Hypothesis: Insufficient moderation tools lead to instance protectionism, which leads to a decline in the overall discussion quality on Lemmy
"Decline in overall quality" is a subjective metric, though. Does defederation reduce participation? Certainly.
But ya know, there's a reason people defederate certain instances -- usually because those instances have attracted people who are disruptive to discussion on other instances.
It's really been no problem at all for me to keep a foot in lemmy.world, kbin.social, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org. And a few other instances that appeal to more niche audiences.
And if I really feel like discussion on an instance is offering something and I'm missing out, I can always get an account there.
Not that I'm arguing against better moderation tools, of course. By all means, lemmy devs should prioritize those as soon as scaling/stability issues are dealt with.
Yep, when I get sick of the rhetoric here I just jump over to hexbear where they make fun of the people I tend to disagree with frequently here. . I think the best moderation tools would be to attempt to decentralize it so the petty tyrants the role seems to attract can't abuse their authority to censor opinions they don't agree with regardless of whether or not the content actually conflicts with the rules.
I'm an example of a filthy casual reddit user who is really struggling to find value in lemmy. Finding an instance where local is of value is difficult, world may as well be "everything", and "everything" is a nightmarish hodgepodge of memes for teenagers, furry porn, really niche technical discussions, and star Trek memes. I never stay in the app longer than a few minutes and I feel like I spend more time blocking weird porn communities than I do reading interesting articles.
The other major issue is having to sort through the exact same article 60 times because people cross post not only to local communities but then also the same communities are duplicated on every instance. I'm probably going to abandon this soon unless I can find some kind of curated community list to subscribe to or something.
I don't really get all the "'all' is bad" discussion. Isn't that what the "subscribed" feed is for? Just sub to the communities that interest you and browse from there. Just like it was back on Reddit.
The big difference is 1. Finding communities is not easy. Can you name every one of your interests off the top of your head? 2. Just punching in communities from reddit 1 for 1 doesn't work. 3. Content and user base. There are no discussions for my favorite podcasts here and if there are where do I find them.
It took me a decade to build out a decent sub list on Reddit and I still stumble upon new interests now and again. I don't know how to "stumble upon" decent communities on Lemmy and I'm sick of wading through cartoon horse cocks.
One thing I don't like about the approach of blocking things is that the frontpage of reddit still allowed some level of discovery. If something in a niche community got hot enough it would break into my feed even though I didn't subscribe to that community. It was a cool way to expand my content on an occasional basis.
If I'm going to only view my subscribed list on lemmy then I have to also manually go out and intentionally discover new communities. That's hard, because some of my favorite small reddit communities were ones I never would have thought to search for.
I mean, I use my LW account for local and lemm.ee for all (because it can see more posts). They are just... different, although I am getting pretty annoyed at the mass of r/politics level politcal discourse on the LW local feed.
I browse all and block communties I have no interest in.
Bye bye Star Trek memes and may the force live long and prosper.
Did you hide all NSFW and still get that problem?
That seems to be the growing consensus on some of the biggest instances. Hopefully they start prioritizing that, or some other nice dev who knows Rust will. Maybe I need to start brushing up on it lol.
Just waiting on someone to create Reddit in forum form so long discussions over weeks/months/years on any type of subject can happen...
Think those are just called forums?
I miss forums so much. A federated backend for forums would be nice. I'm so tired of having these giant communities of angry strangers if I want to talk about anything
In theory, but I used to hate when people would get mad at threads getting brought back from the dead. If the person has a question relevant to the topic, why start a new thread?
Ironically that’s also lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
????
Why do people not seem to know that the subscribed feed exists?
They do.
But, if they used subscribed, they wouldn't be able to fuss about all of the stuff they don't want to see.
Instead, they just want to look at everything. and then block instances (not communities) showing things they don't want to see.
Because they want to find new stuff maybe?
Well half the things I've tried to sub to say 'pending' then never get added to my feeds so that needs to be fixed. I don't think it's a jerboa issue because I've had it on desktop too.
I don't really know what's happening there, am I waiting for permission to subscribe? Waiting for it to sync between local and remote instances? For my local client to communicate with the instance I'm on or the the community is on?
Either way there should be an intermediary step where is stored locally soi I can find it again
if you hit refresh while it is in the pending state, does it go to subscribed?
i've seen it on the website, but it is just a graphical glitch. you did indeed subscribe to the community, just the front end never gets updated to reflect it.
but this might be outdated, it has been a long time since i last used the website.
i use sync btw, and here it works. you hit subscribe and the ui reflects the change
The biggest thing killing Lemmy for me is needing a seperate account on every single instance if I want to participate in anything on an instance.
I thought this wasn't how it was supposed to work.
I saw this post on another instance and tried to reply this exact message but got an error saying I couldn't.
Using Liftoff if it matters.
That's odd, you shouldn't need another account. I've even made posts from this account to another instance
You definitely don't need accounts for every instances (as long as you're not defederated). That sounds like an app bug or something.
On Liftoff you need to "open using another instance" and then choose the instance your account is on
I just subscribe to whatever content I want to see. Wish my feed defaulted to subscribed instead of all because I hate lemm.ee.
