Hey there! For complicated reasons, some of which I will explain later, I'm in the middle of dong a pretty gigantic revamp to the Motte codebase. Right now, this means "fix a bunch of small bugs". Later, other things will be happening.
The immediate goal of this is not to massively transform the site or do a Digg v4/New Reddit thing. Frankly, if the site remained exactly the same (but with fewer bugs) I would be happy.
The long-term goal isn't going to be quite that static, though. The long-term goal is to set things up to allow more subcommunities, similar to how subreddits work. This will be a larger set of changes. These changes will not obsolete The Motte itself; I am absolutely aiming for a site that can comfortably keep holding The Motte. I've talked about this before if you want to go read about it - this is still the same plan, for what it's worth, it's just now being (slowly) executed.
I will be posting more, and asking questions about next steps, when actual site behavioral changes are in the queue. This just isn't that! This is infrastructure work.
tl;dr: The site backend may be a little wonky for a bit, sorry about that, please report any bugs.
(and mods, feel free to unsticky this in a few days if I forget)
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Notes -
Oh God please no. This is what killed reddit. Reddit was so much better when it was just a few people on a few official subreddits.
I mean I guess the correct thing to say would be that many many factors killed reddit over the course of 20 years. Our userbase here at TheMotte might be small enough that the existence of subreddits wouldn’t cause fracturing. But generally I view it as a bad sign, and the fact that all discussion here is centralized in the CW thread is one of the main draws of TheMotte for me.
Yes, but also no. I mean, Reddit in general is 99% full of garbage. But there are some quite nice niche communities. If subreddit system did not exist, the garbage would envelop everything and the communities would not survive. But since each subreddit pretty much can exist in its own bubble and ignore what is happening outside it, it can survive. I don't think we really need it here at this stage, but I am very glad it exists on Reddit.
A problem in Reddit is brigading: members of other communities interfering one they don’t like. A more general form of brigading is when a subreddit reaches the frontpage, then average Redditors discover it, and inadvertently brigade it by making average-Redditor posts and comments.
I have not seen a single Reddit sub that hasn’t been destroyed this way, except for niche interests and local communities. And I hear stories of even those being infected with people outside the interest or the community.
This makes me hesitant to suggest federation, especially with the more radical Lemmy instances. I think we should, at least initially, only federate with Motte-platform and whitelisted communities. But in federation it’s easier than subreddits to distinguish and block outside servers: if a community is obnoxious and we block them and remove their users’ “contributions”, now they must make an account here and get past the spam filter…which is possible, but it’s a higher barrier at least good enough to filter “average Redditor” types.
IMO brigading was an overstated problem. Local moderators could handle it, and it was mainly used as justification to ban subreddits on very shaky grounds. Woke sub says something unpopular, gets downvotes and hostile comments, blames whichever non-woke sub was most active at the time, admins ban it. This was before they just explicitly banned anything not left-of-center.
Moreover, comment-brigading is relatively harmless. Brigaded comments get downvoted and hidden. We don't have to accept other sites' votes, only their comments - and any node that hosts a bunch of spammers can be defederated.
I'll also say that you shouldn't worry about "radical lemmy instances". These are hugboxes for redditors who want to consider themselves special even as the main site is politically indistinguishable from theirs. They'll blacklist us immediately, and we'll never hear from them.
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For me, the solution is communities so niche nobody is really interested in brigading them, and that attract mods who really care about the subject, not clout or wokeness or anything else. I don't know, maybe it not always works, but for like half-dozen ones I am interested in, they survive. I'm a bit sad the place they survive on is Reddit, but I am glad they exist nonetheless.
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So keep in mind that federation does not imply bypassing filters. Assuming we do have federation, and assuming we federate with Lemmy instances, then Lemmy users would still have to go through the new-user gauntlet. They don't get to skip that. And our spam filters et al would still apply to them. As far as I'm concerned, federation is just a convenient way to make an implicit account, nothing more; it doesn't come with status above what a new account gets.
We'd be in the same situation as we were on Reddit, which empirically worked reasonably well, except if the Lemmy admins started demanding that we remove references to certain subjects, our response would be "lol no".
I still think we should disable Motte federation with mainstream Lemmy, at least because I'm sure they will get mad and immediately block us. But if there are more tolerant Lemmy (or Mastodon) instances, we can whitelist them.
I remember when the whole federation hype started, the most popular discussions had been along the lines of "how do I block server X?" and "how do I block everyone who doesn't block server X?". I lost interest to it about that time, and I don't think it got better since.
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Oh I fully expect federation with them to not happen. But it'll be on them, not us.
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