It appears to me that the current state of Lemmy is similar to other platforms when they were smaller and more insular, and that insularity is somewhat protecting it.
I browse Lemmy, and it feels a bit like other platforms did back in 2009, before they became overwhelmed and enshitified.
If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar “landed gentry” moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?
Federation.
There’s a reason why [email protected] and [email protected] are not federated with eachother, yet lots of users are subscribed to both.
If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar “landed gentry” moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
For lemmy, it’s again a federation thing. You just don’t see many multiple defederated examples due to the small user count.
It’s not the most optimal solution, but it’s still miles better than dealing with single instance or single community issues.
Yeah but what do you do when one instance becomes so big that it dwarfs the other instances, and inevitably pushes them out with its sheer amount of content?
Lemmy is built around forums, which is very distinct from microblogging when it comes to moderation and management.
You don’t get the same kind of context collapse as on Twitter. You don’t get the same kind of dependency on server wide shared culture like on many niche Mastodon servers. Although context collapse still happens to some degree on reddit and may happen here when threads gets popular, it’s possible for forums to be moderated to minimize it and enforce quality. You don’t get nearly as many people trying to enforce their rules in others’ spaces, because forum makes it clear that it’s not “your feed” (like how some try to control what they see not with filters but instead by harassing people who post stuff they don’t like), here it’s somebody’s forum and somebody else is the moderator. You can stop seeing specific content by blocking those forums instead of blocking the users. Forums which you don’t interact with doesn’t affect you!
Because of how the federation works here, volume alone is never the main problem. Forums can be hosted on small instances just fine. Users on small instances can use big forums just fine. If a particular forum is poorly moderated it can be blocked regardless of where it’s hosted. Admins for small servers can filter content from problematic servers, regardless how big they are, and can do it on a per-forum basis too in order to avoid collateral.
Spurious defederation between servers where one has a lot of users is where the problems gets complicated.
On non-federated platforms, the quantity of content contributes to the cost a user experiences when trying to switch to a different platform.
On federated platforms there is zero cost to switching, and even more, it is not zero sum. I can follow both of I think both have value.
Non-federated platforms don’t allow such a choice, and there is this hidden cost of inertia built into it that the federation bypasses.
On Reddit, before it went full goose step, you’d have the problem where the top mod of r/linux would be this weird open source zealot who would delete any thread that had any practicality in it. So actual discussion of using Linux would happen in r/linuxmasterrace, which was nominally a meme sub but it’s where the actual community landed. You could use Reddit’s vast namespace to steer around an individual top mod.
You couldn’t steer around Reddit’s admin though, they have root access to the servers, they can, have and increasingly do shut things down they don’t like. It’s double plus ungood.
Lemmy, and indeed the entire Fediverse, offers every user the Bender gambit. You can make your own instance with blackjack and hookers. There is no mechanism to shut it down everywhere. Instances are hosted by multiple people on multiple hardware platforms on multiple power grids in multiple countries under multiple jurisdictions.
The top mod of [email protected] is being a shithead? You could make [email protected], or you could start [email protected], or you could start your own instance and then YOU are in control of who gets to be a mod on at least one instance. No one person has the power to shut down everything everywhere; you start talking about severing undersea cables at that point.
Isn’t this still true of Reddit though? You could just make a new subreddit if you don’t like another.
How is it different?
Because at the end of the day, they’re all on Reddit. So when reddit says “you’ll get banned for upvoting content that promotes violence [against the oligarchs],” you can’t just make another subreddit because they’ll shut that one down too.
If the admin of lemmy.world says “you’ll get banned for upvoting content that promotes violence [against the oligarchs],” then you can say okay and make [email protected]. People on Lemmy.world can still access the new site, or even leave Lemmy.world entirely if they decide they’re not down with the admin. But they can still access all of the other federated communities they were subscribed to rather than having to quit Lemmy overall.
What happens if lemmy.world admin forces the hand of the mods of [email protected] community to ban such content and then defederate from the madeupinstance.net where the new luigi community is hosted? Isn’t that the same problem as reddit? Lemmy.world users would not be able to see the luigi community at that point right?
You can easily create a new account on a different instance. The only thing you lose is your post/comment history, but many apps allow multiple accounts in case you still want access to that.
Ah that makes sense. Thank you for the clarification!
Lol. We need to advertise “The Bender Gambit” more aggressively in our welcome materials. It really is part of what makes this place(s) great.
I’ll be sure to do that when I make my own instance, with blackjack and hookers.
