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I'm afraid I've been talking on Reddit.
It's goddamn annoying.
I don't know if anyone here is still discussing stuff on Reddit regularly, but Reddit has rolled out a new improved block feature, where someone blocks you and then you can't see them and they can't see you. Of course inevitably this is being used regularly to get the last word in a discussion; that's why our Block feature is specifically designed to make that impossible. But this is happening in straight-up debate subreddits, with some communities slowly polarizing into two parallel communities that can't see each other or talk to each other, talking past each other with everyone else caught in the middle.
Fuckin' sucks.
Let's talk about something else.
One of the very-long-term plans for the Motte that's always kinda been banging around in the back of my mind is trying to expand this community into a serious Reddit competitor. Part of this means opening up community creation in much the same way Reddit has; instead of the mods needing to make every subcommunity, let the community do it. I have a few pages of notes on code architecture and more notes on how to handle site-wide policy and Sketchy Communities.
This has historically been implausible because it's a ton of coding. For . . . reasons I'm not going to describe in detail right now . . . the codebase The Motte currently runs on is a dead-end; by using it, we're in a kind of shaky position, but nobody cares enough about us to shake us, so I've just let it ride. For anything that looks vaguely like "try to become larger" it needs to be nuked and paved, and in the process rewritten to suck less butt (I have opinions on code architecture.) On the other hand . . . AI exists, right? It's really good. A lot of the difficulty of writing something like The Motte is not in the kind of deep architecture decisions that AI is bad at, it's just a shitload of really boring code that AI is great at.
I wrote a video player because there were like three features I wanted. That wasn't even Fable, that was Opus 4.7. Every week, "rewrite the Motte codebase, but less crappy" becomes more viable, and the hardest problems shift away from money and engineering, and towards community management.
Whoops, I ended up talking about the same thing.
Who could have seen that coming.
There's a few problems Reddit has that I feel are kind of knotted up in each other. Be warned, this is going to be long; I don't have time to make it shorter.
Reddit plays these cutesy games with "subreddit ownership" that I've always kinda hated. The mods control a subreddit, completely and unassailably . . . unless the subreddit does something Reddit doesn't like, in which case they replace the owners. But that doesn't mean Reddit condones the subreddits! No, the subreddits are owned by the moderators! It's the moderators to blame if anything bad happens there! Please ignore the points where Reddit interferes. Reddit doesn't interfere because that would make Reddit responsible. That never happens. Except on this subreddit over here, where we have to interfere, but it has never happened before and will never happen again, oh look another one, let's interfere here also.
It's fundamentally dishonest. They're playing both sides of a difficult decision and trying to get the credit for both. Thankfully most people aren't buying into this, but they're still doing it.
This is exacerbated by Reddit's namespacing woes. Subreddits are defined entirely by their subreddit name, which means if you happened to squat on a name, that name is now yours. Sometimes this is funny (hello /r/trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts) and sometimes it's actually kind of crappy (/r/worldpolitics, nsfw). (Which admittedly then loops back around into "funny", as per /r/anime_titties, which is surprisingly safe for work.) And then sometimes it's toxic; can you name a community that got taken over by people who seem to exemplify the worst of that community? Or who seem to actively hate the thing it's ostensibly about? If you can't, then I envy you, because you clearly don't use Reddit very often, which is a good decision.
The problem is that Reddit doesn't have the ability to rename subreddits. They never have. So if there's a group doing something questionable - let's say /r/YourIngroup has been taken over by your outgroup, substitute the metasyntactic variables as appropriate - the only levers they can pull are "replace mods", "ban subreddit entirely", or "ignore".
What if "rename" were possible?
What if subreddits had a unique internal ID, but the front-page label was replaceable? So in a world where /r/politics is taken over by your outgroup, an event which I'm sure nobody here has previously considered, it could just be renamed to /r/PoltiicsYourOutgroup and a new neutral politics subreddit formed?
