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I'd be willing to throw some hours at this, though I'll recognize my area of focus is neither webdev nor the massively parallel http serve optimizations you'd need to have this scale.
My biggest immediate concern is the face value of "What if subreddits had a unique internal ID, but the front-page label was replaceable?" That's a hard problem, and one with a lot of bad solutions. Reddit (and tumblr, and a lot of other social media) overloads the value of 'name'. It's both an identifier for access purposes, a community label, and a navigation and search aid.
So... let's pretend we have /r/trees (id: 101) and /r/pot (id: 102), which are humorously mixed up so that 101 refers to marijuana, and 102 is the horticulture of apple trees. The joke finally got old, and everyone agrees (note: this will never happen) that they need to be fixed so that /r/pot is attached to ID 101, and /r/trees is ID 102. What does that mean, from a technical level?
Is the new link themotte.org/r/101/this-is-a-pot-thread, and all that changes is what themotte.org/r/pot redirects toward? Because humans don't remember even small numbers well, and if the IDs are alphanumeric or GUID, they'll hate it. Or is it themotte.org/r/pot/this-is-a-pot-thread, and any previous links are updated automatically (that seems a database nightmare, and impossible for off-site links)? Or is the ID part of the thread identifier, and the submotte id only a navigation aid?
Who arbitrates when /r/politics has been taken over by your outgroup, can they fund the inevitable lawsuit or forced arbitration, and what's that look like to normal users?
I think there's ways to sell it, but I think it matters heavily what you're selling. People like reddit, tumblr, twitter, yada, because it's hilariously easy to go from a community member to running your own minisite, and the pressure to do so first means that anyone on the fence either jumps or ends up drawn to an aggregator. Even though setting up a XenoForum site is just a couple hours of work, the
Part of your alpha is the direct website functionality and the aggregator work, but it also needs to be the services you're offering, which is one of the spots that Reddit/Tumblr/whatever have historically been the worst at. People get committed when they buy in, even small costs, and there's a lot of genuine services that are pretty valuable to users and that traditional social media has avoided.
But those services are their own fracture point: DNS means you can get ARFCOM'd, private messaging or live chat adds a lot of COPA concerns, custom templating rather than rawdogging CSS means support costs. So tradeoffs, there. And there's a very serious temptation to go full Discord and start upselling useless crap, at which point your customers hate you.
Uh, some non-obvious problems:
Categorization. I'll take ARK as an example: you have /r/playark at the 'official' subreddit, /r/ark as the community subreddit, /r/survivetogether as the 'official' server listing, /r/playarkservers for community server listings, a handful of other subreddits for specific ports, yada, and that's just the stuff that's on reddit. And while ARK is particularly poorly thought out (badum tish), that's not really unique. /r/ffxiv has about thirty related subreddits, and maybe a dozen or so subreddits that are still about FFXIV that the /r/ffxiv moderators either don't want to highlight or actively loathe. This both pollutes the namespace, and it also means finding a list of everything ARK-related or FFXIV-related is extremely difficult, rather than a single existing page.
There's a couple solutions here. The namespace solution is the obvious coder one: r.games.ffxiv.<community> and r.games.ark.<community>, throw a page that lists them with some sort capability (and maybe allow management of that page by moderators for the recognized community), done. (uh, until you think about Prey 2017 vs Prey 2006). And then you think about literally anything other than video games, where the categorization gets weird fast. This is how usenet worked, but it's also why usenet ended up with things like alt.horror.werewolves having a bunch of furries and therians.
The other is tag-based. Still have the collision problem, but the bigger issue's whether you allow user tagging -- see tumblr's search for how that goes -- or have to do some work to manage it.
Separation. Even if you don't host images/video, you're going to get content you don't want available to every user, and you're going to get content that goes together like peanut butter and some of reddit's now-banned infamous subreddits. Smut's the most obvious case, here, but it's also the 'easiest'... and it's pretty telling that Reddit's NSFW marker keeps getting reused for everything from spoilers to gore to trychtophobia to spiders to a million other things.
Search. Good fucking god, reddit, what the everliving fuck.
Federation and the Transitive Property. I'm... not sure if this is a general problem, or one specific to the Mastodon implementation, but there's historically been a tendency to threat some forms of content as fundamentally corrosive, and I don't expect that to decrease. Technical solutions haven't historically been sufficient, in general because of reputation effects, in some cases (the baraag saga) augmented by legal concerns.
I like this, it's like reinventing USENET. Arguably the overarching vision here is exactly USENET, but on the web.
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This is roughly my plan, yeah.
themotte.org/r/pot means "the current subreddit named pot, whatever that might be"; it is not actually a unique identifier. It's possible that if you go to /r/pot itself, you would get redirected to themotte.org/r/pot/main/102, which will always refer to Subreddit 102, later to be known as trees, even if it's no longer /r/pot. This means that anyone going to "/r/pot" ends up in whatever community we currently have blessed with the name "/r/pot", but a copypasted link gets that specific community even if it has since been renamed.
