Fediverse

Pretty sure they are creating alt accounts on non-tankie instances.

Is there a way to message instance owners/admins? I would propose that lemmy.world defederates from lemmy.ml asap. Post

I fucking hate tankies, but.

The problem i have, every time this conversation happens, is that cutting them out doesn't solve anything, and that I don't want to be coddled.

The 2 main issues we have, as lemmy at large, is that there are some wildly uneven standards enforced across instances and that we have no say about that. There was that hugbox instance that would ban people for being rude and yeeted itself into the void, there was hexbear that got de-federated for its mods actively encouraging being subversive (despite its users receiving intolerable psychic damage after 5 minutes in any lib space where people are free to call them names, or was that lemmygrad?) and now we're talking about removing lemmy.ml for the fact that its mods are somehow sentient pieces of actual shit.

And while I agree to all of those reasons, I don't think defederating is the answer.

Every time we fragment the fediverse we make it overall worse.

Average users don't even understand what they're looking at when it comes to decentralized networks, let alone can they understand that there's politicking between instances and such. If I were told "you can make an account on instance x or y, but they don't talk to eachother so if you want to see stuff on instance y you can't make an account on instance x" as a rando, I would go back to reddit, the only reason I didn't is that i really hate the app and I am tech/net savvy enough to handle this.

I am a tad more radical when it comes to speech than most, and I accept that, but I do believe that these people have no power so long as they can't abuse moderation, so the answer to the question "how do we handle open propagandists", to me, is to create perhaps a "moderation neutrality charter" and making it very clear which instances subscribe to it, having each instance's moderation team maybe be required to weigh in on appeals to bans from other instances to ensure a certain amount of balance.

That would take care of that real quick. They can subscribe to the charter and start abiding by neutral moderation standards agreed to across the board by some democratic standard, or they can defederate themselves.

That's actually something twitter does right with the idea of community notes, that for the note to be published it needs to be agreed on by multiple parties that don't usually agree in those votes, to ensure there is a bipartisan agreement.

I know this is perhaps too lofty for a ragtag group of essentially microblogging self-hosters, but a man can dream.

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they’re not so easy to replace.

Very true, I saw a post about censorship posted on [email protected] that happened in [email protected] (instead of another instance with the same subject community) possibly because of this reason OP mentioned. This complaint post was also deleted from the community because it was violating the rules which I suppose it was since this was the reason:

The title of the post in the picture above was the reason given by the comics mod:

My unpopular opinion however is that simply de-federating won't help as it just promotes those instances into becoming louder echo chambers. I think the simpler solution would be to have a dedicated community for mod abuse (I'm aware of [email protected] but .world blocked /c/piracy so...) , so users can be aware of said issues and create or migrate to different communities as we see fit. Besides, users can simply block entire instances for themselves. Please don't comment on the paradox of tolerance as I just mentioned blocking for oneself already.

P.S.

Devs please make it easier to browse the modlog, having to press the next button is bafflingly tedious. I had to resort to editing the url to browse faster, add a jump to by time/date or something.

I agree with the facts here but have a slightly different conclusion. This is a problem that exists on many similar platforms like Reddit, etc. If you give mods or admins unlimited power over their users, it is an almost foregone conclusion that it will be abused in some circumstances. While Lemmy.ml is perhaps the perfect storm of a bad example, I’ve seen examples of abuses of mod power from almost every community on both Lemmy and Reddit.

So how do we fix it? Migrating to different communities or instances can sometimes help, but the potential for abuse remains. Having more options for active communities and making migration easier is a step in the right direction. Despite its flaws, Lemmy is an improvement in this respect because its federated nature allows more choice in who has power over you, but the problem remains.

In my view the internet has always worked best when problems are solved democratically rather than autocratically. Content aggregators already allow for this to some extent in what content is presented, but moderation remains quite undemocratic. I think it may be that a new platform with new innovations to make moderation decisions more driven by community consensus instead of owners or founders of communities will be needed. Exactly what this will look like, I don’t know, but some brainstorming might be in order for the next evolution in social media.

Over the past year on Lemmy I have witnessed a constant fight between people on hexbear, lemmygrad, and ml and people on communuties like tankiejerk, meanwhileongrad, and the like.

Both appear to constantly brigade and overmoderate their respective areas of control. Since my instance: sh.itjustworks, is some combination of defederated to hexbear and lemmygrad, I mostly just see threads like these complaining about tankies. I only assume the effort is being matched by those instances I don't see to warrant this problem being so persistent.

So to me there's so much active bad faith behavior between the camps I assume they all just have a paranoid view of the fediverse and are mostly just perpetuating a cycle of bad faith. Maybe that relationship is terminal if just people can't handle each other.

I think any censorship heavy instance doesn't deserve attention in the fediverse.

How about something like elections? A community could vote to change its "base instance" to another instance. Example, ask lemmy community vote to change from .ml to .world. It's possible to do this by just not posting in the "old community", so maybe community cloning and community hopping could be the solution.