I respectfully disagree. On our LW Android comm, the discussion quality is generally pretty good, except when a post get on the front page, then the quality just drops like a rock.
Smaller (but not too small) crowd usually lead to higher quality discussions, that’s true on reddit(default subreddits are pretty much all terrible) , and that’s true here as well. (the turning point for quality decline reddit is at about 20K subscribers). So, I don’t think the "instance protectionism lead to lower discussion quality is true at all.)
Also, I think the mod tools here is basic but perfectly adequate. You can check our community’s mod log to see how much post removal/bans we actually had to do, and it’s not a lot. Also not to brag, but I think our weekly discussions are some of the best threads on Lemmy right now.
It’s not hard, I just tell our comm’s users that I expect them to act like adults, and most of them act like adults, and we just remove the post of the few who refuses to do so (they are like in the single digits over the last months) and our admins usually handle the trolls that requires site wide bans in literal minutes here.
I don’t use bots to mod and still do not see the need for it, because it turns out that if you cultivate a good culture in your community, moderation is pretty easy. That’s just my experience here though.
Ironic you used lemm.ee account to talk about LW :)
Well, LW still shows up to my all feed, so I just comment on posts if it comes up.
Can’t argue with that, hopefully they improve before the biggest instances decide to partly close on themselves
Too late for that!
Is it?
The top five instances aren’t even all federated together…
That seems to be the growing consensus on some of the biggest instances. Hopefully they start prioritizing that, or some other nice dev who knows Rust will. Maybe I need to start brushing up on it lol.
I didn’t see really any questions relating to mod tools or moderation outside of the one that was talking about the join-lemmy lists. Is that what you are referring to or do you mean the lack of mod tool discussion on that AMA?
A couple of beehaw admin had questions about the status of moderation tooling and the Lemmy Devs were like “not an emphasis”
To be fair, I think at the time, Lemmy had major performance issues. I can see how sorting that out is a big priority as well.
I kind of feel like that may be a major strategic mistake.
It won’t be long before any given instance is overrun with alt right or other disruptive sorts if there aren’t good tools to help moderators/admins.
One of beehaw’s admins’ feature requests is for more granular instance controls such as blocking (defederating) at the community level.
Why did two people downvote this? That’s exactly what happened. The devs stated they didn’t care much for mod tools at the moment and also stated they wouldn’t remove exploding heads from join-lemmy in another thread in the AMA, which is a whole other level of wtf.
The reality of it is that the platform wasn’t well thought out. The primary motivation was to copy Reddit functionally from a users perspective. That moderation tooling wasn’t even much of an afterthought is telling considering the language choice.
Just waiting on someone to create Reddit in forum form so long discussions over weeks/months/years on any type of subject can happen…
Ironically that’s also lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
😱
Edit: And both instances don’t work 🤣
Oh yeah i forgot to mention it hasn’t been maintained since the huge influx of users
In theory, but I used to hate when people would get mad at threads getting brought back from the dead. If the person has a question relevant to the topic, why start a new thread?
Exactly, some people would complain about bringing back zombie threads, while others whine that people didn’t use the search feature to find existing threads on the topic. You can’t win either way with forum gatekeepers.
Not as if that was solved by instead having people tell OP to research the answer one of the many (now dead) discussions where the same question was asked!
That’s a culture-thing. I’m a member of two forums that are still pretty active. One views dead thread revivals as amusing, the other almost literally has a celebration in-thread when it happens as all the members with older posts in it come piling in. Heck, the second forum has a thread so active that people literally ask for, and get, recaps for the last X amount of time for it.
I miss forums so much. A federated backend for forums would be nice. I’m so tired of having these giant communities of angry strangers if I want to talk about anything
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Think those are just called forums?
Some things like federated identities, or even federated content would go a long way into making forums a thing again.
I still think lemmy could use a “community type” enum where you can say what kind of discussion you want there.