And you know what?! Forget the instance .
I actually just found this on knowyourmeme:
I feel like there is a real possibility of a federation schism where a bunch of server admins get together and defederate with the rest of the servers. In that case you either need two accounts on both side of the schism or just be blind to whatever is happening over there.
We’re living it right now. It is my understanding that Truth Social is basically a fork of Mastodon.
What you’re worried about is basically what federation was built to stop.
If you don’t like the moderation of a community or other aspects, you or anyone else can make a new one on the same or a different instance, if you want.
You can even make it “private” (not federate) to keep others from coming in and recreating the problem you just fled.
To be optimistic, I’d hope the federation would be able to guard against deeper centralization like a more extreme .world or .ml, a la meta or whoever. There’s always space for grassroots instances, and I’m pretty sure there will always be someone out there running something or with enough interest to learn.
It will still probably end up like email. There will be a working group, public or private, that defines minimum spam requirements. If you don’t comply, you’ll be defederated.
You’re totally right. My optimism gets around that by hoping if it isn’t Lemmy, this federation, that federation, some other new initiative or tech, community will find a way to make itself. I guess my bigger worry is accessibility and notoriety/viability, but I think that will always come in time too. There are smart, willing people out there, and gathering is human instinct.
I agree with everything you said.
I’m thinking/hoping that this new wave of Europeans going to European instances will help spread out the centralization of .world and .ml, now and it’ll hold into the future, but we’ll see.
Hearing that several people have started country specific instances also gives me hope in this. With country/geographicly specific, topic specific, and just general instances, I think/hope it will lead to a more balanced user base.
Not just Europeans. I was talking to my roommate about how I deleted my Reddit accounts and fully committed to switching over to Lemmy, and his main concern was which instances were hosted in America so he could avoid them.
That’s awesome to hear.
Hopefully, the newest reddit influx will be able to settle in without any/too many issues.
I just made another comment that elaborated my stance more too.
I didn’t realize there was a trend of European users. I haven’t really thought about it, but Lemmy could use some sort of translation layer to facilitate multi-but-not-bilingual community. There’s a lot of German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese speakers I’d probably love interacting with and would never know! For now I rely on bilingual non-English natives or the little French I remember and just lurk.
Lemmy has language tags. Clients could offer integration with translation tools.
I don’t know how big the “wave” is but [email protected] has jumped to the 11th(?) most popular/active community in the last week or so. The activity level reminds me of more niche subreddits, where you’d see a couple posts every hour through the day. Quite an increase over what it was at.
I also recall seeing a chart of a German (?) instance that had linear growth and over the past week it went exponential. I doubt the exponential growth will last more than a couple weeks before going back to linear, but still cool to see.
Edit: Added link to the community.
How does one do this without hardware?
…. Acquire/rent hardware, or pay for cloud services?
“How does one cook without a stove”
Yeah no, I’m not paying to do what reddit charged nothing for
Then you should expect enshittified experiences if you aren’t willing to pay for them
Reddit didn’t let you host your own Reddit. Also, you don’t need to host your own instance, you can just use someone else’s for free.
Reddit may not have financially charged you but it came at a cost
“I want everyone else to do everything for me for free, I DEMAND it”
Plenty of people are ok with ads and such, and that’s fine. People who don’t want that may need to pay for the infrastructure of having an alternative platform. It all comes down to what you value more, and there’s no inherently right or wrong answer.
You’re not required to run your own instance on your own hardware; you’ve just got to find an existing instance with an admin team you’re comfortable with, create your community there and recruit moderators just like you would on Reddit.
Literally the only answer not trying to fleece me. Thank you.
? That’s a bizarre response.
No one here is trying to fleece you. People are suggesting ways to run your own instance as that’s the major difference between Reddit and Lemmy; you’re not obligated to use someone else’s hardware or be subject to their rules, you can setup your own systems and have a bit more freedom. Reddit doesn’t give you that option.
Your account is subject to the rules of the instance it was created on, as well as the rules of each community you’re interacting with. If you run afoul of the admins for your instance, you can be banned, losing access to that account completely.
If you were to run your own instance; no single admin could ban your entire account if you pissed them off. You can still be blocked from communities or entire instances if you don’t play nicely with others, but you won’t lose the account so you can still use it in other instances/communities.
For most people this isn’t really necessary; but lemmy also has a pretty large number of tech nerds that like to self-host our own services, so you’ll get quite a bit of ‘heres how you can do it yourself’ type responses.