"This subreddit is yours. You can do what you want with it. But the names are ours. Your subreddit has been moved; your subscribers moved along with it; we welcome your success; we just don't welcome your success under that label."
In a hypothetical world where we had this site, what if we were a bit more formal with ownership?
You can just make a submotte and nobody stops you. But at some point the mod interface starts pestering you to make an important decision: is this a community submotte, or a privately-owned submotte? If it's a community submotte, you relinquish ultimate ownership to The Motte; we'll help you define a purpose for the community and then enforce that purpose, in much the same way as corporate ownership works (tl;dr: "you have vast and flexible power as long as you can justify it following the purpose of the company, but the one thing you can't do is violate that purpose or work against the best interests of
the shareholdersthe Motte").Don't want to be ultimately liable to us? Choose Privately Owned; you can pay a reasonable monthly fee and we are happy to keep hosting it. You have full power over it. It's yours! But if you do something that we don't want to host at all, we'll give you a reasonable short warning to export the data and host it yourself, and then kick you off.
I think this sort of relies on federation. Make The Motte a protocol (maybe see if we can twist the Fediverse protocol into working for us, or give up on that and just make our own), provide the sourcecode, and now moving your site off The Motte is easy.
The big problem with the Fediverse is that they treat federation transitively. If you federate the worst community imaginable - which I think we can all agree are the Wet Sock Appreciators, curse those people - then the core Fediverse nodes won't federate you. But we don't have to do that. We can refuse to federate with the Wet Sock Appreciators if we think they're truly unredeemable, but if someone else wants to be a node that federates with both us and them, alright, have at it, we'll allow it.
So if you make a privately-owned Wet Sock Appreciator submotte, and we decide to kick you off (as is obviously deserved for members of such a heinous group), (1) you can just host it elsewhere, (2) your users can just use something capable of seeing it.
I don't think there can be such a thing as truly objective judgement when it comes to something like community dynamics. There's a reason we have the Wildcard Rule, and we don't use it often, but we do use it.
But there are ways to make this better.
One of the best things I did when making The Motte was to write the Foundation. It was meant as the overall north star for the community, so if I had to ask why I was doing this, or if I had to make a hard decision, I could check the Foundation and see if that made it easier. That's why we're here, for the record - when it came down to "move or censor yourselves", I looked at the Foundation and realized that moving was a good chance of death, but self-censorship was death. Maybe The Motte would be a thing that existed, but the Foundation would no longer apply.
I've changed the Foundation once. It used to say "subreddit". When we moved, I changed it to "community". Besides that, it's gone completely unchanged.
So maybe we do the same thing. Maybe we require that communities make a Foundation; basically a community Constitution, similar to the Company Purpose I alluded to earlier. It is what the community is judged on, it is what the moderators are judged on. And if the moderators start violating a community's Foundation, the moderators are removed.
I think it's easy to read this and think "oh gosh zorba is gonna replace everything overnight, everything is going to be destroyed". Nah. That's not happening.
But I've had this box in my brain labeled "Motte plans" for a very long time. That box is full of interlocked gears, and up until lately it was just deadlocked. Now it's feeling like some of the deadlocks are starting to lift, and the gears are slowly turning, and maybe it's time to revisit the box.
This isn't happening today, and this isn't happening tomorrow, and if it happens, it will be very gradual, and with the preservation of this community in the forefront. And let's be honest it's probably not happening at all.
But the word "probably" is doing nonzero work in that sentence.
Do these ideas help?
Would they work?
Would people put up with it?
Do these concepts help enough?
What am I missing?
I have no idea.
Feedback requested.
This is so fucking stupid, though twitter does almost the same thing in not allowing you to reply to posts by people who have blocked you or even view their timeline.
I think that blocking can be a useful feature for some users, trading some accuracy of your view of the community for some peace of mind. It is not a substitute for moderation though, because it scales very badly -- if you have N offenders and K offendees for a particular topic, then it will take N*K blocks to settle.
