cerevant

Why are people obsessed with communities having the same domain name as their login? How do you expect these communities to deal with moderation and admin policies?

Here are some ideas for solutions to the real issues:

• Add smart cross posting like on Reddit where interacting with a cross post happens on the community where it was created.
• Develop mesh federation instead of a star topography. There would still only be one community with a unique name, but instances could share changes between each other, not just with the host.
• Provide a true cross instance community search that is integrated in the primary UI. It would need to provide better metrics for like-named communities so that users can make an informed choice.
• Admins need to stop land-grab communities. There needs to be a commitment to moderating, maintaining and growing the community. They could start by purging Reddit general interest knock-offs with fewer than 10 subscribers.
• Add support for instance relative links not only to communities, but comments and posts.

In general, I think user focused instances should be separate from community focused instances, but that’s a different rant

If there is a predictable algorithm, it can and will be gamed by a bot.

The closest I’ve seen for control of voting is Slashdot: each person gets a limited number of mod points (votes) on a semi random basis. Then there is a meta moderation queue where a second group of semi randomly selected people vote on whether a given set of votes were sensible. If too many meta mods disagree with you, you don’t get as many mod points.

The biggest problem with that system is that it amplifies groupthink.

Yep. The business model has always been "Lure them in and stifle competition with a low initial cost. Then when we have the market we can jack up the price." Enshitification at its best.

They confirmed it wasn’t defederation- it is something to do with CloudFlare.