Unlike reddit, you can just setup your own space on your own hardware completely under your own control, if you don’t like what’s available.
Fleece you? You act like we over here in a shady alley forcing you to buy shit.
??? How are the other answers trying to fleece you?
Take your meds
You appear to have asked a vague question and people responded on what they thought you meant with your question.
You seem to be interpreting that as people trying to take your money rather than seeing that what you are looking to understand and what people are answering do not line up.
Another user has already given you other information that looks like what you were looking for, so I won’t bother reiterating.
I just want to say that I hope in the future you’ll try not to assume people interacting with you are trying to take advantage of you and there may just be a disconnect in the conversation.
Regardless, best of luck with everything :)
You rent hardware.
The fuck I do
You didn’t need to stand up a whole instance to create a community.
I’m kind of sidestepping the point, but I think the average user will always be able to depend on the community to some degree, at least hopefully. All it takes is one savvy and willing user to support a huge section of community, bless the admins. If I’m being pedantic, most admins don’t own the hardware anyway, but that’s not the point. It’s not even the software necessarily. If it isn’t Lemmy itself, the spirit of independent web won’t go away. People will be always running Tor, I2P, fedi, I’ll even include crypto. The community isn’t the platform, it’s us.
I apologize for the uncalled-for Ted Talk.
I need to know a bit more what you are specifically asking to answer appropriately, but I’ll guess in the mean time.
I’m assuming you asking about starting an instance without hardware. My understanding is that many of the top Lemmy instances are hosted on server farms (companies) rather than self-hosted on their own hardware. Hosting with a company would be essentially renting their server to run your software (Lemmy). You would have control of all the software decisions (instance admin), but would not own the hardware.
I’m not particularly knowledgeable in the area, but the above is my understanding and hopefully that answers your question. If not, let me know and I’ll try again :)
Also, I believe the [email protected] community just posted in the last couple days a list of European companies that could be used to host Lemmy instances.
Edit: added correct community and link.
So I have to pay. No thanks.
Infrastructure costs
It depends which instance you are on. Some instances are full of mods that censor everything that doesn’t fit their ideology. Other instances are more relaxed with their moderation approaches. It definitely pays to shop around a bit before you settle on an instance that is a good fit for you.
On dbzero we have a governance community and instance users have the right to vote out mods/admins if they are unpopular. But most instances are run in a much more top-down BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) fashion.
On dbzero we have a governance community and instance users have the right to vote out mods/admins if they are unpopular
Most leftist thing I’ve ever seen.
lemmy is part of a horizontally scaling network of instances (servers). if a popular community on an instance goes sideways… say because of a new terrible mod or rule change, the entire population of that community can up and move to a new community in another instance without having to create new accounts anywhere.
this has already happened a few times.
I think the primary defense is the decentralized nature of the application…
Moderators/admins can block and remove content on the instace(s) they control, but this does not impact the content of any other instance.
Effective censorship of the entire ecosystem would require control of many instances and defederation from those that are not deemed appropriate.
There is not really a way for the operator of one instance to control the moderation decisions of the operator(s) of any other instance.
the enshitification happens at a smaller location level.
look at some of the shunned/pariah instances. lots of people just end up blocking it or joining the instance to participate… what ever
imo it will continue to be a rollercoaster of ups and downs that only a core group of users will notice but there’s going to be drama
because drama is how humans behave
There could be some maximum threshold or critical number where people’s discussions goes downhill, regardless of the infrastructure. So while the idea of splintering into new communities that share names and topics was initially a big concern with the Reddit migration, calling for a way to imitate a Reddit sole source, perhaps it’s better to allow diversification even if some things aren’t directly and timely shared.
I don’t know how it’d work but I’d be interested in something to deal with spam/scams. That annoying “Fediverse chick” thing, sure i blocked her, as can other individuals. And I guess the account could be flagged to whatever instance the account is registered to? But if it became a frequent problem, with bot account spamming people, it would be handy to have a way a tracking what accounts are getting blocked by lots of people.
Even if I wouldn’t want to autoblock accounts just because they’re unpopular, I might want to stop or mark as ‘caution’ private messages from “problem” accounts.
That annoying “Fediverse chick” thing
I got a DM on Mastodon from that account; I didn’t realize it was spam. It was on an account that gets a modest amount of interaction from strangers, so I didn’t pay much attention to it.
