But communities aren’t really locked to a particular instance. Anyone can start a community that’s a clone from another instance and nothing stops everyone from migrating to that new one. Blaze has already pulled it off multiple times. If everyone doesn’t like the community on ml, then they can go to one made on another instance super easy. You can’t do that on Reddit without adding a 2 on the end or something. That’s the beauty of the fediverse.
Comment on Lemmy's gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this.
doctortran@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
I feel like I’ve been saying it from the beginning, but for all of the problems Reddit has that Lemmy ostensibly solves, it opens the door for far worse moderation problems than Reddit had.
We can shit talk Reddit admins all night and day, but their long-standing and often problematic insistence on neutrality was nevertheless beneficial for the site’s growth.
And I think one of the fundamental problems with Lemmy is that too many of the people in charge of various instances don’t have a similar philosophy. They want to choke the place, and curate it to their exact specifications.
WanderingVentra@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
OpenStars@discuss.online 3 weeks ago
In short, we are trying to turn Lemmy into a Reddit clone, when it is a different toolbox with a different purpose.
Personally I think that people were just so burned out from leaving Reddit, that they just accepted whatever else they could find. Many did not even do that much - I have no idea where a great many of the content creators went, some seemingly went back to X, others from there onto Bluesky, but notably many seemed to have simply left social media altogether. And until this next USA election is over, that’s probably for the best…
Anyway, I am saying that people no longer feel the desire to put in the hard work that it takes to moderate a community. Some very few seem to shoulder the vast majority of the work, but it is not spread out. And ironically, this wraps back around to the OP issue, b/c the presence of such toxicity is precisely the reason why (okay well tbf among the top 3 lets say) I, who was a mod of two gaming subs on Reddit, did not want to volunteer my time here. 99% of the effort ends up going to deal with 1% of the people, I am talking about the people for whom “no means yes”, i.e. those who e.g. create alt accounts to get around bans and just keep going.
Also, the tools and infrastructure just aren’t really here yet. e.g., what concept could be more foundational than “helping guide new users to how Lemmy works?” Do a little digging and you will be fantastically depressed to learn the state of affairs there. e.g. Lemmy.ml’s sidebar features a post titled “What is Lemmy.ml”, except that is a broken link to a post that must have been removed at some point. And that is the chief instance of Lemmy!? Lemmy.world’s status is not much better, pointing to a neat Quick start guide, but so very many features (e.g. cross-posting, and in fact I only count a singular occurrence of the word “instance” in the entire thing). Notably, there is an entirely community to help people get acclimated to Lemmy, called !newtolemmy!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca (yes, that link is messed up, but I left it that way b/c this is how the webUI chose to expand it out - Lemmy is not polished, and is in fact broken in so many ways!), but have you ever heard of that community prior to my mentioning it here? Also nobody has posted to it in the last ten months except 3 posts from Blaze and I. We’ve asked instance admins to add this community - or some other one like it - to the sidebar of their instances but… crickets.
Sadly, what I conclude from this is that this is still an alpha-level “experiment” in social media. I thought that we were at least in beta but… if so, it is quite low-level. We seem stuck in this downwards spiral where the people aren’t willing to put forth effort b/c the infrastructure isn’t quite fully here yet. Perhaps Mbin, Piefed, or Sublinks will offer greater hope?