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 -
I think you are trying to solve a real problem - it's entirely true that a website that exists only to host a single discussion topic will vitrify, and will feel a lot less like a community besides. Part of what made Old Reddit special was that everyone was a "real person", with their entire set of interests collected in one account. The guy talking about immigration rates with you was also a welder, and a hobbyist C programmer. In contrast, everyone on each of the various offshoot forums is there because a banned community was one of their primary interests, and their activity there is distinct from their activity anywhere else.
However, I don't think adding subreddits will help. It's a small and cohesive enough community that anything any of us would want to post here is probably of interest to anyone reading the main feed. There's no influx of people that will let a really good moderator turn themotte.org/gardening into a thriving gardening community. Other Reddit offshoots have tried this and never really had much success, aside from the massive exodus around Voat that had people convinced that it could really be Reddit's successor back in the '10s. Communities.win, for example, is anchored by The_Donald, which still has thousands of active users, and its set of communities amounts to a couple of fairly inactive replacements for other subreddits that got banned.
I know it's a bit of a buzzword, but Federation is the only thing that really works here. Code is cheap nowadays; have Claude Opus 5.5 (or one of the Fable models, if you've got the $100 a month) tie Plemora into the forum, letting users talk to people from the other servers out there and letting the other servers comment in threads here. The Fediverse is full of the sort of tech-savvy, contrarian, erudite people that are our core demographic, and being able to engage with this community using a client they're already comfortable with eliminates a big source of onboarding friction. Nostr in particular has a bunch of smart-but-fanatical tech guys who will use the social media service with the best whitepaper come hell or high water.
I'm working on something of exactly this nature - a Fedi-enabled replacement for a historically-significant BBS forum that recently died, and I'd be glad to talk to site devs about it.
My apologies for not answering your call earlier. I'd be happy to talk to you about this.
As opposed to now, where nobody is real. When you ask a question in a reality-based forum or Discord chat, a community of 100,000 subscribers will post maybe 10 replies. 9 of those will be wrong or irrelevant. When I ask a question I get no substantive reply; when I post I get no substantive engagement. While I am a fan of doing things that don't scale, my efforts could be put to better use scaling now that the technology to do so has become available, and I'm at a time in my life where I simply need to accept that the early '10s are not coming back, so it's time to ruthlessly distill what was good about them down to their base essence and move on. If being able to ask a question and get decent responses in a reasonable timeframe is something that builds wisdom among those who do not know how to ask, then I am wasting my talents by not scaling.
But if human beings are indistinguishable from artificial intelligences (especially when you consider that a "human being" is, at least to some religions, this software), how best to harness those intelligences to expose intuition that other AIs don't have?
I think the reason for that is that the Internet was actually completely dead by late 2016. I think the warning that the Internet was over occurred when 4chan failed to successfully splinter because of moot's mishandling of Gamergate.
This is because everything that could be written down was, and once that happened, people stopped logging in (but never bothered to unsubscribe) to answer questions. Google was still sophisticated enough to index most of this. After that, Twitter and Facebook (as platforms that were designed from the beginning for tripfagging) ate what little was left of the public square.
You can see this in StackOverflow too, where the site remained strong until AI got good at which point it deserted completely, because it is faster and more efficient (and far less rudely nitpicky) at answering the average coding question than the collective of human beings. And I think this is increasingly happening to other sites that discuss reality as well- why log into the forum if you can just ask the AI, searcher of all forum posts ever written? Just as the personal firearm is the Great Equalizer, AI is the Great Federalizer.
An evolution of /r9k/ is probably instructive as to what the solution should be: if what you're about to type is detected by the robot to be a duplicate of a discussion already happening, or a duplicate of something in the past X days, then you are unable to post that thing, which limits you to posts that at least have a novel theory of mind behind them. It should also be able to cross-reference previous posts that one makes that talked about the same thing to build a reference network for users- I, and the other users who I took that idea from, already practice a form of this. It's not enough to just see sources; you need to be able to see where the AI got its context from so you can check its work.
Ideally, one would be able to not just tag comments, but the thought process behind them, so that if they need to be indexed or referenced later the metadata behind why they were written (and why they were written that way) still exists. This is also (to a point) an anti-AI feature, since thought processes are, if not hidden by AI platforms, long enough that a user needs to actually read them to know them. Obviously this is something present in humans (if there was no thought process behind the comment, then it is meaningless and should be treated accordingly- if it's a meme, it goes in the meme hole, because the reason it was posted was consensus-building; and consensus-building, while a perfectly valid reason for a comment to exist, is also completely useless if you're interested in the nuts and bolts understanding of things).
I disagree. Federation [in the sense that you mean it] is already accomplished at the web browser (or the app store) layer. If you want an instance, you type 'git clone' followed by the repository containing the code and stand it up yourself (or rather, get your AI to do that), then you stick a domain name on there and you're done.
The only thing "federation" enables in this context is bullying. If the forum still functions when all posters are Anonymous, you didn't need the usernames (this is the final solution to 'blocking', by the way- blacklists are for tripfags). Conquest's Second Law clearly states that any forum that is insufficiently focused on reality inevitably devolves into tripfagging, and federation dramatically accelerates this process.
AI moderation tools (and the uncensored models, if you're running a forum that is sufficiently spicy) are now good enough to deal with the spam, untrusted user, and the clinically retarded (they're the same picture).
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