Server admins can set up moderation filters to deal with stuff like that, and should be coordinating with each other on detected spam patterns, etc.
oh yeah, I also got her dm, I wondered what was that about
What federation protects from is the singular owner of the platform sweeping in and setting/enforcing new rules for some or all communities. This could still happen on one instance, but new instances can mitigate the effects. Single communities can still turn bad, but it will be up to the users to decide whether to stick around or move to other communities.
If people get fed up, they just create another community under the same name somewhere else. This happened with 196 recently.
I think the difference here is there is not some weird, ephemeral person deciding. For example, at the bad place, it could have been a shitty admin, a good admin or actually spez deciding the rules for everyone.
Here we have instances that make up their own rules on who to federate with (who you see), and whether or not you’re banned (who sees you). Also, the admins of your instance can redo moderation order anyway they see fit. It really will be an instance controlled vibe.
The real thing to be worried about is that if certain instances get too big. They have the most users and can control who sees what across the fediverse. For example, if a super large instance doesn’t want any posts on any volatile or controversial topic to be seen (immigration, Nazi salutes, transgender, etc.), they could just have it not show up on their instance and the biggest part of the fediverse would never see it and have no way of knowing they didn’t see it.
None. Someone is going to say federation helps here, but the effect is the same as creating an alternative to a popular subreddit under another name.
Not when it’s about sitewide policies. (Like reddit banning “Luigi” etc)
None. Someone is going to say federation helps here, but the effect is the same as creating an alternative to a popular subreddit under another name.
Which mechanism in Lemmy allows one person in power to decide a single word is a reason to ban a person from every instance in the Fediverse? Since there isn’t one, that is a way that Lemmy is more insulated from institutional abuse.
I agree, but the server owner imposing unpopular rules is not one of the two problems the OP asks about. Those are:
- The first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
- If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?
Decentralization with federated servers does not address those problems.
The first to create a community control it.
If the community becomes toxic, its easy to create an identically named community on another instance. A perfect example: when I joined lemmy I subscribed to the “news” community on lemmy.ml. When I saw how it was run, I unsubscribed and instead subscribed to “news” on lemmy.world.
censorship,
Modlog documents all actions including moderator censorship. Nothing like that exists at reddit. If there is censorship happening, its in full view of the users on lemmy.
and controlling a narrative.
Again Modlog, if a moderator is removing dissenting opinion.
If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?
Beehaw is an example of a Lemmy instance immune to “Eternal September”. They disabled their easy signups, and defederated from instances that allow easy signups. I don’t particularly agree with their extreme approach, but its what was important to them and it was effective. This is a powerful use of Lemmy and the Fediverse.
To be pedantic, transparency mod bots exists on reddit and server admins can redact the log here.
its easy to create an identically named community on another instance
It’s easy to create a differently named community on systems that don’t have this sort of server-based namespacing.
Modlog documents all actions including moderator censorship.
The part that’s missing is the original content mods removed. If I’m an abusive moderator and I want to censor someone, I’m not going to put “I don’t like your opinion” in the removal/ban reason; I’m going to put something that sounds reasonable like “racism” or “harassment”.
Beehaw is an example of a Lemmy instance immune to “Eternal September”
Time will tell. Either way, that’s not a solution for Lemmy as a whole.
It’s easy to create a differently named community on systems that don’t have this sort of server-based namespacing.
I’m not understanding your point here. Can you reword it perhaps?
The part that’s missing is the original content mods removed. If I’m an abusive moderator and I want to censor someone, I’m not going to put “I don’t like your opinion” in the removal/ban reason; I’m going to put something that sounds reasonable like “racism” or “harassment”.
The modlog entries I’ve read show the offending comment as well as the moderator given reason for a ban. If I see something that isn’t racism being labeled as racism, I’d suspect the community was corrupt. I do get curious when I see a banned comment from a moderator. 95% of the time I agree with the moderator’s decision.
Time will tell. Either way, that’s not a solution for Lemmy as a whole.
If you’re saying there isn’t a single solution for the entirety of Lemmy (or the Fediverse for that matter) I’ll agree with you. Where I’ll disagree with you that one has to exist or Lemmy will fail. With each instance having its own control we’ll see multiple approaches that suit each group of users.
I’m not understanding your point here. Can you reword it perhaps?
If I’m not happy with how /r/knives is run on Reddit, I can make /r/knife to compete with it.
The modlog entries I’ve read show the offending comment as well as the moderator given reason for a ban.
It shows part of the comment. I think there’s a limit on length, and it does not show media. The mod log is a good idea, but there’s room for improvement.
Where I’ll disagree with you that one has to exist or Lemmy will fail.
