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Up until now, social containers like groups, communities, or subreddits on all the largest social networks have existed as fundamentally separate locations on a single hierarchical level.
“Up until now”… Uh… no, Usenet… was the open standard for social media. Created in 1979. A foundation of the Internet. Just as much as e-mail was.
alt.tv.simpsons
alt.tv.futuramaWhy did so much of usenet end up on Google Groups?
It was a big deal when we got an archive we could search of all content…
“The Deja News Research Service was an archive of messages posted to Usenet discussion groups, started in March 1995 by Steve Madere in Austin, Texas. Its powerful search engine capabilities won the service acclaim, generated controversy, and significantly changed the perceived nature of online discussion. This archive was acquired by Google in 2001.”
Why did change the perceived nature? That discussion became less ethereal?
Storage was still pretty expensive, and there we transitions in computing from originally paper terminals to screen and people didn’t have a sense of long-term retention of personal messages (I guess many people probably felt that way about SMS messages on mobile). There also wasn’t really a way to look at a user’s “profile” like you have on Lemmy - to see everything you post in any topic - which a search-engine provided a way to search for your name across a time period.
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That’s not really the same thing because ‘alt.tv’ doesn’t aggregate everything under it. Let alone the other relationships they describe (e.g. biochemistry).
Really, are you going to ignore what it says? The opening?
It implies a flat /c/a /c/b /r/a /r/b system “until now”? Or am I wrong?
Perhaps you aren’t faniliar with how under-utilizes naming dots matter in domain names?
smtp.chemistry.science.oranic.org has been in the Internet (Usenet) conventions for a VERY long time! Forgotten, burred in $$$$$$ wealth. “Windows”… Everywhere. Owning the words. TradeMarks.
Those who forget USENET are doomed to repeat it forevermore…
Now this has some potential! I have something for my nighttime reading list! Great post!
Gentoo Linux agrees… the very root of the concept of “federated” comes from Usenet, which did not have a flat hashtag style group, a flat subreddit /r/name /c/name kbin magazine convention.
I feel user defined multi communities will get lemmy pretty close to this. Multi level hierarchical feeds could then be achieved by allowing the user to include a pre-existing multi-community in the sources of another, which would just be a front end thing, nothing new on the backend.
Beyond that, users and communities can self organise. Users can share and recommend multi coms while communities can do the same for other communities they seem themselves connecting with. Again, more front end stuff that should be pretty straightforward for sharing and importing multi com definitions, which would all just be lists of communities.
So… multi-communities (mc) that can include multi-communities?
If you wanted to get more fine-grained to allow filtering of busy communities (c ), you could add tags (t) to posts so they would be contextual (it would be able to distinguish between rock music and rocks, for example) and could then also be added into multi-communities.
So if you were interested in dinosaurs, you could have an /mc/EarthSciences that contains /mc/Geology, /mc/Meteorology and /mc/Palaeontology and inside the last one you might have /mc/Dinosaurs which might include a few /c/Dinosaurs as well as /t/Dinosaurs, the latter scooping everything else up. /mc/Dinosaurs may also contain /mc/Velociraptors, /mc/TRex, /mc/Spinosaurus, etc, etc.
It would be easy enough to add tags semi-automatically as each community could define relevant ones that’d trigger on keywords,.so a /c/Geology would have /t/Rocks suggested triggered by “rock” or “rocks” (where a /c/Music might pick up “rock” and offer /t/RockMusic). Someone posting would be offered the automatically generated tags to accept, remove or add others from a drop down menu. Posts without tags get flagged for moderators to look at.
Not sure if you’d allow users to create the multi-communities or leave it to the instances admins and/or mods or have a half-way house where users can create them and suggest them to admins.
Wikipedia has its hierarchical categories, for an example that is already working. More historically, the librarians have the Dewey decimal system and the subject classification system.
But it’s a good idea and may give the fediverse an edge until reddit copies it.
So… Like Tildes?
