Fediverse Challenge: Prove there's still good in the world
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For a successful community, this one (which I also lurk in) is oddly topic-specific. They must be doing something right. Copy them!
Yeah, the fediverse could definitely use more niche stuff.
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(unless there’s just a massive bot problem which I don’t have reason to suspect)
Actually those are known to exist - see e.g. https://lemmy.ca/post/58955248 - though as evidenced by that same post, the admins tend to be pretty on top of shutting them down.
Below that though, at the level of communities, Lemmy has a moderation problem. Reports from one instance to anther do not federate (well, on PieFed they do, but on Lemmy they don't) - although like everything else this is promised to be fixed "soon" (same as last year iirc, and to a lesser degree the year before that too, though probably more in the sense of just having put it onto the roadmap), which allows toxicity to thrive. Ironically it also encourages having toxic mods as well, seeing as they are the only ones willing to put up with the majority of the negative flood pushed at them.
And don't even get me started on the lack of notification to someone that their content was removed by a mod - people tend to find out days/weeks/years later/if at all, meaning that they continue unabated, not even aware at all (or at least, at first) that they have been so censured.
Lemmy also is lacking is so many other ways, e.g. content discovery is often primarily achieved by browsing All, rather than lets say by browsing Topic areas (I am not discouraging the existence of the All Feed, just bemoaning the lack of many alternatives to it). So communities get "stumbled upon" much more readily by people not actively searching for something anywhere close to that content type, who might tend to emotionally vomit upon people rather than be genuinely interested in constructive dialog.
Reddit is a multimillion dollar company and even though the vast majority of the features rolled out over the last decade either ignored or actively went against what the userbase wanted, it nonetheless was a fully feature-complete product. e.g. it triggered notifications upon removal of your content, it had a modmail allowing you to communicate with the team to ask why, and posts removed from a community remained active to anyone possessing the URL, allowing people to continue discussions already begun, which personally as a mod of a small gaming community I used to explain to the OP why I felt their post had to be removed, and we could talk about it back and forth. None of that can be done here (although PieFed now retains deleted posts, rendering them inactive/locked but preserving their content to be read, so that e.g. a Q&A would preserve the A part even if the OP deleted their Q).
The Threadiverse is great for FOSS, not so much great as in overall terms. We make sacrifices to be here, and the benefits tend to be more abstract and harder to explain in few words (at least without needing all kinds of MAJOR caveats about what does not work). Even Linux took decades to arrive at where it is at today, and until then it was primarily a CLI tool for all that time (gfx options often did not work as well or even properly at all, earlier in its development).
I guess what you're calling "toxicity" is something I've dealt with more-or-less successfully by just blocking and switching instances. In fact, those are so far out of my mind I forgot to include them in my "see things through the eyes of a new user" experiment (I only unblocked communities/instances for that). But yeah, considering how many people, communities, and lemmy.ml + dbzer0 I've had to block and how much work that was and continues to be, I guess that does speak to a bigger problem that could be solved by better modding. I would hope some of the more egregious bad behavior only gets a pass because this place is so relatively small, but I fear that's just me being naive.
Topic areas would be amazing and a much better onboarding experience than dumping you into the community list or
/all. Topics you want to see, topics you never want to see, and maybe have it build a default subscription and/or default block list for those. And maybe a better "duplicate" detection system where there's like 5 posts for the same non-story about a rich person farting and the Fediverse breaking out the torches and pitchforks over it. At least then you could slow-boil you way to the angry stuff that currently dominates the feed and give you a chance to turn those off rather than turning you away from the platform.I would love to try Piefed because I keep hearing that it's basically adding all the features Lemmy has needed forever, but TBH, my instance would have to migrate to Piefed or stand up a copy. I was on
.worldbefore I moved to startrek.website and the "feel" is just so much better here (general negativity of the overall Threadiverse notwithstanding). As you said, that's primarily due to modding and giving the perma boot to the ones who don't play well with others (as large as my block list is here, it's significantly smaller than the blocklist I had on .world before I just gave up it as an instance).Even Linux took decades to arrive at where it is at today
True. I'll admit I'm impatient (my major remaining rough edge therapy has not yet conquered lol) but every time I see a brand new account coming in with their first post bitching about getting banned from Reddit it's just a reminder that we're not attracting the best and brightest here but rather the ones who have nowhere else to go. And they bring that behavior here and it just seems like it takes us further away from becoming a real alternative people actually want to go to. I'm going off on a tangent, I know, so I'll stop here.
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lemmy and doomerism are synonymous at this point
What I said is factual
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I guess what you're calling "toxicity" is something I've dealt with more-or-less successfully by just blocking and switching instances. In fact, those are so far out of my mind I forgot to include them in my "see things through the eyes of a new user" experiment (I only unblocked communities/instances for that). But yeah, considering how many people, communities, and lemmy.ml + dbzer0 I've had to block and how much work that was and continues to be, I guess that does speak to a bigger problem that could be solved by better modding. I would hope some of the more egregious bad behavior only gets a pass because this place is so relatively small, but I fear that's just me being naive.
