What makes this difficult is a few things in my experience.
Comms are silos with no real intersectionality. Cross posting doesn’t really do the trick because it creates a whole new post with a new score.
Lemmy lacks a tagging system to allow for posts to be delineated within a comm.
1 + 2 incentivizes more comms to offer delineation, at the expense of subscriber fatigue. Too many comms to brows and pick from, leading to low traction in most comms outside of large broad stroke comms like News.
You cannot move a post from one comm to another.
Ideally, you would create as few comms as needed covering the broadest strokes possible, and delineate them with tags, creating a hierarchy of comms and tags.
News could embody all types of content, for example.
News > Sports
News > Politics
News > USA > Politics
Writing > Fake News
Writing > World Building
Gaming > TableTop
Gaming > Video Game
Theory > Marxism
Theory > Anarchism
Praxis > Unions
Praxis > Mutual Aid
Praxis > Direct Action
General > Slop
General > Gossip
Posts should be allowed to have any number of tags, and honestly, I don’t see why there should be much difference between a tag and a comm… There should be tags that are site wide, like NSFW, which would be a tag that is configured to blur its contents, or marked as a “content warning” tag.
Honestly I would love this. Replace comms with tags (which side note: should work with mastodon tags), posts can be in as many tags as possible, and those tags should be editable after posting, including my moderators.
I think the main issue would be that currently moderators are per-comnunity, and having moderators per-tag just feels weird.
Additionally, the blurring of content could be done like bluesky labelers, where you can specify that certain tags should make content fully hidden, blurred, or fully visible.
Yeah, the only big issue with replacing Comms with Tags is that Communities can be extremely tailored to a very specific niche thanks to the silo effect and having attached mods. This only works when the network effect is powerful, like with Reddit, where you have millions of users, though. I don’t see Tags really allowing for that level of community building ultimately.
Simply adding Tags (global tags and local community tags) would go a long way in condensing the number of communities, which raises the level of engagement of communities.
What makes this difficult is a few things in my experience.
Ideally, you would create as few comms as needed covering the broadest strokes possible, and delineate them with tags, creating a hierarchy of comms and tags.
News could embody all types of content, for example.
News > Sports News > Politics News > USA > Politics Writing > Fake News Writing > World Building Gaming > Table Top Gaming > Video Game Theory > Marxism Theory > Anarchism Praxis > Unions Praxis > Mutual Aid Praxis > Direct Action General > Slop General > GossipPosts should be allowed to have any number of tags, and honestly, I don’t see why there should be much difference between a tag and a comm… There should be tags that are site wide, like NSFW, which would be a tag that is configured to blur its contents, or marked as a “content warning” tag.
Honestly I would love this. Replace comms with tags (which side note: should work with mastodon tags), posts can be in as many tags as possible, and those tags should be editable after posting, including my moderators.
I think the main issue would be that currently moderators are per-comnunity, and having moderators per-tag just feels weird.
Additionally, the blurring of content could be done like bluesky labelers, where you can specify that certain tags should make content fully hidden, blurred, or fully visible.
Yeah, the only big issue with replacing Comms with Tags is that Communities can be extremely tailored to a very specific niche thanks to the silo effect and having attached mods. This only works when the network effect is powerful, like with Reddit, where you have millions of users, though. I don’t see Tags really allowing for that level of community building ultimately.
Simply adding Tags (global tags and local community tags) would go a long way in condensing the number of communities, which raises the level of engagement of communities.