The participation seems way down recently. What did I miss?
Yep it’s down a lot. I think it’s because it’s just memes and also quite hard moderation and downvotes. It feels like a reddit clone that has the exact same mindset as reddit. I get annoyed when I see people being moderated for having an opinion that is not popular.
I saw a post being locked yesterday for asking about moderation. Doesn’t anyone else see the problem with that? Your channels rules are not more important than making people feel they can talk and express what’s on their mind.
I hate that so much. Stop treating people like they are just resources to moderate.
I don’t see much discussions. But I’m sure there is a few here and there.
Turns out the shittest people from Reddit came here and became mods, who woulda thought lmaoooooooo
Accurate, except Lemmy mods are more the shittiest tankies/libs of Reddit. The vast majority of conservatives don’t seem to have come here; probably to truth social, 4chan, and other established strongholds where they don’t have to ever see opposing opinions.
I second that. If you express unpopular opinion in the most civilized way, engage in the discussion defending that opinion you will still get banned/downvoted because mod was in a bad mood. I’ve blocked many big communities because of that.
Yeah the aggressive mod removals on a platform that is starved for interaction is dumb as fuck. I haven’t had much of my stuff removed, but when someone replies to me and it’s removed before I can see what they said it irritates me to no end. Let dude make his shitty point so I can engage in toxic online dick wagging stupidity like I want to god damnit.
I’ve been getting some flags to mod remove some stuff. I read them and look into each one, but I need a damn good reason to take action and I rarely see that. I see some stupid, but everyone has a right to that, or a bad day. There are lots of things I don’t like or agree with, but only a terrible mod enforces their opinions or is unable to separate themselves from the role of a mod. A bad mod is a visible mod. Feel free to point them out. People can change, and admin should be made aware. Heck, if it is me, I want to know where to adjust my biases or how to better explain my actions.
IMO the “replicate reddit, but decentralized” approach will be the downfall of Lemmy. You sound like you’re trying to do the right thing, but there is significantly more moderator centralization and authoritarianism on Lemmy than there was on early reddit. Most of the early reddit mods were people who genuinely had an interest or experience in that subs topic; not the tankie or excommunicated from elsewhere simply “domain squatting” dozens of popular community names and then dictating over them once they grew popular; trying to carve out their own personal safe space soap boxes. I have seen dozens of mods who’ll debate someone and when they lose they just delete all of the opposing comments and ban the user they disagree with. Often they are the one and only mod of that community.
Users left Reddit because they didn’t wanna have to deal with continued enshittification and unaccountable bad faith mods on a power trip. Lemmy only solved the former, and doubled down on the latter, while fragmenting users across numerous duplicate communities about the same topic; leading to significant post duplication amongst a sea of inactive duplicate communities.
If Lemmy doesn’t solve its core issues I don’t expect it to last long and will move elsewhere sooner than later. I feel like users should be able to join a group of communities about the same topic, and moderator control should be both diluted and distributed amongst them. As in, redistribute moderation across the user base by randomly showing a group of users a post/comment and using the average rather than relying on whoever created the sub to act in good faith. Decentralized services should be built as trustless/adversarial; expect and account for bad faith actors. I wouldn’t have any problem being required to moderate a post/comment for every post/comment I make, I just don’t want the responsibility of being a permanent mod, nor having to review every single thing myself.
If Lemmy doesn’t solve its core issues I don’t expect it to last long and will move elsewhere sooner than later.
you’re absolutely right however those “core issues” are intrinsic qualities that come from the fediverse’s tankie roots and they’re intend to shed power tripping & bad faith users by design.
those qualities like the “fragmentation” keep the discourse going despite the inevitable power tripping mod/admin. the fediverse effectively makes blocking/banning/defederation pointless because doing so only serves to exclude yourself from the main group chat that everybody else can see.
that “sea of inactive duplicates” is probably the biggest outward sign of the intrinsic qualities that serve to sustain its intended tankie users and repels everyone else. if you embrace the fediverse using it’s tankie roots on lemmy, you get a wealth of content from niche communities on an entire spectrum of activity levels like the bustling and relatively large star trek communities with the comunist-socialist/doomer-humor/genz-trans perspective on hexbear; or star trek communities with the sarcasm-mandatory/american-political-commentary/propaganda-speak/anarcho-communist perspective on lemmygrad; or star trek communities with the center-right-leaning/moderate/capitalist perspectives from the reddit fueled instances like .world onward all the way to the other end of that activity level spectrum to even deeper niche communities that you could also learn about for yourself if it weren’t for banning/block/defederating.
the relatively large user increase from the reddit diaspora has effectively turned the lemmyverse into a digital version of an american center-right mainstrain group gentrifying a tankie digital lemmy neighborhood whose plumbing was built to ensure that no one person/group from the entirety of the leftists spectrum can control/dominate the discourse and that plumbing is going to do it’s job and push away the self sorted and mostly inactive liberal echo chamber users.
it’s all effectively like digital anti-homeless architecture (eg builtin spikes and split public benches); but with a focus on users who try to power trip when solely permitting nothing but rigidly moderate perspectives through banning/blocking/defederation and only the people too unpleasantly rigid in their world views will be the ones to move on elsewhere; but only to discover that no reddit diaspora has ever survived and they’ll end up going back to reddit or sign up for future enshitification with bluesky; where they will do this diaspora thing all over again in the future.
in the long run, the most fortunate thing about this diaspora was that the massive userbase bump was as big as it could be and the political makeup as well suited as possible compared to the other previous reddit diasporas; this effectively guarantees that everyone that could be here to enjoy these leftists safe spaces is already here now and also gives the feddiverse the best likeliest chance for any reddit diaspora to survive.
