Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem
Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem
For the unaware, Lemmy is a Fediverse alternative to platforms such as Reddit and Tildes. I've been using Lemmy as one of my main social platforms for the pa...
I made a blog post on my biggest issue in Lemmy and the proposed solutions for it. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
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It's not a problem. It's a great feature. Because there's more and more servers enforcing a lazy moderation system and spreading a lot of hate out there. And sure, you're free to do so. But I'm also free to rely on servers that actually protect their users, and they have a right to exist as well.
It's always baffling to me how people go to great lengths trying to describe the utter freedom of the Fediverse (and decentralized networks as a whole) as something flawed and bad, because they're brainless and they just think of Lemmy as "the new Reddit" (or Mastodon as "the new Twitter").
Freedom! Freedom to crosspost between 20 identical communities!
If they were identical they wouldn’t be separated. Everyone seems to fail to understand that the same « topic » doesn’t make automatically the same « community ». The goals and rules of instances are different.
I 100% agree that what you suggest could be a valid usecase. However, from my subjective point of view, people are not using it that way. Let me present an example.
I 100% agree that what you suggest could be a valid usecase. However, from my subjective point of view, people are not using it that way. Let me present an example.
There are 12 communities dedicated to Bitcoin in general. I can't imagine 12 different points of view to discuss this topic from. Lemmy.ml somehow has 3, but 2 of them are completely empty.
All of these are mere duplicates of each other. Let's put the technical difficulties aside, and imagine we have a global namespace, and each instance just has it's own mod team to which users would auto-subscribe (with an option to opt-out, or use a different list). Now we have more users seeing each other and being able to react to each other. Sure, that would put more strain on the individual mod teams, but, there could be a system in place to make it easier for them to cooperate. Two or more mod teams flagged a comment? Let's auto-suggest it for the review to the rest.
TLDR; More users, more mods, more fruitful discussion.
Then, there are more niche communities. 1 dedicated just to the lightning network, 1 dedicated just to the markets, 1 probably dedicated to trolling and memes, 1 dedicated to bitcoin from the point of view of the united kingdom.
All of these indicate their nature by the name.
Goes to show that bitcoin bros like to spam around!
Jokes aaide: I think you don’t quite get the point. The issue is not “are there enough mods?” but really “what moderation rules do you want to enforce?”. You can’t force collaboration on instances that have different views and rules on moderation because they will disagree on key elements. Some instances are very open to all kind of content, even offensive, and will enforce close-to-no moderation; others will have a very active moderation to protect their users against hate speech, for instance. You don’t solve anything by thinking those can work together. There are separate instances for a good reason, and it’s ought to stay like that.
You can’t force collaboration
You can. There's always the lowest common denominator. If there's a guy peddling viagra pills in the astronomy community, it's clearly offtopic. Most mods would flag the post regardless of their political or ideological affiliation. That takes care of the obvious spam.
- cooperation = advantage
- noncooperation = no advantage nor disadvantage
instances that have different views and rules on moderation
And that's ok. They will do as they always did. Hide posts, or users that violates their terms of service
- cooperation = advantage
- noncooperation = no advantage nor disadvantage
"You can force cooperation". Wow. A true fighter for free software, you are. Sure, let's use that as a new catchphrase.
(But if it was to be actually enforced on any actually decentralized network — a concept that you still have a hard time understanding, apparently — there would be forks up the ass from such an autoritative move. Just go on Reddit, that's what you're looking for.)
Additionally, you could even automate certain decisions. Let's say you are a pro-monarchy activist instance, and there is a post with title "Digest the aristocracy", containing pictures of peasants playing football with the king's head.
You could've easily set the following rule: if mods from both hermajesty.co.uk and puppiesandkittens.org flags the post, AND freedomforpeasants.com does not, auto-flag the post here as well.
In this scenario, even the "enemy" instance is making it easier for you to make the decision.
Bitcoin sucks
Freedom to have any opinion that is exactly like mine.
To be fair, Lemmy is my reddit replacement.