Also it can be really hard finding small communities from a different instance, a lot don't show up or aren't fully synced so some of the posts don't show.
Hopefully this is going to be fixed but I think it's limiting the growth of more niche communities.
That's what the subscribed feed is for.
But you NEED a functioning feed to discover new stuff ACROSS the threadiverse. How else will you be able to find other communities?
Search, people link to them, looking at community lists on interesting instances, etc. Honestly browsing by all as it currently exists is one of the worst ways to find new communities. Maybe that could be improved but that’s where it stands today.
Why are people wondering that lemmy.world gets bigger and bigger if everone is told to stay on their local/subscribed feed
I respectfully disagree. On our LW Android comm, the discussion quality is generally pretty good, except when a post get on the front page, then the quality just drops like a rock.
Smaller (but not too small) crowd usually lead to higher quality discussions, that's true on reddit(default subreddits are pretty much all terrible) , and that's true here as well. (the turning point for quality decline reddit is at about 20K subscribers). So, I don't think the "instance protectionism lead to lower discussion quality is true at all.)
Also, I think the mod tools here is basic but perfectly adequate. You can check our community's mod log to see how much post removal/bans we actually had to do, and it's not a lot. Also not to brag, but I think our weekly discussions are some of the best threads on Lemmy right now.
It's not hard, I just tell our comm's users that I expect them to act like adults, and most of them act like adults, and we just remove the post of the few who refuses to do so (they are like in the single digits over the last months) and our admins usually handle the trolls that requires site wide bans in literal minutes here.
I don't use bots to mod and still do not see the need for it, because it turns out that if you cultivate a good culture in your community, moderation is pretty easy. That's just my experience here though.
Ironic you used lemm.ee account to talk about LW :)
Well, LW still shows up to my all feed, so I just comment on posts if it comes up.
Yeah thats the problem - too many comments. /s
How feasible would it be to have levels of federation? Make it possible for instances to partially-federate (if you're from "your-instan.ce" and its partially-federated with lemmy.world, you don't see lemmy.world stuff in your feeds, but allow browsing and interacting with "https://your-instan.ce/c/fediverse@lemmy.world").
Sounds more like a simple filter to your feed. I'm not familiar with the backend side of Lemmy but I would guess it shouldn't be too hard to implement.
Just save an array of instance domains a user doesn't want to see in their preferences and filter them out of the post list that gets served to them.
Instances shouldn't be first class citizens, they should be more invisible to the users. The fediverse should be more like a cloud. Communities should be the primary focus, and only allow Instances to control how many users/communities they are the primary/secondary source for.
Disagree. Indeed, I couldn't disagree more strongly.
Instances are not just abstract server nodes in some overly wasteful recreation of some other website. This is the world wide social web as it should have been.
You may as well argue that websites should be indistinguishable from each other.
This isn't Reddit. Full stop. And it's not a drop-in Reddit replacement, either. It's not "Reddit, but different". It's a whole new paradigm in forums and content aggregation. It's very different from centralized social media, and we need to stop dancing around or trying to hide that fact.
It will never get to reach its potential if we decide it needs to be nothing more than a simulacra of what came before it.
This is the world wide social web as it should have been.
This is my stance too - we took a wrong turn letting initially utopian tech companies create vast eyeball-farming dystopias when the natural progression from forums and blogs is breaking them out of their silos (not building bigger ones) and letting them talk to each other.
This isn’t Reddit. Full stop. And it’s not a drop-in Reddit replacement, either. It’s not “Reddit, but different”. It’s a whole new paradigm in forums and content aggregation. It’s very different from centralized social media, and we need to stop dancing around or trying to hide that fact.
Indeed. It's early days still and the Reddit diaspora has shaped the initial growth but, as it spreads beyond that, it will expand and mutate. Already kbin have a kind of forum/microblogging thing going and it will be interesting to see how things evolve from here. With better moderation tools, I could see people skipping setting up their own forum and blog and just spinning up an instance instead - there are too many advantages to not do it. That'll drag in a more diverse group of people with different needs and requirements that will push development in new directions. I, for one, can't wait to see where this all goes.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there already exists a proposal to make communities work more like a cloud.
It's just a matter of time before Lemmy and Kbin implement this.
Websites are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.
Federated instances can be like web service providers, only limiting malicious content from users. The magazines/communities are like web sites on a particular host, such as WordPress. They control the content within their scope.
What you are suggesting is that instances should be like AOL, curating the experience. Which is fine if some of them want to do that, but it shouldn't be the standard.
To use a somewhat stretched analogy. Instances should be like bitcoin miners, I don't need to know much about them individually at all. My only concern is that there isn't a majority miner/instance.
It doesn't have to be a reddit clone, but the federation needs to move to a more mandatory model, and one that puts the content first. The current system is far too user hostile to allow anything but the lowest common denominator of communities.
I have zero interest in administrating a generic lemmy instance, including the inevitable hosting of transphobic and bigoted users.
I admin a group focused on the gender diverse community, my community because that's what's important to me.