Topic areas would be amazing and a much better onboarding experience than dumping you into the community list or
/all. Topics you want to see, topics you never want to see, and maybe have it build a default subscription and/or default block list for those. And maybe a better "duplicate" detection system where there's like 5 posts for the same non-story about a rich person farting and the Fediverse breaking out the torches and pitchforks over it. At least then you could slow-boil you way to the angry stuff that currently dominates the feed and give you a chance to turn those off rather than turning you away from the platform.I would love to try Piefed because I keep hearing that it's basically adding all the features Lemmy has needed forever, but TBH, my instance would have to migrate to Piefed or stand up a copy. I was on
.worldbefore I moved to startrek.website and the "feel" is just so much better here (general negativity of the overall Threadiverse notwithstanding). As you said, that's primarily due to modding and giving the perma boot to the ones who don't play well with others (as large as my block list is here, it's significantly smaller than the blocklist I had on .world before I just gave up it as an instance).Even Linux took decades to arrive at where it is at today
True. I'll admit I'm impatient (my major remaining rough edge therapy has not yet conquered lol) but every time I see a brand new account coming in with their first post bitching about getting banned from Reddit it's just a reminder that we're not attracting the best and brightest here but rather the ones who have nowhere else to go. And they bring that behavior here and it just seems like it takes us further away from becoming a real alternative people actually want to go to. I'm going off on a tangent, I know, so I'll stop here.
we’re not attracting the best and brightest here but rather the ones who have nowhere else to go. And they bring that behavior here and it just seems like it takes us further away from becoming a real alternative people actually want to go to.
This right here. There's a famous adage that goes "why would I want to be a member of a club that would accept me as a member?", which encourages us to look within, but it's undeniably true as well (however much we may want to deny it) that we are influenced by the actions of those who we choose to spend our time with. Echo chambers that act to funnel misinformation (or worse, active disinformation) are so incredibly dangerous. Yet it seems nearly impossible to escape from such - though we do get to choose our favorite flavoring of it.
I will note that making an account on PieFed does not represent any kind of "commitment" at all, and in fact has ancillary benefits such as reserving your username in advance in case you ever do decide to switch. Simply make an account on PieFed.social and you'll get to see first-hand what all it offers! Do beware though bc most likely one glance at that sign-up wizard will make you fall in love
, and then more and more often you'll find yourself using your PieFed rather than STW alt account. But is that a bad thing, to have options to choose from?! 
For a new member coming to Lemmy, my advice would be to:
- Block instances
- Block communities
- Subscribe to communities (traditionally by scrolling through All)
- Block users
- Comment and Post
We need to move past these bare-bones basics. Which I don't see much activity happening there on the Lemmy side to improve any of that, though I do see much happening in PieFed, hence I am placing my hopes for the future into it.
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I would love to not be bombarded with US news in communities where it has no business showing up.
I think there’s a lot of communities where the mods have gone inactive and no-one’s noticed yet, so when you get stuff in the wrong community there’s no-one to clean it up. Iirc, there’s a process for getting added as a mod for those communities — maybe it’s something we could help with?
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We are living in a world full of conflicts and political tension that we never seen since the end of world war 2. You can't expect people to post less negstive contents. If you talk about balance between negative and positive content I can agree
The worse things get the more important positivity becomes, mrdown. You can at least try.
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The worse things get the more important positivity becomes, mrdown. You can at least try.
The worse things get the most vocal people should so we find solutions. Hiding your face in the sand do not help
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The worse things get the most vocal people should so we find solutions. Hiding your face in the sand do not help
Panicked screaming doesn't exactly help either man. Good luck out there
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Panicked screaming doesn't exactly help either man. Good luck out there
Acknowledging the reality and be vocal about it is not panicked screaming
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I would love to not be bombarded with US news in communities where it has no business showing up.
Yes, there is the economy community that only post politics on it
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Acknowledging the reality and be vocal about it is not panicked screaming
And keeping a light in the darkness isn't sticking your 'face' in the sand. Whatever you try, I hope it works for you
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And keeping a light in the darkness isn't sticking your 'face' in the sand. Whatever you try, I hope it works for you
I talked about balance in my first comment. I talked about finding solutions aka keeping light in the darkness. I don't know why people are always selectively reading my comments
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I talked about balance in my first comment. I talked about finding solutions aka keeping light in the darkness. I don't know why people are always selectively reading my comments
Communication can be tricky. I always wonder what motivates someone to downvote the other half of a conversation like this. Hope you feel better understood next time and have a nice day
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Communication can be tricky. I always wonder what motivates someone to downvote the other half of a conversation like this. Hope you feel better understood next time and have a nice day
An advice for you. Hide downvotes and upvotes in setting . It is good for people well being including me
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I think there’s a lot of communities where the mods have gone inactive and no-one’s noticed yet, so when you get stuff in the wrong community there’s no-one to clean it up. Iirc, there’s a process for getting added as a mod for those communities — maybe it’s something we could help with?
Maybe. On the other hand, I can see a mod being reticent about nuking a post that has a high upvote ratio and a healthy discussion going.
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Yes, there is the economy community that only post politics on it
To be fair, politics shape a lot of the economy. But it pops up everywhere, TV show communities, hobbies, everything.
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Maybe. On the other hand, I can see a mod being reticent about nuking a post that has a high upvote ratio and a healthy discussion going.
Lemmy’s mod tools allow for much more nuanced responses than just nuking a post. For instance, I think locking the post and adding a comment pointing folks to the same post in a more relevant community is something most people would react positively to. And, it’s definitely okay to have some communities be for very small groups of people with a very restrictive mod policy — there’s always a bigger, more permissive community available for people that want to discuss whatever.
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Lemmy’s mod tools allow for much more nuanced responses than just nuking a post. For instance, I think locking the post and adding a comment pointing folks to the same post in a more relevant community is something most people would react positively to. And, it’s definitely okay to have some communities be for very small groups of people with a very restrictive mod policy — there’s always a bigger, more permissive community available for people that want to discuss whatever.
it’s definitely okay to have some communities be for very small groups of people with a very restrictive mod policy
I'd say that's not only ok but desirable. I forgot about locking posts, that would indeed be effective.
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Or its a .ml instancrlol
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Or its a .ml instance
And moderation of certain topics is very active lol
