filtering for individual consumption, not community building. Lemmy “communities” are just content tags, they’re not real community spaces. They’re never going to encourage the kind of tight knit spaces with idiosyncratic customs, rituals, and rules that actual vommunities have. They’re never going to let you get to know others because “off topic” discussions are meant to be had in entirely different spaces.
Reddit and reddit-like services are about content creation and delivery, noy community. Thatms baked into the form.
I see that for sure. Fediverse platforms don’t have to be locked in to mimicking big platforms though. User expectations and habits, frankly, can be a problem with this. Some are interested in experimentation. But if enough are kinda “conservative” about what they want, the devs will naturally not want to take risks.