I don't know what I'm doing differently but I really haven't experienced the things everyone complains about. It's been fine overall. Not a ton to see but that just means I don't waste so much time.
For starters, a way to unban people would be nice. Then, also, a way to easily see new content for their community. Like, only new content. And not see it after it has been marked as "reviewed" (except as context to unreviewed content, when unfolded). I mean, new posts, new comments, etc. With alerts. Also, sudden activity alert.
A way to match keywords, and bring up matching posts and comments.
Metrics about each user's contributions to the community, are they new, or seasoned. Did they contribute mostly popular content or unpopular content? What words do they use most? Etc.
Compiling multiple reports for a single post/comment into one. Ignoring reports from select users.
That's all I can think of for now.
But, essentially, a dashboard with live content, showing "old" content as "greyed out", and relevant actions, would be really, really useful.
Edit: additionally, automated actions would be great. Answering posts/comments matching regexes with templates populated with the user's information; automatically removing, issuing warnings, and banning (outright or after n warnings) people for specific terms, etc.
It would also really help to have automation workflows (e.g. user commented with "r-word" or "n-word", autocomment a warning, wait X minutes/hours, or Y minutes/hours after user comments again, remove comment/ban).
This automation could come as an additional tool, to be ran under a separate account.
Report queue. Right now, reports go to a queue that both instance owners and mods use. This makes it impossible to mod because the instance owners mark items as completed before mods even had a chance to look at them.
Now, if it's the case where it's user abuse it's fine for the instance owner to take care of it.
But if it's just breaking the rule of a community, the instance owner should never even see it.
Separating the queues would help both mods and instance owners.
The ability to hide a community from All and/or Local. Some communities just aren't appealing to the general public. And when All surfers see posts, they just downvote them into oblivion.
Interesting topic - I've seen it surface up a few times recently.
I've never been a mod anywhere so I can't accurately think what workflows/tools a mod needs to be satisfied w/ their, well, mod'ing.
For the sake of my education at least, can you elaborate what do you consider decent moderation tools/workflows? What gaps do you see between that and Lemmy?
PS: I genuinely want to understand this topic better but your post doesn't provide any details. 😅
One of the major issues is replication and propagation of illegal material. Because of the way that content is mirrored and replicated across the fediverse, attacks that flood communities with things like CSAM inevitably find their way to other federated sites due to the interconnectedness of the fediverse.
The only response currently to dealing with these types of attacks, even if they're not directed at you, is to generally defederate with the instance being attacked. This means whoever was attacking the site with CSAM has won, because they successfully made it so that the community becomes disjointed and disconnected from the rest of the fediverse with the hopes that it will die.
This whole federated system is about whack-a-mole.
I hate politics, so I filter it out. Oh, look, somebody spun up a new instance! Time to filter out the same fucking communities I filtered on every other goddamn instance.
Sports is another one. I hoped everything would end up on fanaticus.social but no, we need our own communities on our own instances, making it so that there are seven communities dedicated to the same team.
I would recommend using a client that allows instance and/or keyword blocking. I believe Sync and Connect on Android offer these features amongst others. I would also raise this issue with the dev of whatever client you're using, as a lot of clients now have this feature.
The Lemmy backend is also getting instance blocking shortly.
Don't force yourself if you don't feel like it. Lemmy still have a lot of rough edges, hopefully it will get better over time, but at the moment it takes some commitment to use it as a Reddit replacement
Have you tried kbin? Same content in that it's Lemmy compatible, but slightly different sorting algorithm which (in my view) seems to result in a more rounded/balanced set of posts being promoted.
Yes there a different set of issues - it's earlier in it's development phase, but developing fast (collapsibling comments is being worked on, API (and therefore 3rd party apps) is imminent, many other improvements are developed and expecting to go live this month...