Hacker News Reader

Comment by cc101 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that it is not easy to find a real sense of community because there is no worthwhile way to search the available communities. I find this hugely frustrating. For all their distasteful aspects Twitter and Facebook do help some in this. Perhaps the solution is some sort of dynamic "meta-social medium" for finding communities. If well managed, the economics of such a medium would be huge.

View on HN

SF writers are hugely creative. I have often thought that a good way to find an idea for a startup would be to read lots of SF then try to implement what I found. Maybe Neil Gaiman will write a story describing some solution to this problem. With his audience, that might be all it would take to spur the creation of such a solution.

Back when Google had honest search, you could find any blog :)

LemmyBB is the kind of direction I wish this would go.

Self-hosted communities, interacting in federated spaces together, specifically in the form of a PhpBB board which I maintain is the least bad form of social media we've tried.

The issue I see with Lemmy, is that you get the Reddit power mod issue, only worse. Add to that the extreme centralization of the instances, both for users, but worse for the hosting of communities, and I can only see dark.

That several instances are openly fascist friendly doesn't help either.

>If well managed, the economics of such a medium would be huge.

This is exactly the problem. Economies of scale ruin communities. Discovery ruins communities. Caring about engagement and metrics ruins communities. Maybe discovery should be difficult, maybe it should take effort.

This also brings to mind the concept of federated search. Frequently brought up as a thought experiment, but it's a shame it's not discussed more seriously.

Something similar to Reddit/lemmy, but without the front page could be interesting.

You have to join the subs and interact with each sub one at a time.

I used Reddit for many years.

I don't remember ever using the "front page".

I always used my own feed where I saw content only from the subs that I followed.

Back before I ditched Reddit (years ago), this was how I used it as well. The "front page" offered nothing of interest to me in that forum.

I used the front page for like 2 days before I realized it was the same content recycled between subs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com