I Run /DIY and I Have No Neighbors 🛖

We all share users, interests.. mainly we share that particular stubbornness of people who’d rather learn how do something right than pay someone else to do something wrong.

Yet were all strangers from each other…

I didn’t start a community to feel separated from everyone else. Did you?

This is the Reddit model. The Voat model. The Lemmy model. The model that everyone copied. And for the time being it gets to be our’s too.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad user communities exist. Finally the one thing digg could never.. it’s a full circle moment 🥲

The problem is outside of them. Outside of them they’re just a giant flat list of nouns. And already discovery has become someone else’s problem. It starts with websites like digglist.com. Userscripts, tools to help manage. And it keeps iterating.

The community tries to figure out the best way to organize itself, but there is no underlying system to support us. No guardrails to hold us together.. so the developers add tools, designers shift around layouts, math enjoyers work on more algorithms, but even with all of the bootstrapped solutions it’s not ideal, all the technical debt just accrues. The site grows bigger, now there’s too many voices at the table, we can’t go back now.

So we continue to float.

Hoping that the next new algorithm starts introducing us to the right people, in the right places, talking about the right things.

We ask users in our communities to crosspost. To tell their friends. We even form new relationships with other community owners so that we can exchange URLs in each other’s sidebars/abouts. Then we continue to wait. Hoping that more people will come..

But this wasn’t always the way.

Usenet figured something important out 40 years ago.. it’s so simple it’s a bit funny. Humans like organizing from the top-down.

For whatever reason, it’s always been our go-to. It just works, you don’t need to read a guide to understand it. We just all sort of “get down” on our tiered structures. It’s instinctual, it’s a millions of years of evolution kind of a thing. It makes sense why the entire newsgroup system, and really most of our online communities, were all built on it.

You see within a hierarchical system, rec.crafts.woodworking knows exactly where it lives. Not just as a name, but as an actual location, you can following it just by reading it from left to right.

You don’t need an algorithm to find your way to it. You can just walk.

Your journey begins simply.. do you like recreation? Well in this long ass journey of a post you do! So click on-in and take look around.

Where do you want to go next? Stay here at the surface, enjoy the best posts out of all of recreation for a while? The cream of the crop You can just hang out and get comfortable .

Then, out of nowhere, you see something! It’s that thing! The thing you never knew existed, but now you’re so happy to know it does. You chase it down a tunnel.

Digging deeper, you find more things you really start to obsess over. Give me the woodworking, give me the knitting AND crochet! 😲

All along the way, you’re seeing who and what is nearby. Everyone’s interests just coalescing together in a way we can all just sorta vibe with..

Hierarchy isn’t bureaucracy. It’s an engine for discovery.

It’s like a backstop for being curious. You don’t have to wait around asking an algorithm to guess what you’re looking for. No, these systems struggle with surprise. Why not use models for organizing, keeping our streets clean, and most importantly, building more pathways between spaces.

All of what I wrote slots together like this. This proposal isn’t just about surfacing more content for you to find. No, the whole thing is really just me pitching that we should give everything here an address. That’s it.

Not a discovery stack, or a recommendation layer. Definitely isn’t an interest graph, an affinity model, or a flywheel.

Nope this right here is just a map.

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More ideas that have been posted by other community members over the months have been put together on this interactive website: https://v1.internetuniverse.org/community/proposal/