Your solution would lead to less folk volunteering to run communities
If this is true, it may also cause users on smaller instances to migrate to bigger instances, because there is more activity. Undermining the power and freedom of the decentralized structure of Lemmy and the fediverse.
What kind of moderation tools could help with this?
I don’t believe there is any type of auto moderator, though that’s possibly being supplemented by external bots.
I forget where I read it, but I believe the biggest issue is with the implementation of current mod tools and how they don’t properly propagate through the fediverse.
But again, I don’t recall the details.
Actually I have built an AutoMod myself, just a few days ago.
The configuration is a bit clunky, unfortunately, mostly because of lack of UI support. I plan on making some changes to my instance's UI to make this a bit more feasible, and of course those will be open sourced just like the bot, but it will take me time.
Here's a laundry list from one of the Beehaw people, and apparently the devs don't have any of this as a priority
What I think could help against instance protectionism:
A.) Better moderation tools to protect against SPAM and trash
B.) Better curation algorithm, especially for smaller instances, to smartly curate posts that are relevant to the user
C.) Better default-values for the selected feed (All instead of local), as well as for the discovery of communities (which is also currently local by default)
If B is not realized, smaller instances will have no handle against big instances flooding their user's feeds with their posts and they will switch back to local-default again.
Overall, it can be brought down to making the All-feed more attractive. In my opinion, there should only be the subscribed-feed and an all-feed with curated posts (with different sorting algorithms to chose from in the best case). Or at least these should be the main ones.
To me, the Local feed is one of the biggest strengths of Lemmy. It allows having in the same platform a community/instance based feed (for example, Local in jlai.lu allows you to find most of the French activity in Lemmy), and at the same time, I can use "Subscribed" and/or "All" feeds to get a broader view of the Fediverse.
Without the "Local" view, Lemmy would just feel like another Reddit clone to me, where French communities would just be flooded by English-speaking communities. On Reddit, the French community actually had to create a subreddit dedicated to listing all French subreddits, just because the discoverability of non-English-speaking subreddits is just awful by default on Reddit.
And at the same time, I don't see the need for "curation algorithms". The "Subscribed" feed already fills this use case for me.
All these issues only apply to large generalized instances like lemmy.world and not smaller instances where the local feed is the curated high quality feed.
It would be IMHO better to remove the all feed and in general get away from large generalized instances that are harmful to the federation.
I agree, I feel like most of the "feed" issues are simply because users are in big instances where the "Local" feed indeed becomes meaningless.
Something that would however be cool would be a way to view the Local feed from another instance, without having to actually go to the other instance.
But why? That goes against the whole idea of federation. If no one uses the All feed you never discover other communities. You will end up with thousands of independent reddit clones.
I was going to say that B might not be so easy. But maybe some kind customization on the ratio of local vs external posts on some of the top posts lists. Just a random idea.
If its possible to create your own instance and federate with any instance of your choice - are there any apps which include the ability to register your own instance with you as the sole user? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the underlying logic
Apps? As on your phone? No, that's not the way it works. You can host your own instance. I would in fact recommend it, if possible. It would give you the best Lemmy experience possible. But here's the thing: the machine where you run the instance has to be on 24/7 or as closely to that as possible, it isn't enough for it to be online when you'd browse Lemmy.
Here's an oversimplified explanation of how federation works: say your personal instance is disappointingintro.com and you're federated with lemmy.world. Any time something happens on the lemmy.world server (upvotes, comments, posts...), the lemmy.world server will send a "message" to the disappointingintro one notifying it of what just happened. The disappointingintro server has a copy of everyting coming from lemmy.world, where all of these updates are written into. When you view a lemmy.world community on disappointingintro what you're really viewing is this copy.
Because of this, if your instance was hosted on a phone, said phone would need to communicate constantly with the federation. If it didn't you'd miss out on a ton of updates and you'd only see a fraction of the content.
The actual way to do this is either to self host it (meaning installing the server on an older PC or laptop lying somewhere in your basement), assuming you know how to do that, or rent a server from someone else to host it on their server for you. Both take some degrees of technical expertise and have some expenses, which is why public instances exist, most users can't be bothered running their own instance.
Best take
i use the home feed
I don’t like seeing something on the internet. PLEASE CHANGE THE INTERNET FOR ME. kthxbai
No. Moderation tools lead to instance protectionism, which leads to a decline in the overall discussion quality on Lemmy.
I don't understand this. I cant even name a single community native to the instance I use. I picked one that hadn't defederated from anyone, and I block communities as needed. Also subscriptions are a thing.
How do you find out if they defederated from instances?
https://defed.xyz
Built by yours truly
https://lemmy.world/instances
Replace it with your instance domain.
If you find out please let me know too. Thanks
I found a link to a list of who is defederated from whom on a "fediverse for beginners" post. I will see if I can find it again if you need, but it looks like some other commenters already got you covered.
Actually lemmy.one defederates from lemmygrad.ml
Which is kinda weird because they allow everything else but I guess it’s okay.
Ah. Interesting. I sort of forgot about lemmygrad altogether. Guess that explains why.