TacoRaptor

I mean, anything is possible with enough programming skills and an API. And I did find multireddits to be very useful on Reddit. But I don’t think creating a “one true meta-community that replaces r/whatever” is either feasible or desirable.

Firstly, what your talking about want even possible on Reddit. Subreddits are infamous for fracturing over mod drama. Look at the Game of Thrones/ASOIAF subreddits. There’s the main sub r/ASOIAF which is for any media from the ASOIAF series which split into r/PureASOIAF for JUST talk about the books. R/GameofThrones was for talking about the TV show, but users hated how strict rules were for spoilers, so users went and made r/freefolk which got more popular than the original sub.

Second, at a fundamental level, Lemmy and any Fediverse social media is about decentralization. Even if you were able to develop such a tool over the top of Lemmy/Kbin, a meta-community wouldn’t really be centralized, as each community would have its own moderation team with its own rules. If one community defederates from any of the others, it would break the meta-community. Additionally, instance admins and community moderators might also oppose the tool if it brings an influx of outside users who aren’t subscribed to posting and commenting in their communities.

On both Reddit and Lemmy, anyone at any time can make their own subreddit/instance and host any new communities they want. People are going to organically pick whichever community fits the thing they’re looking for. That’s not always the same thing, and that’s a good thing. Some people want strict moderation and enforcement of being on-topic, some people don’t. Wishing your favorite subreddit hadn’t shut down or splintered doesn’t undo that it happened. Wanting an “official” community for your old favorite subreddit is unlikely, but possible. Wanting your community to be the “official” community across all of Lemmy & Kbin is unreasonable.

My suggestion is to hang out and see how the Fediverse works. Subscribe to some places and migrate your account if you don’t like the vibe of an instance. But Lemmy (and BeeHaw especially) aren’t trying to recreate Reddit exactly. This is our version of a link aggregate social media site, and sometimes not being like Reddit is intentional.

On every website I’ve ever ever been on, opting in for NSFW means opting in for porn. If you don’t want porn, disable NSFW, and block any communities that don’t use proper NSFW tags. If you want to sometimes view NSFW/porn, but not always, make an alt account, preferably on a NSFW-focused instance.

I learned this lesson on Mastodon, but all means ALL. It is an uncontrolled firehouse of posts without any algorithm to filter it. By design, if a single BeeHaw user subscribes to a porn community, then the entire instance shows up in everyone’s all feed, unless BeeHaw defederates.

You could always make a feature request with the Lemmy devs, but they are swamped with all the bug reports and feature requests. There is no way to tell when or if the feature you’re asking will be implemented, and when BeeHaw will update to it. So to answer your question, no there isn’t. You’ll need to disable NSFW.

What good ideas, specifically?

I would say that the Fediverse, Lemmy, Etc. are diametrically opposed to blockchain in the way each approaches decentralization.

The blockchain/crypto, tries to “solve” decentralization by creating a trustless database that nobody can own. It assumes that the technology is perfect software, executing the same code for everyone, equally, without outside interference. It requires all users to be equal, that any changes be made in the interest of the collective.

What actually happens, especially as you scale up, is that early investors are disproportionately valued, while wealthy investors can dump tons of money into mining. These stakeholders then expect a profit in return, and the loop of enshittification begins. The stakeholders can apply pressure to fork or update the blockchain in ways that favor them, and normal people have no recourse to do anything.

Blockchain is also, by design, incredibly inefficient. Bitcoin, which caps at 7 transactions per second, cannot scale to any meaningful, and require third-party exchanges to perform transactions OFF the blockchain taking a cut of the cost in the process. The various proof-of-stake can achieve reasonable TPS rates, but also require a third-party to provide collateral, which again gives them power over the platform. And sure, you could make your own small cryptocurrency, but to federatate your coin to other coins you still need a third-party exchange!

The Fediverse, by contrast, is based on the idea of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS). It thinks that private, for-profit entities shouldn’t control public resources, and that technology is best when it is transparent and accessible to everyone. Here, decentralization is a tool. While ActivityPub (the technology behind the Fediverse) is decentralized in implementation, the standard is maintained by a central governing body (the W3C, an international non-profit consortium).

Another difference is that ActivityPub isn’t “trustless” like blockchain. On a Fediverse social media platform, like Lemmy, each server is an independent central authority, a unique database of users, posts, and interactions. Rules and decisions are governed by their administrators, and the moderators they appoint. It only achieves decentralization by allowing these servers to federate by (and this is key) trusting other servers. Trust is the default, which is antithetical to the blockchain. Admins can then revoke trust for malicious actors. You can see this happening now on Mastodon with the news about Meta joining the Fediverse, the Fediverse Pact, and the ripple affects on mstdn.social and mastodon.art.

Blockchain ultimately fails as a technology because the core assumption it makes is flawed. A truly trustless system cannot exist. You trust the programmers who make a blockchain or ActivityPub that their source code does what it says it does, and they haven’t secretly modified anything. You have to trust the third-parties that make crypto exchanges and Lemmy instances with your personal data and to operate as promised. You have to trust the other users you send money to or reply to in the comments. By viewing “decentralization” as the solution and “trust” as the problem, blockchain dooms itself to never accomplish anything of value.

Ignoring the difference between copyright and patents, this is exactly the kind of motivation I’m looking to prevent! The idea that the only driver of invention and creativity is the profit motive is corporate propaganda. Humans have, from our evolution, always been driven to invent and create to make our lives easier.

Using the example of pharma company, if a hypothetical company with infinite funds and resources for their R&D group wants to develop a new drug that cures cancer, despite having infinite input, they will still never produce anything if they don’t have people to do the work of research and development. A media company like Disney, despite their vast wealth, cannot produce movies without writers, animators, voice actors, production crews, etc. This is my reason for people being the only ones able to own a copyright. (Edit to fix a typo)

I think copyright is most valuable as a tool to protect someone’s work from plagiarism. Preventing others from copying your work without attribution is a good thing. Using copyright to block the derivative or transformative work others make is counterproductive. I like the phrase “rising tides lifts all boats”.

I think rules on fair use should be far more forgiving than they currently are. You should be able to protect complete concepts, like a unique character, setting, or story, but you can’t stop others from modifying or being inspired by someone’s ideas.

I also think corporations or private entities should never be able to own copyright. Copyright must be owned by a person or a group of people (the makers/authors). Ownership of copyright shouldn’t be able to be transferable, but you can give permission to use the copyright like a normal license or contract would. That means copyright ends when the last owner does, and the work enters public domain.

Edit corrected with attribution to without attribution

I think your first idea is very interesting. It essentially turns public domain (with attribution) into the default. I wonder whether you have to opt-in to copyright before sharing, or if you get a small indow to opt-in after sharing. For example, a creator shares something online that “goes viral” unexpectedly without specifying the work is copyrighted. Do they get a period (say 60 days) to specify “wait, this is under copyright”?