The current community implementation is pretty awful.
But it does have me thinking. I would prefer moderation to be at the relay level and just allow users to use what ever relay they want.
- You can’t control what a relay owner moderates. So having it in more the one place seems like dirty design.
- Users can easily switch relays
- Needing to approve post by default seems just kinda dumb
But this has me thinking of hashtags. And how they could be used to give a similar community feeling.
If you were to create a UI that automatically pulled in hashtags into communities users could browse by topic the same way. You could still have moderators for that hashtag so if a post doesn’t belong you can boot it out.
Because nostr is so much more open I think it could be done much better than hashtags in other social media sites. The ui could take care of adding or removing the actual hashtag and it could pull hashtags from other users automatically into communities.
Funny you should mention hashtags.
At the moment we have a lot of communities here on Exploding Heads because Lemmy does not support hashtags and different communities are the only way to separate by topic. I have been using hashtags as a substitute for hashtags.
As we consider a transition or dual support for Nostr, I would love to hear how people think we should map or restructure our communities.
If you were to create a UI that automatically pulled in hashtags into communities users could browse by topic the same way. You could still have moderators for that hashtag so if a post doesn’t belong you can boot it out.
Probably need to be filter on posts by community members only if a user wants to, otherwise you lose that sense of community and also to make popular hashtags more workable. Imagine a community that used the hashtag #bitcoin:
- volume of posts
- volume of spam
it could pull hashtags from other users automatically into communities.
Community members would just be the people you often see posting in a community. I think that would give a sense of community the same way.
for example, here you don’t have a application process to join a community. People come and go as they please. The sense of community comes from frequent posters and frequent replies.
In what I describe everything would work the same way. the hash tag would just be automatically extracted and labeled as a community. Multiple hashtags would work as cross post. so if you use hashtags in iris, in this hypothetical new ui the hashtags would show up as community post.
We would still have moderators assigned at the relay level. So the relay operator can assign permissions.
Now that I think about it, the only problem or difference with this implementation is that users would have to ask a admin to become a moderator.
But I think writing the code for that on top of a relay would not be that difficult. If a hash tag is not moderated, allow it to be automatically taken over by a moderator. Relay admins can remove and assign moderators. So if someone isn’t happy they can switch.
Would be able to sort communities by repost, date, most zapped ect…
I think this would work
Sounds great.
Make it so.
You could probably just reuse the Lemmy UI and replace the “Subscribed”, " Local" and “All” buttons with
- Subscribed
- Members
- Moderated
- All
Buttons
And then focus on building out a Nostr back end and the relay
The lemmy ui has some problems. If I was really good at it I could I guess but there isn’t really much I would want to keep. Even the lemmy devs said they are going to get rid of it. They are doing a complete rewrite. I would probably write a basic ui in plain old javascript with a ui framework like Bulma https://bulma.io/
And then rely on other’s to write mobile UIs.
So many people are writing Nostr Apps, it would probably not take long before they start integrating if we get traction.
So a basic ui is a good foundation
Have you heard of any new nostr apps recently?
I agree this would be much more efficient, as long as it is at least as easy to set up a relay supporting hashtag communities as it is to set up a Lemmy server.
Then I think you would see so many of these “hashtag community supporting” relays up, it would be impossible to censor in any meaningful way.
I would prefer moderation to be at the relay level and just allow users to use what ever relay they want.
Then I think you would see so many of these “hashtag community supporting” relays up, it would be impossible to censor in any meaningful way.
We would need the ability to browse by relay. So that if one relay is not deleting spam it doesn’t clutter up the feed. Curation is very important to the user experience. People expect to come to a squirrel community and see squirrels.
The more I think about all this the more possible I think it is.
I can make the relay changes and I can even write the UI over time. People who host the ui could configure it to have default relays or just respect what relays the user says they use.
this way you could distribute the load of moderation and association however you want.
I think default relays are important so we ensure all community communication is seen and it would help speed.
Of course the ability for users to add other relays is important for freedom.
I think it’s best left to the clients to pay attention to whatever the moderators request. If the user wants to ignore whatever moderators did, so be it. If some jerk gets banned I want to be able to see what the jerk said or continues to say, even if most users don’t because they leave the moderator filters on.