Yes, what I mean is instead of having separate forums for everything, a Reddit/Lemmy type platform where people can create their own community to start threads. So if I wanted I could create a tractor community with sub communities for different brands and in there would be a single discussion to discuss a specific model, but my credentials would also allow me to go on the cooking community, in the baking sub community to take part in a discussion on strawberry shortcakes that’s been going on for months…
Reddit type “forums” just lead to the same questions/content being posted again and again and if you know a lot about a subject and just happen to miss the one time someone asks a question about it then that discussion is lost to time.
Kind of like if there was a Lemmy Star Trek server and it hosted a bunch of communities with different topics that are all related to Star Trek?
The architecture is in place to do what you’re talking about. Just needs the right people to adopt the approach over time.
Yes and no, the bulletin board system leads to more in depth discussions than anything you’ll ever get on the Reddit system of discussions that don’t get bumped…
So what I’m talking about is a decentralized bulletin board system with the federation system in place, so you can sign up to the Star Trek bulletin board but use the same log in to post on the Home Renovations bulletin board…
Basically, fix the biggest issue with forums, i.e. having to create an account for every single topic that interests you.
That’s just a function of how the host server sorts posts.
I am fairly sure that functionality could be implemented without the need to even fork the version.You can go to your user setting and select new comments and do this now.
It still doesn’t work like bulletin boards where all users would see discussions get bumped and replies were linear. It only works if the sorting mechanism is the same for everyone and the discussion is ongoing. I could point you to discussions that are still active more than ten years after they started, where all the knowledge available on a subject is available…
Here’s an example: https://www.advrider.com/f/threads/klr650-only-thread.742912/
Over 42 000 replies over 12 years on that specific model of motorcycle, that’s simply impossible on a platform that doesn’t work like bulletin boards do.
Bulletin boards is like having people sitting at a table and discussing a specific subject. Reddit/Lemmy is like an event with everyone scattered around the place with groups each having separate conversations, it might be a Star Trek convention, but you can’t follow every conversations so the same thing keeps getting repeated again and again by different people because they don’t realize someone already said the same thing.
There’s a reason specialists still hang on forums and enthusiasts hang on Reddit…
Edit: The Lemmy devs even started developing my idea, but development stopped when the Exodus happened…
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Instances shouldn’t be first class citizens, they should be more invisible to the users. The fediverse should be more like a cloud. Communities should be the primary focus, and only allow Instances to control how many users/communities they are the primary/secondary source for.
Disagree. Indeed, I couldn’t disagree more strongly.
Instances are not just abstract server nodes in some overly wasteful recreation of some other website. This is the world wide social web as it should have been.
You may as well argue that websites should be indistinguishable from each other.
This isn’t Reddit. Full stop. And it’s not a drop-in Reddit replacement, either. It’s not “Reddit, but different”. It’s a whole new paradigm in forums and content aggregation. It’s very different from centralized social media, and we need to stop dancing around or trying to hide that fact.
It will never get to reach its potential if we decide it needs to be nothing more than a simulacra of what came before it.
This is the world wide social web as it should have been.
This is my stance too - we took a wrong turn letting initially utopian tech companies create vast eyeball-farming dystopias when the natural progression from forums and blogs is breaking them out of their silos (not building bigger ones) and letting them talk to each other.
This isn’t Reddit. Full stop. And it’s not a drop-in Reddit replacement, either. It’s not “Reddit, but different”. It’s a whole new paradigm in forums and content aggregation. It’s very different from centralized social media, and we need to stop dancing around or trying to hide that fact.
Indeed. It’s early days still and the Reddit diaspora has shaped the initial growth but, as it spreads beyond that, it will expand and mutate. Already kbin have a kind of forum/microblogging thing going and it will be interesting to see how things evolve from here. With better moderation tools, I could see people skipping setting up their own forum and blog and just spinning up an instance instead - there are too many advantages to not do it. That’ll drag in a more diverse group of people with different needs and requirements that will push development in new directions. I, for one, can’t wait to see where this all goes.
