I think I made a mistake by bringing in the concept of power tripping mods. I do think that exists, although as @poVoq@slrpnk.net says, it’s often an invention of someone who is being moderated for good reason.
The whole point I was trying to make was that because there is no strong social contract, anyone who is a moderator is getting put in an unreasonable position. They have to keep coming back to herd 500 feral cats in their free time for no paycheck, and that’s not a fair thing to ask a whole contingent of people to do, as the backbone of a good social network. It’s fine that they want to do it and have signed up to do so, so that things can work and we can have this nice thing, but it’s not the way.
It is true that sometimes they become unreasonable as a result of being in that position, but that wasn’t the point. It is that we need to fix the users, instead of trying to have volunteer mods always backstopping the user behavior once it passes a certain absurdly toxic threshold.
I think I made a mistake by bringing in the concept of power tripping mods.
you’re right to: a huge majority of the lemmyverse’s current userbase has self sorted themselves into a few instances that makes power tripping mods a real problem.
if they had embraced the lemmyverse in it’s original tankie spirit this would not be is a problem at all because the fediverse is design to keep the discourse going despite any block/ban/defederation; taking those actions only serves to remove yourself from the main group chat that everyone else can see. a power tripping mod has no power when you can easily side step them to continue participating in the discourse.
By the same logic however, mods would have no power to actually moderate. Their moderation ability is directly proportional to their potential for abuse. And I think we can all agree we’ve long passed the point where communities are able to survive without moderation, at least in their current form (which is what OP is discussing).
a bigger dominant group will always encounter issues when trying to gentrify a neighborhood out it’s original inhabitants and this digital lemmy neigborhood; its original tankie inhabitants; and it’s reddit enshitification induced gentrifiers are no different.
several features of lemmyverse sustain are intended tankie audience and work against you like anti-homeless architecture if you try to dominate the discourse through banning/blocking/defederation. it’s sort of like a digital equivalent of anti-homeless-spikes or anti-homeless split public benches; but for people who try to power trip when enforcing moderate only views like most of these moderators and admins do.
martin luther king jr believed that moderates have “shallow understanding”](letterfromjail.com) and the reddit refugee’s desire to maintain that shallow understanding has shepherded them to self sort into mostly inactive echo chambers and the few active ones have censorship problems since those refugees have; effectively; cut themselves off from a majority of the communities and conversation on the lemmyverse.
i likewise have shallow understanding of the lemmyverse’s issues from a moderate’s perspective. i think i’m more tolerant of people with THOROUGHLY uninformed political views due to having immediate maga family members and i think that’s served me well accepting that i’m in a tankie safe space and adapting myself to thrive in it instead of trying to force the environment to suite me. those same family members have also taught me to accept when someone’s world views are so rigid that they simply can’t handle anything to the contrary, so i can accept that reddit liberals don’t want to talk to tankies and i hope that they can find something about this place to stay.
if they leave they’ll discover that no reddit diaspora has ever survived and the lemmyverse is in the best situation to survive if it can capitalize on the relatively huge user base bump and the political disposition of this particular diaspora. leaving means either going back to reddit or signing up with bluesky where future enshitification is already guaranteed and they’ll eventually go back looking for a new social media platform again as they are now.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 2 months ago
I think I made a mistake by bringing in the concept of power tripping mods. I do think that exists, although as @poVoq@slrpnk.net says, it’s often an invention of someone who is being moderated for good reason.
The whole point I was trying to make was that because there is no strong social contract, anyone who is a moderator is getting put in an unreasonable position. They have to keep coming back to herd 500 feral cats in their free time for no paycheck, and that’s not a fair thing to ask a whole contingent of people to do, as the backbone of a good social network. It’s fine that they want to do it and have signed up to do so, so that things can work and we can have this nice thing, but it’s not the way.
It is true that sometimes they become unreasonable as a result of being in that position, but that wasn’t the point. It is that we need to fix the users, instead of trying to have volunteer mods always backstopping the user behavior once it passes a certain absurdly toxic threshold.
eldavi@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
you’re right to: a huge majority of the lemmyverse’s current userbase has self sorted themselves into a few instances that makes power tripping mods a real problem.
if they had embraced the lemmyverse in it’s original tankie spirit this would not be is a problem at all because the fediverse is design to keep the discourse going despite any block/ban/defederation; taking those actions only serves to remove yourself from the main group chat that everyone else can see. a power tripping mod has no power when you can easily side step them to continue participating in the discourse.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
By the same logic however, mods would have no power to actually moderate. Their moderation ability is directly proportional to their potential for abuse. And I think we can all agree we’ve long passed the point where communities are able to survive without moderation, at least in their current form (which is what OP is discussing).
eldavi@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
a bigger dominant group will always encounter issues when trying to gentrify a neighborhood out it’s original inhabitants and this digital lemmy neigborhood; its original tankie inhabitants; and it’s reddit enshitification induced gentrifiers are no different.
several features of lemmyverse sustain are intended tankie audience and work against you like anti-homeless architecture if you try to dominate the discourse through banning/blocking/defederation. it’s sort of like a digital equivalent of anti-homeless-spikes or anti-homeless split public benches; but for people who try to power trip when enforcing moderate only views like most of these moderators and admins do.
martin luther king jr believed that moderates have “shallow understanding”](letterfromjail.com) and the reddit refugee’s desire to maintain that shallow understanding has shepherded them to self sort into mostly inactive echo chambers and the few active ones have censorship problems since those refugees have; effectively; cut themselves off from a majority of the communities and conversation on the lemmyverse.
i likewise have shallow understanding of the lemmyverse’s issues from a moderate’s perspective. i think i’m more tolerant of people with THOROUGHLY uninformed political views due to having immediate maga family members and i think that’s served me well accepting that i’m in a tankie safe space and adapting myself to thrive in it instead of trying to force the environment to suite me. those same family members have also taught me to accept when someone’s world views are so rigid that they simply can’t handle anything to the contrary, so i can accept that reddit liberals don’t want to talk to tankies and i hope that they can find something about this place to stay.
if they leave they’ll discover that no reddit diaspora has ever survived and the lemmyverse is in the best situation to survive if it can capitalize on the relatively huge user base bump and the political disposition of this particular diaspora. leaving means either going back to reddit or signing up with bluesky where future enshitification is already guaranteed and they’ll eventually go back looking for a new social media platform again as they are now.