I want a client that looks basically how reddit looks today. An aggregator.
And maybe that aggregator has a back-end that runs on a VM somewhere that I control, or I can pay someone to run an aggregator for me, or whatever.
But I want each subreddit to be federated. Run on its own server, with its own moderators.
I want to be able to make as many Reddit accounts as I want to (dozens, maybe not hundreds), and pick which ones I use on which subreddits. Some decentralized authorization / authentication scheme? Or maybe some centralized server? Or using OAuth or something? I don't really care.
I want to SUBSCRIBE to a list of Admins. If an Admin shadowbans a user, I don't see their posts. I find this incredibly useful. Other people will disagree with me about which users, which actions, should result in shadowbanning.
I think that about wraps it up. What am I missing?
Way back in the day, Reddit was marketed as a way to create a forum without any technical setup, and then to view content across all the communities you were a “member” of in one place. You can still see glimpses of that, I think when you signup or register a subreddit it suggests making one for your dnd clan or something like that.
I don’t think Reddit realized how smart this strategy would end up becoming, because over time what happened is that existing Reddit users would just join the subreddit for some topic they were interested in (like a band) instead of seeking out forums for it on the web. Eventually enough people started doing that, that subreddits for a topic would absolutely dwarf any single traditional forum in activity. Because reddit is a single site they could also do a bunch of SEO optimizations due to having larger scale than independent forums. The result is a massive network effect and controllling the top-of-funnel for online discussions on the web.
Anyway, what fucked up Reddit was that after 2010 or so they started turning it into more of a consumption platform than a discussion platform, plus various issues with moderation (the emergence of powermods who are all secretly monetizing their subs to help advertisers, implementing platform-wide moderation policies), turning it more into a centralized service with less focus on discussion.
Honestly, combining the web with forums provides like 90% of what you want, it just doesn’t do aggregation, nor does it let you directly ban a mod (but you can always switch sites). But it does decentralize auth, moderation, servers, and allow more freedom in how a subreddit-equivalent gets run while also allowing moderators to directly monetize their sites rather than having to resort to secretive scheming. Maybe we simply need some kind of protocol or common API + FOSS client that lets you automatically grab and sort top posts from a list of forums that implement the protocol.
...and the lack of friction. I'm not making a new account for your forum on your site.
And consistent UI. Threaded conversations rather than a single scroll by date. Upvoting. Following a user to see the content they've created in other forums. Easy discovery. Some guarantees of not being hacked by the site itself. Ways to block users. The auto-moderation tools. The fun bots in some reddits.
And yes, most of all, the mnemonic forums. /r/minnesota. I just guessed that, and I was right. There's good and bad to that land-grab. I kind of wish that there was one more layer of indirection... That if I made a /r/minnesota and you made an /r/minnesota, that whoever has the most engagement is the "default" /r/minnesota that some new user will see... but that if the other gets the most engagement, the "default" would change. And that a given user can pick which /r/minnesota they want to be what they see when they type /r/minnesota.
But that's just how I want to handle the case of tyrant mods who own popular mnemonics but have instituted terrible policies.
The landgrab is part of the problem, you get discoverability and less of a fractured community, but always and forever that’s gonna be the first and probably main place people go to for Minnesota content. Which allows for really shitty moderation and all sorts of perverse incentivizes like registering subreddit names as soon as you find out about a new show/companies registering their own subs
Splinter subreddits still happen, like the various right wing politics subs, but a lot of them fizzle out. People have attempted free speech subreddits and of course there was voat, but it turns out there is a lot of adverse selection in which kind of user goes there.
One reason I’d prefer using the web and regular forums is that popular domains are already taken, so there’s naturally going to be more room for competition and multiple forums all discussing the same thing, with all the pros and cons that entails. While the vote->ranking/visibility mechanism is interesting I think it also biases towards simple content that appeals to the broadest base of users. It’s good for surfacing feel good pictures of something vaguely Minnesota related but not for things like discussing the merits of a legislative bill.
Neat! Do you know what I also want - I wish the aggregator I'm describing was API compatible with Reddit, so that Apollo and etc could have a setting to switch servers to it. Or I could hack my VPN to point at it. Does Lemmy happen to do that?
I want a client that looks basically how reddit looks today. An aggregator.
And maybe that aggregator has a back-end that runs on a VM somewhere that I control, or I can pay someone to run an aggregator for me, or whatever.
But I want each subreddit to be federated. Run on its own server, with its own moderators.
I want to be able to make as many Reddit accounts as I want to (dozens, maybe not hundreds), and pick which ones I use on which subreddits. Some decentralized authorization / authentication scheme? Or maybe some centralized server? Or using OAuth or something? I don't really care.
I want to SUBSCRIBE to a list of Admins. If an Admin shadowbans a user, I don't see their posts. I find this incredibly useful. Other people will disagree with me about which users, which actions, should result in shadowbanning.
I think that about wraps it up. What am I missing?