I never said Lemmy will fail, and that is not my position.
I’m not understanding your point here. Can you reword it perhaps?
If I’m not happy with how /r/knives is run on Reddit, I can make /r/knife to compete with it.
Ah, gotcha. Thank you for that. I understand your example. My response is, irrespective of /r/knives or /r/knife if Reddit bans the word “luigi” both subreddits are affected. That isn’t the case with Lemmy where if one instance bans a word, other instances don’t have to follow suit.
The modlog entries I’ve read show the offending comment as well as the moderator given reason for a ban.
It shows part of the comment. I think there’s a limit on length, and it does not show media. The mod log is a good idea, but there’s room for improvement.
This is good information. I didn’t know about the limit length. I did some Google searches and could only find references to the 10,000 character Lemmy post limit, but nothing about the limit of modlog entires. Any idea what it is?
You make a good point on media. I didn’t know that either.
I will say that for any modlog entry I’ve seen of a removed comment I largely agree with the moderator’s actions about 95% of the time. I’m guessing a character limit would have to be VERY short for it to not capture the gist of an offending comment though. I’m prepared to retract that if you tell me its extremely small.
Where I’ll disagree with you that one has to exist or Lemmy will fail.
I never said Lemmy will fail, and that is not my position.
Apologies if I mistook your statements. I saw you referring to Lemmy as a whole, and the need for a Fediverse wide fix being your opinion to be necessary for Lemmy to not be eventually destroyed as a whole. If you have a more nuanced opinion on the points we’re discussing, I’m open to hearing it.
Yep. People around here love to attribute some magic powers to decentralization it definitely does not have. The assumption that crappy behavior is somehow localized to a specific instance is bizarre, nothing is keeping people from spamming accounts on instances with free signups. If anything, the decentralization makes it significantly harder to scale up moderation, on top of all the added costs of hosting volunteer social media servers.
That said, I’m not concerned at this point. There is nowhere near enough growth happening to make this be a problem for a long time. Masto worried about it legitimately for like twenty minutes back in some of the first few exodus incidents, before all the normies got alienated and landed on Bluesky.
Don’t get me wrong, I like it here, it feels all retro and kinda like 90s forums, but “what if it gets so popular it’s swamped with bad actors” is VERY low in my list of priorities. We have like two spammers and they’ve become local mascots. Mass malicious engagement is NOT the concern at the moment.
The assumption that crappy behavior is somehow localized to a specific instance is bizarre, nothing is keeping people from spamming accounts on instances with free signups.
I disagree. If that is your primary concern, look at what Beehaw (another Lemmy instance) did. They closed their signups to prevent the bad actor spam accounts on their own instances, and they defederate from instance that allow the easy signups.
Its extreme, yes. It limits conversation from the wider fediverse, yes. However it does mitigate the exact problem you’re citing. I personally prefer to deal with the spammers for the wider audience, but I don’t fault Beehaw for their actions and choices.
No, see, you’re assuming that this is a problem for one instance. Which makes sense because there’s nobody here and not much incentive to target people who are.
If you’re the size of a Twitter (and that’s a couple hundred million accounts) or a Facebook (about ten times that), then there are more than enough people to be targeted by more than enough bad actors to swamp EVERY instance with more spam sign-ins than Beehaw ever had, legitimate or not.
And you have nothing to stop bad actors from spinning up entire instances, which you then have to moderate individually, too.
You can’t defederate from every instance that gets hostile accounts because the logical thing if you’re a malicious actor is to automate signups to ALL available instances. Spam is spam is spam. You do it at scale. And you can’t shut down all signups on all instances if you want to provide the service at scale.
There is no systemic solution to malicious use. If there was, commercial social media would have deployed it to save money, at least when they were still holding to the pretense that they moderate things to meet regulations. Moderation is hard and expensive, and there are no meaningful federation-wide tools to manage it in place. I don’t even know if there can be. The idea that defederation and closing signups will be enough at scale is clearly not accurate. I don’t even think most of the big players in making federation apps would disagree with that. I think the hope is the tools will grow as the needs for them do. I’m not super sure of how well that will go, but I’m also not sure things will get big enough for that to matter at any point soon.
then there are more than enough people to be targeted by more than enough bad actors to swamp EVERY instance with more spam sign-ins than Beehaw ever had, legitimate or not.
