Hey everyone, I’m new here and just testing the waters. I’ve been on Reddit for years, but lately it feels like a mix of heavy-handed moderation and echo chambers where any dissenting opinion gets buried.
For those of you who’ve spent real time on Lemmy: • What do you like better here than on Reddit? • What do you miss from Reddit? • Do you feel the culture here is genuinely different, or does it eventually drift the same way?
I’m curious how people see it — especially those who made the switch after the API drama.
Make it pull instead of push. Each user has way too little control over their own experience in my opinion. To me from an old-school-internet background, it’s very weird that a moderator can override what comments you’re allowed to see or not allowed to see. I much prefer Bluesky’s model, where you pick your moderators, and someone can’t override you and decide that certain comments you’re not allowed to read just because those comments happened to land within that person’s little domain after they were the first to claim the “worldnews” name for their community or whatever.
How to graft that onto Lemmy is a little bit difficult. It’s just a different model. I mean you could have a list of moderators whose decisions you want to block (similar to your list of users you want to block) – if any of those moderators removed a comment, you can still read it, their decisions just don’t affect your feed in any way. That would be a simple hack, sort of a useful check on their “power” if you want to say it that way, although it’s definitely a little bit rough approach. Probably a more holistic way would be to restructure how content even gets shared around. I haven’t looked at how Piefed does “feeds,” but that might be one good approach; let someone create or share a “politics” feed for example, and it can be a modification of someone else’s feed (“!news@lemmy.world but take out the Trump stuff” or “block these specific annoying users” or “ignore decisions by these two moderators”), so that it’s not a monopoly in terms of who gets to curate and control the content. You could subscribe to !betterpolitics@lemmy.world for example, and it’s just the identical posts sourced from !politics@lemmy.world, but with some users that are widely disliked banned, and then also with certain moderators who consistently make bad decisions disabled. That’s a lot harder to implement of course… IDK, this is just me thinking out loud about solutions I could see, but hopefully it makes some kind of sense.
I feel like we’ve had a debate on this before. This would just negate the concept of communities built up by moderators. Also, in many case, instances have rules before communities. How does that system work here?
Feeds are just made and maintained by one person that draw from a pool of selected communities. You can subscribe to a feed or follow new posts made in it. The creator doesn’t curate it beyond curating what communities are visible in it. Piefeds word filters already work to mitigate content users don’t want to see.
Are we having a debate? I honestly was not aware if so lol
Correct. Moderators should not “own” the communication that goes on in “their” communities, they definitely shouldn’t look at people as “their” users as I’ve heard some of them say before. We are just people. We are allowed to say things. The fact that letting people say things even if the moderators don’t want them to, would do damage to their concept, is a flaw with their concept.
To a certain extent, it is cultural. At the end of the day, the instance admins can physically control whatever passes through their server. In the old school Usenet sense, someone who was in that role would never modify someone else’s message. It just was this kind of wild fascism that would never be done except in the most dire circumstances (there were actually arguments about it when spam started cropping up, some people felt like even removing spam was going too far). Now, even someone who doesn’t own the server hardware feels empowered to set “rules” as you say for what people are allowed to say to each other, sometimes very arbitrary and clearly self-serving or etc. In my opinion, success lies somewhere between those two extremes: People generally being able to talk to one another (and the architecture being designed where it’s assumed that they’re allowed to) even if someone else doesn’t like it and wants to make rules against it, but still moderation set up for people who want it to the extent that they want it.
There’s obviously still a need for someone to take responsibility for deleting spam, harassment, or abusive content, and there’s going to be a grey area. I feel like, generally, you can let people control their own feeds and moderation that applies to them, and they will probably decide to configure it in a way where the anti-spam protection is applied to their feed and their weird additional arbitrary rules are not. That’s what I was saying.
Yes, I’m aware. I was proposing a new way in which it could work, I know that currently it doesn’t work that way. I don’t even know that the thing I spitballed is the way to do it, just someone asked how it could work, so I spitballed one possible way.
Moderators don’t literally “own” the communities they run now. They steward them. They can power-trip, but they can also be supplanted and replaced much easier on the Fediverse than they are on Reddit.
As for being able to “ignore” specific community moderators decisions, that’s a recipe that doesn’t scale well. In more active communities, that would mean that you would end up consistently seeing a lot of spam and abuse and nonsense because even a poor moderator will do the janitorial work that all communities do.
In terms of instances, there simply isn’t any appetite for the type of instances and community culture you want. You are simply in a minority here.
Severely tempted to code it up and see what the interest level is. IDK, I am lazy also, so let’s see. In any case thank you for your constructive input lol.