To use a somewhat stretched analogy. Instances should be like bitcoin miners, I don’t need to know much about them individually at all. My only concern is that there isn’t a majority miner/instance.
It doesn’t have to be a reddit clone, but the federation needs to move to a more mandatory model, and one that puts the content first. The current system is far too user hostile to allow anything but the lowest common denominator of communities.
Miners are trying to make money, which is why having a faceless and generic flavour/community is irrelevant.
That’s not what motivates folk running lemmy instances
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there already exists a proposal to make communities work more like a cloud.
It’s just a matter of time before Lemmy and Kbin implement this.
It’s a proposal, not a certainty. There’ve been a bunch of proposals for ways to allow people to aggregate communities from multiple instances together and it’ll be a handy tool to have, but it doesn’t change the fundamental properties of the Fediverse. It just makes it more convenient to use it in various different ways.
Websites are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.
Federated instances can be like web service providers, only limiting malicious content from users. The magazines/communities are like web sites on a particular host, such as WordPress. They control the content within their scope.
What you are suggesting is that instances should be like AOL, curating the experience. Which is fine if some of them want to do that, but it shouldn’t be the standard.
What he’s suggesting is that instances can be like AOL. Not that they have to be. Each instance can present whatever sort of interface to the fediverse that it wants, and people can pick and choose which one they like.
I have zero interest in administrating a generic lemmy instance, including the inevitable hosting of transphobic and bigoted users.
I admin a group focused on the gender diverse community, my community because that’s what’s important to me.
Your solution would lead to less folk volunteering to run communities
That’s what the subscribed feed is for.
What kind of moderation tools could help with this?
I don’t believe there is any type of auto moderator, though that’s possibly being supplemented by external bots.
I forget where I read it, but I believe the biggest issue is with the implementation of current mod tools and how they don’t properly propagate through the fediverse.
But again, I don’t recall the details.
Actually I have built an AutoMod myself, just a few days ago.
The configuration is a bit clunky, unfortunately, mostly because of lack of UI support. I plan on making some changes to my instance’s UI to make this a bit more feasible, and of course those will be open sourced just like the bot, but it will take me time.
Here’s a laundry list from one of the Beehaw people, and apparently the devs don’t have any of this as a priority
Wrong link.
Anyone can be a dev, it’s open source.
Sure, but it usually takes some time to get proficient in a language. I’ve been an enterprise Java engineer for a decade and things have changed pretty dramatically in that time. Picking up a language like Rust takes time, understanding the available frameworks and what they provide takes time, understanding why there isn’t published code coverage metrics takes time, understanding why commits get merged when the pipeline is broken (or the commit broke the build) takes time, etc.
It’s important, if one plans on creating a project that is maintainable by people other than yourself, to think things through and make sure the actual infrastructure exists and is stable and documented before opening it up to the world - and hold steadfast to those processes. When I read a PR that has the comment “the code works, now I just have to work on some tests”, I start to cringe knowing that testing is usually an afterthought with that developer rather than the place where the change should have started. As I look at the code in GitHub, the last commit to main didn’t even build. How was it even allowed to merge of it failed in the PR? Or do the pipelines just break randomly?
Maybe I’m just really picky because I take pride in the maintainability of my professional (and personal) projects. After seeing where we were 5-6 years ago - with commented out code and tests, tests that made no sense, lack of code or branch coverage, non-existent validation phases, etc - it’s a no brainer that I would never want to go back to that.
As a dev myself, I fully agree.
But that also illustrates why simply demanding that the existing devs should prioritize your personal needs over whatever it is they’re working on is kind of a non-starter. If it’s too hard for you to become a dev on the project but they’ve put in the effort to do so, they get to use that hard-won ability however they see fit.
Is there some sort of bug bounty or feature bounty program for Lemmy or kbin? That might be a way that a non-dev could get their own needs prioritized, perhaps.
