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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.
My advice. I made it very specific, but of course you can take and leave whichever parts you want:
Start by re-creating this website, with better architecture and minor improvements, but no major new features. First list all the features of this website (posts, comment trees, upvote/downvote, context, user profile, followers...), then come up with an architecture, then implement it, then copy all the data from this site onto the new one, then deploy it on https://beta.themotte.org and let mods and volunteers test it, then replace this site with the new one. Feel free to use Claude for everything, not only to implement the copy but list the features and maybe even plan an architecture etc. He is very useful as long as you make sure to go over everything he does and improve it to your standards. Again, don't implement any major new features until it can replace https://themotte.org.
Do exactly what Reddit has done with subreddits except where you've noticed issues, specifically the ID/name thing. That is a textbook example of great design: extremely simple (low code maintenance cost and user-facing, you don't even have to mention it exists) and fixes a real problem without any real downside.
Accept that this forum may not grow much so there may not be many communities here. Maybe you can create separate ones for the recurring threads: Culture War, Tinkering, Wellness, etc. Or maybe keep the Motte one community, and create a separate spin-off that has multiple.
If you create a spin-off, ask yourself: why would someone join my forum instead of an alternative, or create a community instead of a subreddit etc.? For example, maybe you can make a game dev spinoff that's better than existing game dev subreddits. Make sure to advertise why wherever you promote it. I recommend any politically-correct spinoff be an entirely separate from this non-PC one. I don't think lack of interoperability will be an issue. Speaking of...
IMO, most attempts at federation are a "solution in search of a problem". I recommend adding all federation features ad-hoc: only when needed, as simply as you can. In fact, I recommend this for all features that don't already exist on this old site.
For example, if someone wants to link a post from another instance of this forum (which implies you succeeded enough for there to be two instances), they may simply create a post whose URL is that of the post from the other instance. What I would do, is tell people to do that initially. If it becomes common enough to be worth spending maintenance for better UX, I would add official support so that, when the website sees a link to another forum instance, it displays it as a fancy "crosspost". The website can even pull comments from the other instance's post, and let it provide authentication credentials, then push local comments to it (making both posts effectively the same)...but only after crossposts are first implemented, if by then it seems like it would be useful.
Similarly, if someone wants to create an account on another instance, they can create it with the same username. If they want to show that they own both accounts, they can add a PGP key and list both instances in the account bios. "Federation" could be adding explicit support for this: if it's common enough, split the "bio" into "bio" and "PGP" (you can migrate the database), allow instances to store a list of "federated" other instances, and then for example, when someone follows a user, the server can notify them if not only the local account posts, but any account with its PGP key on any instance posts (possible by the instance servers pinging each other any time a user posts, just to alert followers on other instances).
Unfortunately, I'm skeptical this would work out. Why would people trust you to host their site (instead of Discourse etc.), especially when if they really trust you they can simply create a community? But I think the bigger issue is you will not want to host the instances of people who ask you. There are two big issues: 1) these people aren't technically proficient (or they'd self-host), so they'll constantly ask you for small fixes and threaten to move if you don't help them; and 2) these people will sometimes get into trouble with law enforcement, unless you moderate them the same way you moderate your own site. All these issues raise the question, why not just host the community yourself?
If you truly want to give others peace of mind and absolve yourself of responsibility, then make your forum software open-source and self-hostable. You can make it easy to self-host by creating a Docker container, which is deployable to a VPS in basically one click, and I don't think you have to worry about making it accessible for complete laymen, because the only people who will try to self-host are technically proficient (others will just make a community on your or another host).
Ultimately, communities succeed or fail by their culture, dictated by moderators and members, more than technology. The "Foundation" you have on this site can be the default for new communities, but trying to force their moderators to adhere to it is pointless at best, because if the moderators suck the community will fail.
You already proposed what I think is the proper solution to bad moderators: give admins (yourself) the power to rename a community to something niche and create a new community with the old name and new moderators. I'd recommend letting moderators police their own communities mostly hands-off, with three exceptions: 1) obviously if they do illegal stuff remove them, 2) handle moderator disputes like "rouge moderator removes everyone else before they can remove him" however you feel is best, and 3) if it's a community you really care about, make yourself a moderator (which tells members that you will interfere and enforce your Foundation, and if they don't like it they can create their own spin-off).
The Fediverse is the principled direction to take here. I imagine a bridge service could be created. Lemmy for example is federated and it's also basically a reddit clone, so the data plane should be compatible. When the exodus was being prepared by @ZorbaTHut on the OG /r/TheMotte I brought lemmy up, but its aesthetics were worse, and my spare time was negative.
ETA: Since code is free, maybe we can link up to Bluesky too? I recall some grumblings that the TheMotte is too right of center
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