I don’t see how your statement applies to a Beehaw type response. Who cares how many bad actors there are if you’re allowing zero signups at your own instance, and you are defederating from instances that do? I don’t know the bowels of Lemmy code well enough to know if there is an “instance federation allowlist” opt-in as opposed to a “defederate from X instance” opt-out. If the former doesn’t exist yet, then it would likely be added to Lemmy code to combat the exact example you give of an infinite number of spam instances being spun up.
Moderation is hard and expensive,
I agree with this.
and there are no meaningful federation-wide tools to manage it in place.
I’m arguing there doesn’t haven’t to be federation-wide tool. There are instance level tools that give enough control depending on how extreme a response the instance wants to enact.
There is no systemic solution to malicious use.
I agree. I argue a systemic solution isn’t a requirement. You’re looking for one thing that solves the problem for the entire Fediverse. That’s a rather un-fediverse concept. The point of the fediverse is decentralization allowing instances to enact their own rules that work for them.
I don’t know how old you are, but decades before giant social media existed, internet forums were a common community posting system. This is an old and known problem. There are a number of approaches that apply from those days to modern Lemmy instances. Yes, many of these would require raising the walls of the garden, but again, these approaches exist. Is it perfect? No, but if thats what it takes, then that will be the result, and the tools exist in Lemmy to do that.
I am old enough to remember that IRC had more in common with 4chan than modern social media and that moderation of atomized, non-interoperable forums was either just as bad or handled at much smaller scales by people with commercial interests.
You care about how many bad actors there are if they are enough to be in every instance. Again, you’re presuming that bad actors will choose a specific instance to populate. You can’t defederate from every instance that allows people to sign up or you end up with a group chat instead of a social network.
That’s the Fedi-wide problem to solve if it ever gets truly popular. If I put together a bot farm or a sweatshop tomorrow that targets every instance of every Fedi app with multiple spam signups per minute how would you stop that? Especially if I’m not immediately posting spam and instead generating bad content slowly over time.
What if instead of one person doing it it was thousands? How high are the garden walls at that point? Is there anybody left inside them?
“There are tools to do that” is a bold assertion, but nobody has been able to explain to me what those tools are or how they’d work at scale. I’m all ears. Even if I don’t think it’ll be needed I’d love to know what the plan is, if there is one.
You can’t defederate from every instance that allows people to sign up or you end up with a group chat instead of a social network.
You can. Beehaw did. Perhaps that is the future of Lemmy. I don’t know.
“There are tools to do that” is a bold assertion, but nobody has been able to explain to me what those tools are or how they’d work at scale. I’m all ears. Even if I don’t think it’ll be needed I’d love to know what the plan is, if there is one.
Beehaw did. I think you’re still looking for a solution that allows the full Fediverse-wide system of communication with control of bad actors. I’ll agree that doesn’t exist and likely won’t. I’m arguing that it doesn’t need to for certain use cases of Lemmy to operate.
You’re still thinking about it as an asymmetrical problem. Taking one portion that has a problem and isolating that from the rest. I’m saying if every part has the same problem that doesn’t solve it AND it means the entire network is no longer interoperable, which was the entire point from the start.
What you’re ultimately saying is that you can have a small interoperable network or a large centralized network, but not both. Which, if you’re right, begs the question of why try to decentralize and federate in the first place if you don’t have a solution to secure that arrangement.
And, to be clear, even in that scenario now you have an isolated, self-run social network that has exactly the same moderation issues and running costs as Reddit or any other alternative.
Decentralization provides a lot of important benefits, such as protection against worsening the whole system for profit, or imposing unpopular network-wide rules. I like it here; it’s fun in the way the old web was and the corporate web isn’t.
I think we’re in agreement that preventing moderators of popular communities from being assholes and handling large-scale abuse as OP asked about are not among those benefits.
Agreed, for sure. If anything, decentralization makes those things harder, I’d say. And also agreed that there are benefits to decentralization along the lines you mention. Those two things can be true at the same time.
I think it’d be cool to figure out what the toolset to handle those issues is before they become a problem. Or, honestly, just because figure it out would be a meaningful challenge and may move the sorry state of social media in the right direction just in general. That said, there is a LOT of overcomplacent assumptions, at least in the userbase, regarding decentralization being a magic bullet. I think the development side is a lot less… I don’t want to say naive, but a lot more realistic about the challenges, in any case.
How does that help against reddit admins power tripping? Not at all.
That does not appear to be the problem OP was asking about.
Ehh… Sure… Admins don’t control narratives or exploit large communities. Totally irrelevant. Im sure OP must be stupid upvoting people calling this advantage of Lemmy. Crazy OP! Listen to the dude with downvotes!
