TLDR: 3 people working together can gatekeep content on the “active” and “hot” feeds on smaller servers/communities.
After some playing around, I noticed posts disappear after reaching a threshold. A quick search later and I’m in the Lemmy docs reading about how this all works.
In plain English, any three people working together (or one person with three accounts) can stop posts from appearing on the default feed. Once a post reaches -2 it will only appear to people who browse “new.” Edit: Of course, it reappears after it climbs above -2, but it’s a race against the clock.
As a smaller server, we’re vulnerable to this. But we also have some extra mitigations - namely, @seahorse@midwest.social has to approve everyone who joins, and that might weed out bad actors.
So what can you do? Upvote content liberally, downvote sparingly.
I’ve been trying to upvote nearly everything to try and help with engagement. As others have mentioned, at this point I mainly downvote hateful content or misinformation.
I think having both votes available and displayed are massively beneficial as a tool against echo chambers/dogma.
Fuck group think. It’s an illusion.
I think it’s important to remember not to downvote someone because they have a differing opinion on a subject. I reserve my downvotes for when I am pretty sure the commenter is purposely and consciously spreading misinformation, or is being otherwise hateful.
I wonder if long term it would be feasible to push more of the “algorithm” onto the client side where it could be tweaked by the user (or more likely, by extensions or built-in options).
I disagree. post karma only matters if you’re limited to viewing in the feed only. if the community doesnt care about posts showing the the federated feed then post karma is a meaningless metric.
a worrisome issue is that brigading smaller communities effectively mutes them (from a federated standpoint)… however, there are innumerable ways to search for communities. you do have to take the initiative.
Could you possible expound on these innumerable ways? I am new to Lemmy, and have been trying to subscribe to some federated communities, but can’t seem to find them without clicking on something that takes me away from my home server. I know we’re federated with them, because I am subscribed to other groups on that same server. But the Search function doesn’t seem to work at all, and entering the address manually (as best I understand it) returns a nonexistent group error.
Could you help me out?
