Corgana

Exactly. Block and move on. Don't twist yourself into knots appeasing people, focus on keeping the users you want happy.

Not trying to victim blame or anything, but I find it hard to believe that someone operating a low-moderation instance would truly expect people who don't like moderation to stay away.

Don't get me wrong I agree with your sentiment and dislike that behavior, but what I'm saying is that asking or expecting users not to go on witch hunts or to behave in a certain way is a fool's errand that will always lead to burnout. A more sustainable approach for admins and mods is creating space for what they want to host and not trying to control what they don't.

I will be dead in the cold cold ground before I ever type "/s"

I know it sounds insane but I swear to god BlueSky has astroturfing accounts on Lemmy. Every conversation (including yours here) about BlueSky is met with countless Sealions either saying it "will be federated soon" or asking "Why does federation matter?"

Additional PSA to admins not running a "universal free speech" instance- if you see someone someone being obnoxious it's probably annoying your users just as much as is is you. Don't put the onus fully on users to curate their experience. The Fediverse needs our adults in the room!

company

Is this just your vibes or do you have a source? Because I just checked the website of the organization this article is referencing and it says no such thing.

First of all, that's not what "Economic Freedom" means in the context of democracy, but more importantly "economic freedom" is not even a factor in the methodology used by the group this article is citing.

Healthy for Lemmy, totally catastrophic for Pixelfed.

I know this comment is satire (well done... I think) but I want you to it hurt me deep in my bones.

I'm clearly not paying enough for a therapist.

Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold

This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it leads to mod burnout when they are getting drawn into rules-debates when it's obvious the person is just trying to get around the spirit of the community's purpose.

For example we had a rule that was literally just "be nice". There's no wriggling around that because it's not some legal text. If someone is ""concerned"" about a request to "be nice" or "be honest", they are not someone we wanted to be around anyway. These are discussion communities, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate in every single one of them.

As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it's own preferred method of discussion.

The Fediverse (and FOSS in general) is inherently (radically) political simply by the nature of it's construction and organization. That said I think it's important to stress to new users that one's experience can be curated to the degree that normal social media cannot.

Until someone open-sources TikToks algorithm, the Fediverse cannot compete on entertainment value, what it competes on is quality and intentionality. I think it's important we put that talking point front and center. We don't need to convince the users who just want to scroll memes (even though this post is literall r/memes haha).