We need to be careful on Lemmy. Only the fact that the moderators and admins have goodwill are keeping Lemmy from becoming like Reddit. If Lemmy gets big and starts attracting people who want to pay to take over communities, that will stretch the moderator goodwill to the limits.
As the number of users goes up, it becomes more difficult to enforce that way. Even if many people switch communities, when new ones search for the community by name, the one with the most users will pop up first. And it becomes more and more difficult to justify defederating an instance over a couple of communities if the instance has a ton of big communities.
It makes me think that maybe “communities” wasn’t the way to organize, maybe you subscribe to a topic and see all posts for that topic on all instances.
But moderation is good, and defederation is too severe a tool to use for moderation. It feels like there is no good solution.
Ive always thought it would be good to elect mods from the community. Instead of having a mod that is in charge of EVERYTHING in a community, it should have periodic elections (or just a vote of no confidence by a certain % of users, then an election). The ones that vote have to joined the community for X number of days/months/etc… That way it prevents a bit of the brigading. Also if communities are basically dead, it can help revive them.
It might be some sort of vetting to know all your users are real people.
I’ve considered setting up a Lemmy/Piefed for my neighborhood, but I’ve been told I’m unlikely to get the neighborhood off of our very active Facebook.
Which will make the return on investment questionable, especially if the whole thing gets meme’d into the spotlight. And if it doesn’t attract more attention, it probably didn’t need to be shut down in the first place.
It can be used to pressure admins to remove problematic moderators. It can be used to pressure admins of your instance to defederate from other instances with problematic admins. It means mods can’t gaslight people about their actions. Obviously it doesn’t magically stop bad actions but it gives us a lot of ways to resist it and counter it.
You’ve only seen one case of mods not being able to gaslight people? I’m been a little cheeky because it’s so much more than getting mods to step down or apologize or shit like that. If they’re the problem people can make a new community. If the instance is the problem you can jump ship to a new one. Hell, you can even self host if it comes down to it.
Thats where federation comes in. Don’t like how mods are running things? Just set up a mirror forum on a different instance and people will come if theyre sympathetic.
It’s a fair point. Don’t discount the power and value that comes from keeping the same platform, APIs, and client software during a community migration away from the censorship. Plus having a clear line delineating the extent of a mod’s power to suppress viewpoints likely reduces the incidence of abuse in the first place.
I was banned from Reddit by Reddit for calling out a shill. And then they censored my post and deleted it from my data request so that it was impossible to prove I wasn’t inciting violence. That whole place is fucked.
It sounds exactly like the behavior of Reddit moderators. The entire platform was a form of hidden marketing; if anyone discovered it, they would flag or ban you.
Reddit mostly cleared that up by deleting the posts, and banning the users. They couldn’t risk looking like they did anything wrong, like working alongside a company to check for running apps on iOS, when it’s specifically designed to be sandboxed. Not surprisingly, other users discovered Apple was turning a blind eye to the attempts to check systems memory for hooks.
That’s Reddit, I was banned from a Pokemon Go subreddit for being against Niantic forcibly leaving their sandbox environment on iOS.
We need to be careful on Lemmy. Only the fact that the moderators and admins have goodwill are keeping Lemmy from becoming like Reddit. If Lemmy gets big and starts attracting people who want to pay to take over communities, that will stretch the moderator goodwill to the limits.
The difference being that Lemmy supports multiple communities with the same name.
If an instance is allowing their communities to be sold, they can be defederated.
As the number of users goes up, it becomes more difficult to enforce that way. Even if many people switch communities, when new ones search for the community by name, the one with the most users will pop up first. And it becomes more and more difficult to justify defederating an instance over a couple of communities if the instance has a ton of big communities.
It makes me think that maybe “communities” wasn’t the way to organize, maybe you subscribe to a topic and see all posts for that topic on all instances.
But moderation is good, and defederation is too severe a tool to use for moderation. It feels like there is no good solution.
Ive always liked subscribing to hashtags so you get user led topics. EX: https://piefed.social/tag/peertube
Ive always thought it would be good to elect mods from the community. Instead of having a mod that is in charge of EVERYTHING in a community, it should have periodic elections (or just a vote of no confidence by a certain % of users, then an election). The ones that vote have to joined the community for X number of days/months/etc… That way it prevents a bit of the brigading. Also if communities are basically dead, it can help revive them.
Just an idea.
Piefed has topics I think (I’m mostly on mobile so not something I use but I remember it being there when I set up my account)
Yep and it works well: Example: https://piefed.social/f/fediverse
or ~fediverse@piefed.social (this resolves if you are on a piefed instance)
It might be some sort of vetting to know all your users are real people.
I’ve considered setting up a Lemmy/Piefed for my neighborhood, but I’ve been told I’m unlikely to get the neighborhood off of our very active Facebook.
Which will make the return on investment questionable, especially if the whole thing gets meme’d into the spotlight. And if it doesn’t attract more attention, it probably didn’t need to be shut down in the first place.
Public mod logs help a lot.
It doesn’t, at all. They don’t care.
It can be used to pressure admins to remove problematic moderators. It can be used to pressure admins of your instance to defederate from other instances with problematic admins. It means mods can’t gaslight people about their actions. Obviously it doesn’t magically stop bad actions but it gives us a lot of ways to resist it and counter it.
In theory, yes. I have seen one (1) case of it working, across hundreds of communities.
Ive seen it work. https://piefed.social/modlog?communities=765
Im seeing quite a bit of activity in just this community. Looks like they are doing their (unpaid) job :)
You’ve only seen one case of mods not being able to gaslight people? I’m been a little cheeky because it’s so much more than getting mods to step down or apologize or shit like that. If they’re the problem people can make a new community. If the instance is the problem you can jump ship to a new one. Hell, you can even self host if it comes down to it.
Again, in theory, yes. But no.
Thats where federation comes in. Don’t like how mods are running things? Just set up a mirror forum on a different instance and people will come if theyre sympathetic.
If we ignore the network effect, or the effort it takes, it’s a great idea!
It’s a fair point. Don’t discount the power and value that comes from keeping the same platform, APIs, and client software during a community migration away from the censorship. Plus having a clear line delineating the extent of a mod’s power to suppress viewpoints likely reduces the incidence of abuse in the first place.
I was banned from Reddit by Reddit for calling out a shill. And then they censored my post and deleted it from my data request so that it was impossible to prove I wasn’t inciting violence. That whole place is fucked.
It sounds exactly like the behavior of Reddit moderators. The entire platform was a form of hidden marketing; if anyone discovered it, they would flag or ban you.
Super curious about the Pokemon Go thing, wasn’t able to find anything on Google though. Could you tell what to search or share a link? Thanks <3
Reddit mostly cleared that up by deleting the posts, and banning the users. They couldn’t risk looking like they did anything wrong, like working alongside a company to check for running apps on iOS, when it’s specifically designed to be sandboxed. Not surprisingly, other users discovered Apple was turning a blind eye to the attempts to check systems memory for hooks.