No. Moderation tools lead to instance protectionism, which leads to a decline in the overall discussion quality on Lemmy.
What I think could help against instance protectionism:
A.) Better moderation tools to protect against SPAM and trash
B.) Better curation algorithm, especially for smaller instances, to smartly curate posts that are relevant to the user
C.) Better default-values for the selected feed (All instead of local), as well as for the discovery of communities (which is also currently local by default)
If B is not realized, smaller instances will have no handle against big instances flooding their user’s feeds with their posts and they will switch back to local-default again.
Overall, it can be brought down to making the All-feed more attractive. In my opinion, there should only be the subscribed-feed and an all-feed with curated posts (with different sorting algorithms to chose from in the best case). Or at least these should be the main ones.
To me, the Local feed is one of the biggest strengths of Lemmy. It allows having in the same platform a community/instance based feed (for example, Local in jlai.lu allows you to find most of the French activity in Lemmy), and at the same time, I can use “Subscribed” and/or “All” feeds to get a broader view of the Fediverse.
Without the “Local” view, Lemmy would just feel like another Reddit clone to me, where French communities would just be flooded by English-speaking communities. On Reddit, the French community actually had to create a subreddit dedicated to listing all French subreddits, just because the discoverability of non-English-speaking subreddits is just awful by default on Reddit.
And at the same time, I don’t see the need for “curation algorithms”. The “Subscribed” feed already fills this use case for me.
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Poorly advertised is an understatement, I never heard about this within Reddit xD I always thought that it was a third-party thing.
It is indeed similar to the “Local” feed from Lemmy then. However, it doesn’t have the “I’m part of a common family” feeling that I see in an instance like jlai.lu where we know that all users from the instance see the same content.
But TIL, thank you :)
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All these issues only apply to large generalized instances like lemmy.world and not smaller instances where the local feed is the curated high quality feed.
It would be IMHO better to remove the all feed and in general get away from large generalized instances that are harmful to the federation.
I agree, I feel like most of the “feed” issues are simply because users are in big instances where the “Local” feed indeed becomes meaningless.
Something that would however be cool would be a way to view the Local feed from another instance, without having to actually go to the other instance.
I was going to say that B might not be so easy. But maybe some kind customization on the ratio of local vs external posts on some of the top posts lists. Just a random idea.
???
Why do people not seem to know that the subscribed feed exists?
Because they want to find new stuff maybe?
They do.
But, if they used subscribed, they wouldn’t be able to fuss about all of the stuff they don’t want to see.
Instead, they just want to look at everything. and then block instances (not communities) showing things they don’t want to see.
I just wish I could block porn instances. I like porn as much as the next guy, but I don’t want it offered to me every time I browse Lemmy.
There is a current PR, which I think has been merged. That being said, next release will likely contain that functionality.
there are more than one app that allows you to block instances.
for example sync can filter*:
- words
- communities
- users
- instances
*filter is a sync functionality, for communities and user use block if you want to have them blocked outside sync
I won’t let a little thing like jerkin’ it to furry porn get in the way of my jerkin’ off to bondage porn.
Well half the things I’ve tried to sub to say ‘pending’ then never get added to my feeds so that needs to be fixed. I don’t think it’s a jerboa issue because I’ve had it on desktop too.
I don’t really know what’s happening there, am I waiting for permission to subscribe? Waiting for it to sync between local and remote instances? For my local client to communicate with the instance I’m on or the the community is on?
Either way there should be an intermediary step where is stored locally soi I can find it again
if you hit refresh while it is in the pending state, does it go to subscribed?
i’ve seen it on the website, but it is just a graphical glitch. you did indeed subscribe to the community, just the front end never gets updated to reflect it.
but this might be outdated, it has been a long time since i last used the website.
i use sync btw, and here it works. you hit subscribe and the ui reflects the change
No it never changes and the community never gets added to my list, it’s only when trying to sub to communities from other instances as far as I can tell
that’s not supposed to happen, please do report it to the instance admin
How feasible would it be to have levels of federation? Make it possible for instances to partially-federate (if you’re from “your-instan.ce” and its partially-federated with lemmy.world, you don’t see lemmy.world stuff in your feeds, but allow browsing and interacting with “https://your-instan.ce/c/fediverse@lemmy.world”).
