this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Because in theory, there will be "sister" communities on different servers and everyone can just go somewhere else on the same platform.
IMO, the master stroke is to 'sub-federate' communites. Allow each special interest community on each instance to join into the same feed.
I should be able to go to /c/books on any server and see all /c/book from all servers. Content discovery and curation/moderation filters are then applied in top of the raw feed as subscriptions chosen by the user with community suggested defaults chosen out of the choices from high reputation users's subscription.
I like that concept but I'm worried that weighting anything by superusers opens the door to astroturf, spam, and trolls.
That door is already wide open.
There is always going to be a content discovery algorithm or what you will not be able to find anything.
The question is, do you want to be able to control that algorithm or do you want to leave it up to instance owners ?
We need people to sort the good stuff and the bad stuff. Computers are still bad at it when they don't take human"a preferences into account.
Objective sorting is useless. It's essential, to be able to sort chronological and alphabetical, but it's a special use case, unless you're the story of person who read the dictionary for fun.
I think individual users being able to subscribe to moderation and curation in the form of a selection and sorting filter running inside the client of the user, would be a great improvement to every other social media out there.
Let the user subscribe to the comment deleters that they like, and the upvotes that agree with their taste. Let them play with the selection weights of each subscribtion filter, right in the user interface, not hidden in a backend database.
In practice there's a big one and unless there's a big schism that fragments the community, the big community will suck the air out for any smaller community in any topic.
Worse if it actually worked as intended and each tiny community stayed fragmented forever and em never amounted to anything.
I question if it is by design to prevent the formation of true, fediverse wide, decentralized but coalesced community.
If it is by accident, then it is a huge missed opportunity.
But I don't think it's by accident. The protagonist of Lemmy is the instance owner and the moderator, not the user. So the important part of the network is the instance fiefdom, not the whole network. Instances should just be another mirror of the whole, instead of tiny dictatorships.