timbervale

But if all instances connected to a distributed set of content, then an individual instance can go to shit but people will still have the content and users, instead of having to start over with a new community entirely, hoping that everyone jumps to the same instance you jumped to, or else you would have no content to view/interact with.

It's because below a certain threshold the amount of content posted is low. I don't think you can argue that a news sub is worse off for having more people posting news as it happens.

There are plenty of news subreddits. I greatly preferred /r/anime_titties, for example.

r/news has 26.34 million users. r/anime_titties has 0.47 (even you even somehow stumble upon r/anime_titties being a news/politics subreddit, as I didn't even know it existed until just now, and even then I didn't think "news" when I saw the name of it). Those are two drastically different experiences. Do you at least agree on that?

Then don't. I really don't understand what you think is going on here. If there's one community you prefer, stick with that.

I feel like you're not following the train of logic, here... we're discussing what happens when you can't/won't "stick with that".

They are not fragmented. In what way are they fragmented? Everyone can participate in communities on every instance, no matter where they are.

They are fragmented. Just because they can post somewhere doesn't mean they will. It's why !startrek@startrek.website has 4,870 subscribers, 190 threads, and 3,180 comments, and yet !startrek@kbin.social only has 810 subscribers, 10 threads, and 17 comments. If having the ability to post in multiple places meant people actually did post in multiple places, then !startrek@kbin.social would be a whole log more active, wouldn't it?

People don't need to leave that instance.

You're right, but they would need to start posting to whatever community/magazine I'm subscribed to, or else the community/magazine I'm subscribed to wouldn't have any content, and then why would I bother being subscribed to it?

Because Reddit's admins suck? Why else are you here?

If your only reason was because Reddit admins suck, you could have just quit the internet all together, but you came to kbin for a specific reason. You moved away from Reddit because of the admins, but you moved to kbin because of the content. Now imagine if there were no places with any content; you'd have nowhere to move to, and quitting the internet would be a more appealing option than posting in a magazine with 10 threads over 2 weeks.

The benefit would be the content. Imagine you post to a magazine with 300,000 users, with new posts every 5 minutes, and hundreds of comments per article; that kind of an experience would be more desirable than posting to a magazine with 500 people, with new posts every 12 hours, and maaaybe 10 comments on the more popular posts, wouldn't it?

The benefit of every server moderating everything that comes in would be that a post that isn't suitable for one instance could be perfectly fine for another. Imagine the topic of politics: for some people, discussing abortion might be too sensitive, but others might be totally fine with allowing it. We wouldn't want to stifle conversations about that subject, though, so maybe it gets through to the individual instances to handle it as they see fit. This way a user can continue interacting with a large community that's interested in politics, instead of fragmenting that community into half a dozen smaller communities; sure, some posts might be hidden by some instances, and those threads would be less active than thread about more agreeable subjects, but that's still a lot better than every thread being less active, isn't it?

Because they are trapped there. A user account on Reddit remains on Reddit, it can't access communities outside of Reddit.

Creating a new account on kbin here was not exactly hard. Is your argument that millions of people still use Reddit because they can't type in a couple of data fields?

Then when Reddit goes bad and startrek@reddit.com starts sucking, I can just start posting on startrek@startrek.website instead. No need to create a new account or "migrate" anywhere. The friction is minimal.

Right, but then all of the other users that post interesting content that you went to startrek@reddit.com for are still on startrek@reddit.com, not on your new instance. Now, your new instance gets zero posts because it's new, but the old instance still has millions of people posting to it every second of every day. Yeah, you have a new place to post to, but all of the content that you went to startrek@reddit.com for in the first place is still over there. Federation did nothing to help that problem.

You don't need to move to a different instance. I'm not sure where this miscommunication is coming from. You can continue using timbervale@kbin.social if startrek@startrek.website "goes bad" and instead go hang out on some other startrek community without having to create a new account.

It's not miscommunication, it's just that I'm removing the option of changing to a different community/magazine on the same instance. If I can no longer stand being part of !startrek@startrek.website, I'm not going to start posting to !startrek2@startrek.website, I'm going to the next largest community, which is, at this time, usually on a different instance all together, like !startrek@lemmy.world. I'm not talking about my user account, I'm talking about the community/magazine itself. If a mod on !startrek@startrek.website goes crazy and starts banning people for talking about Star Trek: Discovery, I'm not going to want to be there, even if my account hasn't been banned, yet. As a result, I would need to find a new Star Trek community to post in, which is what I mean when I say I'd have to move to a different instance (because why would I switch to a different community/magazine on the same instance? And, also, there are a million scenarios where switching to a different community/magazine on the same instance would be a bad idea/impossible). Note that when I say community, I mean the equivalent of kbin's magazine, as Lemmy calls it a community.

Move to the smaller instance. Everyone else can move too. It's just as easy for them as for you. Then it becomes the bigger instance.