Sounds more like a simple filter to your feed. I’m not familiar with the backend side of Lemmy but I would guess it shouldn’t be too hard to implement.
Just save an array of instance domains a user doesn’t want to see in their preferences and filter them out of the post list that gets served to them.
“Decline in overall quality” is a subjective metric, though. Does defederation reduce participation? Certainly.
But ya know, there’s a reason people defederate certain instances – usually because those instances have attracted people who are disruptive to discussion on other instances.
It’s really been no problem at all for me to keep a foot in lemmy.world, kbin.social, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org. And a few other instances that appeal to more niche audiences.
And if I really feel like discussion on an instance is offering something and I’m missing out, I can always get an account there.
Not that I’m arguing against better moderation tools, of course. By all means, lemmy devs should prioritize those as soon as scaling/stability issues are dealt with.
Yep, when I get sick of the rhetoric here I just jump over to hexbear where they make fun of the people I tend to disagree with frequently here. . I think the best moderation tools would be to attempt to decentralize it so the petty tyrants the role seems to attract can’t abuse their authority to censor opinions they don’t agree with regardless of whether or not the content actually conflicts with the rules.
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Sounds like you’d like it better over there full-time.
Meh happy to block another hb going by another name. Ez win
Or… just let people live with their multiple personalities. It’s not like people didn’t have alt accounts on Reddit specifically so they could talk about stuff in a way that wouldn’t reflect on their primary account.
As long as people behave appropriately on an instance, it’s nobody else’s business what they do on other instances with different accounts.
I never said they couldn’t? Just making an observation about what their declared preferences suggest.
Also, they’re the ones advocating for all-inclusive access. Personally I think everything works well enough as-is. If a user gets annoyed or tired of an instance, they can quite easily hop to another. No need to restrict the abilities of admins just because wants to browse chapotraphouse on their main.
you’d like it better over there full-time
The passive-aggressive version of “don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out”.
And? That’s still not saying anything about people with more than one account.
If this is true, it may also cause users on smaller instances to migrate to bigger instances, because there is more activity. Undermining the power and freedom of the decentralized structure of Lemmy and the fediverse.
If its possible to create your own instance and federate with any instance of your choice - are there any apps which include the ability to register your own instance with you as the sole user? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the underlying logic
Apps? As on your phone? No, that’s not the way it works. You can host your own instance. I would in fact recommend it, if possible. It would give you the best Lemmy experience possible. But here’s the thing: the machine where you run the instance has to be on 24/7 or as closely to that as possible, it isn’t enough for it to be online when you’d browse Lemmy.
Here’s an oversimplified explanation of how federation works: say your personal instance is
disappointingintro.comand you’re federated with lemmy.world. Any time something happens on the lemmy.world server (upvotes, comments, posts…), the lemmy.world server will send a “message” to the disappointingintro one notifying it of what just happened. The disappointingintro server has a copy of everyting coming from lemmy.world, where all of these updates are written into. When you view a lemmy.world community on disappointingintro what you’re really viewing is this copy.Because of this, if your instance was hosted on a phone, said phone would need to communicate constantly with the federation. If it didn’t you’d miss out on a ton of updates and you’d only see a fraction of the content.
The actual way to do this is either to self host it (meaning installing the server on an older PC or laptop lying somewhere in your basement), assuming you know how to do that, or rent a server from someone else to host it on their server for you. Both take some degrees of technical expertise and have some expenses, which is why public instances exist, most users can’t be bothered running their own instance.
But I like the all feed
Yeah thats the problem - too many comments. /s