Sure, it sucks if someone were to make a scathing reply to a popular post you made and you were not even aware of it because you had previously blocked the replier. But that is your problem because you opted for a less accurate map of reality.
Filtering the perception of what others see is totally unacceptable. Filtering what others can interact with is acceptable in the context of moderation, provided it is done in the open. Nobody expects the facebook pages of PETA or Tasty Sausages to be havens of free speech. But for an open discussion board this would be utterly ridiculous. If the Motte worked so that you could not reply to anyone who felt you had previously offended them (or had strategically blocked you to make it harder for you to spread your ideas through replies), it would be pretty useless indeed.
The only steelman I can think of in this regard is in the context of non-public, whitelist only discussions. If I have a group "Serious Discussions" with four other people on Signal (or whatever), then obviously nothing is stopping the four of them to also form a group "Serious Discussions Without quiet_NaN". Not particularly nice, and certainly a good reason to find different friends, but also not necessarily evil, because I can reasonably be expected to anticipate the possibility of communications which I know nothing about happening. At least everyone who can read a given message has common knowledge about who can read (and reply to) that message. The latter is not the case with that Reddit/Twitter thing, because nobody can be expected to keep track of who is blocking whom currently.
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Having gotten that out of my system, I found the rest of your post interesting as well.
I very much like the "host your own option" idea. What is fundamentally wrong (IMO) with most social media platforms is that they are very much designed as walled gardens, which makes a lot of sense if the goal is to create shareholder value, but is actively unhelpful if you care about communities or freedom of speech.
One technical drawback is that an open system requires well-defined protocols and backwards compatibility. If discord wants to
push their next step of enshittification on an unsuspecting publicroll out a new feature, they can simply deploy their update on their servers and make the clients update. If you want to do the same with E-mail, that will involve industry meetings, and RFCs describing standards which Microsoft then ignores (or not, I stopped paying attention to them in the early 2000s).Another more specific thing is poster authentication. When the motte moved from reddit, it would have been very convenient to take a copy of the user database along, but that was very much not technically feasible. It would certainly be possible to create a protocol where all the information on how you id individual users was common knowledge, but the downside is that this would limit your userbase to the people who feel comfortable creating and using client-side certificates, which is approximately a null set in the space of all possible users. Relying on OAuth only moves the problem. Google will obviously be willing to authenticate users for well-regarded websites such as the motte, but once the Wet Sock Appreciators get kicked out and have to self-host, they may find that Google is unwilling to deal with them, so they could not take their userbase along. (Also, if I had a google account, I would want it nowhere near my quiet_NaN persona for reasons related to opsec.)
Edit: as far as namespaces are concerned, DNS seems to be the obvious solution. submottes get a real name as in xcpe76yl.sub.themotte.org. Because nobody wants to use that, people can set up CNAMEs (plus the bells and whistles to make it work with https), e.g. culturwar.themotte.org if they want to stay in the namespace you control, or wetsocknews.com if they anticipate that they might need to self-host. (This obviously makes auth a bit harder due to browser's cross site scripting policies, but seems solvable for per-hoster auth.)
While this is kind of true, there's also a lot of room for protocols with a well-defined core and constantly mutating fringes. Google, for example, is constantly trying out little HTML extensions, the bad ones of which die on the vine and the good ones eventually get subsumed into the standard. There's a linux desktop called KDE, running on a protocol called Wayland, and KDE is always adding its own little tests to it with the same result; most of them die unceremoniously and are removed, some of them get nicely polished and turn into official Wayland features.
I've got no problem with that here also. It looks like Lemmy is already using ActivityPub, and I think there are some questionable decisions in this but nothing that prevents us from implementing ActivityPub as core functionality and then layering our own stuff on top of that. Much of which will end up dying and being removed, some of which might become a de-facto or even a true standard eventually.
This feels honestly pretty solvable; remember, we can always host our own OAuth if we like! We can even use Google's OAuth and then provide a subsidiary of that.
"Export the database" is fraught in many complicated ways but they feel roughly solvable if you're willing to devote the
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