Thread links don't include a subreddit ID, but they do include a post ID; the subreddit and thread name are completely irrelevant. Reddit already does part of this -https://old.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/1tehscm/theres_a_fox_family_living_under_our_front_porch/ is the exact same as www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/1tehscm/i_sure_do_love_beef/. And while it does validate the /r/aww part for some reason, the comment ID is globally unique. We just have to make it pay attention to that.
Well, the buck stops with me, in the end. So, "me, or someone delegated by me to solve these problems".
One thing I'm currently unsure of is how to tell when it needs actual attention; obviously any subreddit as big as /r/politics is going to have people constantly spamming "this subreddit is violating its own rules" reports. But this feels like one of those "we'll deal with that later" things; I can't come up with a solution when I don't see how the problem behaves. It will be a problem, but this also feels solvable.
Yeah, this is fair; I may have to bump "you can make a site" up in priority for the sake of buy-in.
DNS may be a surprisingly small issue; ARFCOM was due to being kicked off Godaddy, I think? There are much better DNS providers out there who are far less eager to kick people off.
I'm actually not too concerned about custom templating, you can do sufficiently bad stuff with CSS that a real bad actor will find a way to be a nuisance anyway. One step at a time here, honestly.
COPPA is a gigantic pain. I would probably just remove 13-or-younger logins to start with, frankly. This is maybe something I should be doing already though. I am . . . not looking forward to the legal side of this.
Huh. That's a neat idea.
It is definitely . . . controversy-fraught, let's say. At the same time, if community names really aren't permanent, it feels more adjustable. Something like the Ark situation could be handled by just tossing a thread onto all relevant communities and saying "hey, we want to solve this, hash out what names you'd prefer?" and doing a doge-ish process to come to a sensible agreed-upon conclusion.
(I would fully want to automate the Doge process.)
I'm actually not familiar enough to Tumblr to know what's going on here. What did happen?
I think my gut feeling is that user tagging works actually pretty well as long as you have reasonable thresholds for when you officially bless tags. Steam games are technically user-tagged and do just fine; I can also think of, uh, a site with a number in it that has a phenomenally thorough crowdsourced tagging system.
This does tap into one other actual big problem, which is the increasing tendency of governments to want to segregate anything even vaguely adult away from the entire rest of the world.
I can think of a few approaches.
One is to just not worry about it. Reddit still has porn. Deal with it. I feel like porn is less of a problem for communities than it is for community managers without a spine, and I don't plan to be that person.
Another is to have a "everything except the porn" URL, and then an "everything including the porn" URL, using the "everything except the porn" URL pretty much everywhere we can. You want the porn, someone will eventually mention the with-the-porn version; go to that site.
Yeah, you're not wrong.
I think there's a point where this can be solved by the biggest whale simply saying "no, we're not going to do that; you can de-federate with us if you want, but other than that, deal with it, because we are not planning to de-federate with other groups". There's a lot of really awful people running email servers that can still send emails to gmail, so this is clearly not an unsolvable problem. And that's not even indirect federation, that's direct sends!
Copypaste seems survivable, but I'd be a little cautious about what that does if people manually type a link to a community. Admittedly, might not be a common enough use case to matter.
Yeah. And a lot of the metrics that would be naively useful, like whether there's a bunch of splintering or a quickly growing competitor subreddit, are bad to make actual measures because Goodhart.
Fair point. I'm mostly thinking about the incompetent actor that needs ten hours of your tech support's time while you get a reputation for 'breaking' a sub for them putting a period in the wrong place. But that's what reset/load default buttons are for.
For fandom reasons, Tumblr's pretty notorious for weird, overlapping, and very unintuitive tags, and despite that, those tags can take off aggressively. Sometimes this works out well, especially when it's got some coordination: #undertail has 'stuck' several years after Toby Fox proposed it, if anyone wants to see Asgore dad bod and some skeletons bumping uglies. Just as importantly, if they don't, they have to make a significant typo to get from #undertale to that one. But more often, you end up with (overlapping) acronyms, barely related content using snowclones, or bizarre memes (general news updates get tagged with SPN shipping names).
And then you get trolls that will spam every high-profile matter with unrelated content, either to screw up tag following, trying to push their own visibility, or to start fights.
Tumblr's user tagging system has been kinda reused as a way to out-of-thread comment, and it's tied to (thankfully only original) posts rather than to subreddit or forum equivalents, so some of those issues (eg, threads getting tagged 'lmoa' or 'yes') aren't as likely to show up in a sanely designed site. But they're illustrative.
Yeah, the boorus have definitely made it work. That said, they've also typically had to do so with a very heavy hand and a lot of cruft: you probably don't have to worry about a four hundred line analysis to translate "pussy" to "vagina" (a literal two-year on-going process at e621, still incomplete), but I'd still plan early around a situation where a big fandom coalesced around thirty or so completely unrelated tags, some of which overlap with other intended uses of those same tags.
That's fair. I'd long-hoped that the old compromise of 'I won't make you see it, you don't make me see you whine' could last, and despite its difficulties, there's reason to hope it was rejected rather than really failed.
I guess I'm more motioning around the non-porn variants being a problem that will arise, if not one as immediately likely to result in legal threat.
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