i once felt the same way about the lemmyverse you do and when i first joined as a reddit refugee. i spent most of my time on .world and the inactive diet reddit clones. eventually .world started defederating at first with hexbear and later with lemmygrad; the controversy peaked my curiosity due to the virulently and almost irrationally strong opinions from the reddit refugees and reading about it has begun to show me how propagandized i am as an american despite thinking that i wasn’t as a leftist.
like martin luther king jr wrote about in Letter from Birmingham Jail: moderates have a shallow understanding and the information contained in those instances & known by its users that moderate users ban/block/defedrate from on lemmy have lots of information that edifies that shallow understanding. the moderate users’ collective desire to maintain that shallow understanding is going to drive them away from lemmy and these leftists safe spaces are now as fortified as possible to keep chugging along ready to accept future bluesky refugees during their own future enshittification induced diasporas.
Distributing power across a group of communities over the same topic (e.g. like seats in a congress/parliament) is a nice thought.
However, my second thought was how vulnerable that is in a fediverse. To continue the analogy, an adversary could create new states (server/communities) of arbitrary population (accounts) at will.
A solution could be removing the concept of moderators in general, make reports work like down votes and make a user and instance configurable threshold for how many reports until a comment is hidden by default
(Users could still see that there are messages there and choose to unhide them kinda like how discord does blocks)
Communities aren’t the same as subreddits, Lemmy communities are more like hashtags for an instance. Hexbear is an example of a leftist instance, and the Hexbear Games community is basically a Games hashtag. Trying to centralize communities on one instance is a bad plan IMO because that gives far more power to any given instance.
Community repitition isn’t a bad thing, it’s an advantage.
Yeah I always personally hated the idea of locking posts. Let people wage their war, every party can disengage at any moment.
If anything discussed is illegal or borderline, just start banning those who break those rules.
If someone has a shitty opinion, people can learn from the replies as to why it’s shitty. Every stupid comment has the potential to teach.
Yeah because first of all, content had to be spread out across 562826 different communities for no reason other than that reddit had lots of communities, after growing for many many years. It started with just a few.
Then 99% of those were created on Lemmy.world, and every new user was directed to sign up at Lemmy.world.
I guess a lot of people here are younger than me and didn’t experience forums, but we had like 30 forum channels. That was enough to talk about anything at all. And I believe it’s the same here, it would have been enough. And then all channels would have easy to find content.
Then 99% of those were created on Lemmy.world,
The instance I’m a part of has had issues federating with Lemmy.world for a lot of months now and it sucks because that’s where a large part of the community congregated and so it’s where a lot of content exists.
I think it’s because it’s just memes and also quite hard moderation and downvotes
Could this be specific to the American election?
I feel like I’ve seen more items in the moderation queue recently. I can’t say I’ve had to act on more items though
I don’t know, I guess it’s possible. I just get so annoyed when posts are locked or removed entirely. There is rarely any reason for that except removing work from moderators. If we optimize for as little moderation as possible, I think it means that everyone remaining are just agreeing with eachother and the others left.
This is good feedback, and I agree. I try my best to limit moderation to content that needs removing, and simply vote on the rest.
One thing I find is that mods are more likely to remove/nuke a thread when they’re stretched thin or there is a wave of rule breaking content. Bringing on more active mods can help so that each mod can spend more time scrutinizing each post.
The other great thing about the Fediverse is that you can make your own version of a community if you disagree with how one is being run. I’ve joined a few communities with different styles of moderation
For me, there’s just been less posted that I feel I have something to say on. If I see something about programming, networking or tech that I have (probably) some useful info to contribute I will do so. Likewise if there’s a general subject I have anecdotal points to make, or I’m just genuinely interested I will comment too.
But otherwise, I just read and move on. There’s been a lot more read and move on lately. Maybe because of the upcoming US election for which by and large beyond the fact I don’t want the orange shitgibbon (As a fan of the west wing, I like that the spelling checker suggested shibboleth to correct this “typo”) to win, I don’t have much interest. Mostly because I’m not from the US.
I mean, it’s the ml. People, including myself, have had very bad experiences in ml communities and what I’ve seen is a general consensus to avoid them. As I type this I even expect it to be removed or at least down voted to hell for daring to say this, as ml does. I can accept the community just isn’t for me, but the question was asked.
There was no context given. They didn’t say site or community. How do you know it’s about overall activity? You seem to be assuming as much as I am.
Also you, you specially are actually big problem in the ml community. I’ve seen you interact with enough people who all seem to suspiciously be censored… Hrmmm… I’ve also heard plenty of people reference you. You personally have done a lot of damage to the ml community.
Edit: that might have been extreme in calling you out. I won’t remove and try to hide it, but I apologize. To clarify, I’ve seen people who interact with you often been censored, which really discourages conversation, a big part of this platform.
Both Asklemmy and Lemmy.ml are quite active right now, and have been. I can only assume it’s a broader question. I know I avoid Lemmy.world communities generally due to the censorship and biased mods though, maybe that’s making an impact?
Also you, you specially are actually big problem in the ml community. I’ve seen you interact with enough people who all seem to suspiciously be censored… Hrmmm… I’ve also heard plenty of people reference you. You personally have done a lot of damage to the ml community.
Can you elaborate? I have no mod or admin powers.
federated platform splits userbase into a million little fiefdoms, only somewhat interconnected, all differently starved for interaction
Yup, checks out
Also feel free to join !casualconversation@lemm.ee
