write.as

DEVELOPING PRISMO

date: 2018-09-22, author: jox

For the development of the WIP-software prismo there is a matrix room open for discussion.

A few days ago there happened to be an interesting discussion in there. Some arguments, that the participants swednecks and mxbs and some other brought up, stuck with me and have made me think.

The following summary is the result of my considerations.

Up to this point the following way seems like a reasonable way to me for handling subreddits (and federation of them).

IMPORTANT NOTE!
Please keep in mind while reading this summary that I'm just spinning my thoughts through to the end.

Maybe it gives you, mxb, also inspiration to any other useful idea for the project. I hope so! :–)

I'll start off with two points;

1. Reviewing the term groups

As another term for subreddit I suppose PrismoRays, since the projects name is prismo, or maybe even better; PrismoSubs, this time also including the syllable sub, to address ex-redditors.
The approach of Prismosubs in my opinion also fits smoothly into the URL- when calling sub (as the subreddit, prismosub) on the next level in the hirarchie – after prismo. Like

https://instance.org/prismo/sub/linux/, or
https://prismo.instance.org/sub/linux

I personally also find that the wording sounds pretty nice, since you could kinda sub-scribe to a prismosub :–)

2. A question that came up on my side when reflecting our discussion so far

(I managed to find an answer to this though, I will unveil it later)

Imagine I have prismo.me.org as an instance and I give birth (please stay with me, the wording is on purpose) to the sub prismo.me.org/sub/linux.
I guess, I am now the moderator of #linux. Right?

But, shortly before the birth of #linux on my server, my internet connection was cut down, which means the new prismosub that was created could not be federated.

In the meantime you have your server, and also give birth to prismo.you.org/sub/linux – the same happens here, you have full moderating power to #linux.

Now my internet connection comes up again – and the two existing #linux have to compete against each other and to argue about the question who of them is the “real” one.

Question: In this situation which #linux wins? Who of us can keep the moderating-powers for #linux?

Recap

In this video CPGGrey explains what reddit was like, initially.
It was basically an aggregated list of stuff that people found online that they wanted to share with the world (for whatever reasons).
Coming from that defintion, we could say, that prismo works the same way, but is much more than only this one feature.

What I envision, when speaking of more, is, that prismo could accomplish the following two (and a half) main features;

Local timelines would be an highly interesting social aspect for me (as the user) – that would affect the real connections between me and my friends and family that are perhaps on the same instance as me (or maybe they're not).

First feature

So, some background to my thoughts about the first feature:

Sometimes, when being on prismo, I would only engage in the prismosubs I'm interested in.
Maybe, some other times, for example when I'm at work, I would need to find something regarding to a specific topic (if I don't know which prismosub could have the info I'm searching for, I probably could find help in HelpMeFindAPrismoSub).

In that case, the allocation of prismosubs into different parts on different instances could, if implemented as absolute mirroring of all content on every instance, mean that all subs contain the same content/information, no matter from what place in the network you join. Which would really come in handy, since then you had all the data and wouldn't have the possibility to “miss something out”.
But this synchronisation maybe isn't possible at all, just by how the design of decentralisation is naturally.

To sum this part up:

Since the comfort of “one big pot” of information seems not to be possible, I dislike the idea of having various different localities where similar topics of a prismosub get discussed, while the participants of each locality don't know of each other at all.

Again, I will get to this later.

Second feature

Coming to the second feature:

But sometimes I want also to connect with my friends and families, and see what they are up to.
Assuming that my family is on my instance, and my friends are on their own family-instance, I could find new interesting stuff from looking through the listing of actions my family recently took that are filtered onto the local timeline.
Or I could connect onto the local timeline on my friends instance if he allowed me to do so, and scroll through what he and/or his family were up to.

(Maybe I even could subscribe to their local timeline, but this indeed is another issue, that could easily be solved by implementing .rss)

Approach to a feasable solution

So, I've mentioned two times my approach for the (what looks to me as a) feasable solution, and this is it:

Subreddits/Prismosubs are communities/groups whose character is, that the content that they hold is aggregated around interests / allocated into topics, which are federated in a way that everyone, in the whole network, can see, follow and participate with them – be it a user at the local instance or from an external instance (in the initial state, disregarding possible blocks/mutes).

Note that every prismosub gets a unique ID that is defined by the “birth-giving” server.
It can used when experimenting with filtering data to create individual views on a enduser-frontend.

Sharing prismosubs that are distributed across various instances

When a #linux comes across another #linux (and with time there will come across even many more other #linuxs), they can decide to integrate their content to each others public prismosub-list, and to share from this point on everything together.

They say, that they know the other #linux and that they won't forget each other.
Just like they were real persons that just became friends.

(But as I understood this is not how it would technically work: in ActivityPub serverA won't send posts that reached serverA to serverB. In ActivityPub serverB has to lookup by himself if serverA got new content ready)

Following

In principle, I am against the idea of following every instance that comes run along. But on the contrary, I'm not really convinced either that all connections would have to be made manually.

What I consider an important plus point that we can implement in Prismo, and probably have a significant advantage to similar software approaches, is to provide an admin panel that lists all newly opened instances.
The admin can then act to this list, either by asking his local users whether they think an instance is worth following or not, or by looking at the instance by himself and decide then.

Conceptually, maintaining the list in the admin-panel could work the same way as how individual nodes in the bitmessage-network connect themselves with each other.

Moderation

Moderating-powers for a prismosub will stay on the respective instance (regarding the on-that-instance-created content only), and the content of the public prismosub-list will be mixed together with the local content.

If the admin of prismo.good.instance sees that prismo.bad.instance tries to manipulate upvotes, or posts and comments spam, he can decide to cut prismo.bad.instance out of the conglomerated content on prismo.good.instance.

(Deductively, prismo.good.instance also won't share anything to prismo.any-other.instance about prismo.bad.instance anymore.)

Example

If we had an instance with two users, user1 and user2, that would be participating in #linux and #proprietary, we would have at least eight possible lists/views on our instance:

If we decided to apply blocks or mutes upon the processed content on our server, it would be applied to the view Federated list first, since this were the main list for the instance. All other views are just extracted data from that view.

More options/features

Optionally we could add some other views, of course, named Global view or Personal view. For those there would be a different filter that were applied to the uncensored data, that were available to access in the network.
But, since the admin of the server can be held reliable by legal law, it must be an option for him to opt-in, not to opt-out!

Manual personalizing for the user

If the admin is really strict and mutes many stuff he just personally dislikes, or if he decides not to block/mute something a user reported, we could give the users the option to have a personal block/mute-,unblock/unmute-list, with which they could disactivate/activate/reactivate personal filtering.
I guess this probably accomplishes what was called multireddits in reddit. Maybe it was also nice for the user to have multiple personal views.

Background about how I remember reddit

I for myself did use reddit most of the time

This is what reddit represented to me, and I would be very happy when it were possible to design prismo in a way that promotes these useful effects to appear again.

Some more technical ideas to that the review:

A sub could have

Every instances would have to maintain their own version of those pages, just as the various Peertube- and Mastodon-instances do.