The entire reason I would subscribe to a community/magazine is because I enjoy interacting with the community there, and seeing/interacting with the content they post. If I switch to a smaller community/magazine, that content becomes exceedingly rare, and the number of people I can converse with drops dramatically. There are 315 subscribers to !electricvehicles@kbin.social, but 241,000 subscribers to https://reddit.com/r/electricvehicles. Clearly, the experience of posting to one vs. the other is drastically different, wouldn't you say? Why would I go to a place where I have just a few people to talk with, when I could stay on the old site that has thousands upon thousands of people? The same applies to if it were 5 years from now and !electricvehicles@kbin.social has 241,000 users but !electricvehicles@lemmy.world has 315: no one will want to switch if the mods of the larger community/magazine turn into assholes.

If it's "bad enough" for you to move but not for them to move, perhaps you're being more sensitive to the badness than everyone else is. Maybe it's not so bad. If it is that bad, then why aren't they moving?

So now it's, "if most people don't move, it's not really that bad, or it's your fault for thinking it's bad"?

Basically I want a mailing list feature, but one that mimics Reddit's UI. We already do this with websites (there are registrars and DNS servers that aren't controlled by any one organization), so why can't we do it with content? Share content with every instance as it's posted, as referenced by a "DNS server"-like setup, and bam, done. Each instance can moderate the content how they see fit, and if one instance decides to be dicks about it, users can switch to a different instance and have literally the exact same community and the exact same content as they had before the previous instance owners became dicks.

You're right, but the current tradition and momentum are towards using short display names; virtually every service that has a public-facing feature uses display names (even most email clients put the first and last name of the users instead of their actual email addresses).

We definitely should be using the full bit on kbin/lemmy, though, as it's so critical to the idea of the Fediverse, you're 100% correct on that.

That is an entirely valid point, and one I do like. The worst part of that is having to wade through duplicate posts, which isn't the end of the world, I suppose.

Well said.

Sure, but that's no different from switching to a different subreddit, in the current case of Reddit.

Which doesn't really happen. The mods of r/news are idiots, but only a tiny number of users actually care about that. Most people either just stop using r/news, or deal with it. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement of how things should be. Hell, the only time I've seen people switch subreddits is when everyone went from r/antiwork to r/workreform after that disaster of a TV interview; even then, the former currently has 2.6 million subscribers, the latter has 700k, so it appears even that migration was a failure. I can't imagine this is seen as a good solution.

Not really. No more work than posting on a different community on the same instance.

People don't want to post in two communities that cover the same topic. Duplicating work like that leads people to seek out a single solution, even if it's the worse solution. Reddit is so popular because it has a giant number of people posting content to subreddits all the time, meaning even niche topics have a healthy amount of fresh content. If you fragment users into multiple instances (even if they don't have to worry about creating new user accounts for each one), then it just leads to problems. Eventually they will move towards a single mega-instance, but then you run into the problems above: people won't leave that instance for a new one until they absolutely cannot stand to be there anymore, and some people are going to have lower tolerances for bullshit than others, which means most people are still going to be using the old instance for a very very long time, splitting content between multiple instances. In other words: why go to !worldnews@kbin.social when there's so many more users, and so much more fresh content on https://reddit.com/r/worldnews?

Technically can't they do that even now?

Kind of, but not exactly. I'm asking for a solution where kbin.social and lemmy.world and startrek.website all post to the exact same community, but in a way that doesn't require me to be subject to the whims of the mods of any specific instance.

If a mod on !startrek@startrek.website (currently the largest Star Trek community instance) were to go on a power trip and ban anybody who mentioned Star Trek: Discovery, I wouldn't want to be part of that community, anymore. Most people wouldn't care, though, and just wouldn't post about Star Trek: Discovery. So, fine, I go subscribe to another instance where they allow Star Trek: Discovery, but if !startrek@startrek.website has 20 million subscribers, and the next biggest instance only has 40 thousand, the experience of using that next biggest instance is going to suck in comparison. That's the problem I'm trying to find a solution to: a situation whereby a specific instance doesn't control the content for everybody, but instead they only control the content for their specific instance.

How does an instance have "total control" over users from other instances? It has no control at all. At worst it can defederate, which would just hurry along their migration to a new community that's on some other instance.

Look at Reddit: it's gone bad, and yet millions still use the site. So much so, in fact, that content on many subreddits is posted every few minutes, whereas the same communities here on kbin see hours or days between posts. That's what I mean: people are used to the solution they like, so if a community becomes "bad" enough to make me move to a different instance, it might not be bad enough for everyone else, and so I'd be stuck moving to a smaller instance while the majority of users continue using the "bad" instance. Just because I don't need to create a new account doesn't change that fact.

If I don't want to use Reddit, all of the content and users that I benefit from are still over on Reddit. No matter how much I'd like everyone to switch over to kbin, they don't think Reddit is as big of an issue as I do. Clearly. So what am I supposed to do if that happens with !startrek@startrek.website in a few years? Do I have to put up with a bad site as long as everyone else puts up with it, too? Or do I have to move to a smaller community on a different instance just so I don't have to deal with the problems of the original instance?