Yeah, every time there is a post on the topic, moderators say that the tools they have are insufficient.
It’d be great to have some community focus on that going forward, whether through direct Lemmy changes or creating better bot mod tools. I’m not in a position to contribute right now but maybe in a few months.
There is a subset of Lemmy that absolutely hates any idea of automod tools because it reminds them too much of issues they had with Reddit. But as Lemmy grows (and given it’s volunteer nature) it feels inescapable at some point.
JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 3 days ago
I’m not blaming the community. Things are what they are, including human behavior.
What I did was to state what I think is and was necessary for the FV to survive robustly in the long term, and in my opinion it just wasn’t happening adequately, at least for .ee, and maybe it’s a problem for the FV as a whole, too. You’d have to see what other major instance admins had to say, I guess…
rglullis@communick.news 3 days ago
We can not change “human behavior”, so I don’t see how/why we should expect things to “be different at .ee” compared to anywhere else.
JohnnyEnzyme@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Unfortunately, that’s not what I’m talking about, either.
What I’m talking about is something like a sufficient, critical mass needed to help .ee (and any other place) survive in the long run. Two years ago I thought there was a real opportunity and possibility based on what the Reddit execs were publicly doing… how many users it both pissed off and motivated. That in turn brought about a burst of user energy, directly reflected by the significant migration to FV, which of course included participation, and at best, valuable content-creation, curation, useful posts & comments, and responsible moderation. That was a significant, known movement, and IMO a positive one, even if it wasn’t going to last indefinitely.
As a personal example of a ‘motivated user,’ I saw the need for a certain community which was nowhere-else present across the FV, and decided to create it. Over the past two years I’ve populated it with 400+ posts, most of them in the form of mini-articles. Other people also chipped in here and there, and there have been healthy comments and subscribers to sort of flesh the whole thing out over time.
For the most part it’s been a fun (if sometimes extremely frustrating) little hobby, but it’s still basically a one-man show, despite almost 2yrs and 1,210 subscribed accts. Point is-- at the end of the day it’s been a small project that I thought worth maintaining as both a thank you to .ee and a tribute to the FV as a whole. Lemm.ee didn’t necessarily need that kind of contribution from more than a handful of users, but as said above, it needed a certain critical mass to make it work across the server as a whole, and a minimum of posters contributing vile content or simply being disruptive assholes.
At one time I thought community spirit (for what that’s worth) would kind of tilt things in a long-term sustainable direction. But it seems I was mistaken, and thus we have the announcement today. IMO I’m not pointing fingers; I’m observing.
Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Niche topics were always going to be dependent on numbers.
I’m the single contributor to !lego@lemm.ee , one of the most popular toys on the planet. And I didn’t expect another regular poster to appear before we reached 60k monthly active users.
“Build it, and they will come” isn’t really true nowadays. We’re competing with Reddit, but also TikTok and Discord, where people seem to spend most of their time.
rglullis@communick.news 3 days ago
Community is not enough. I wrote that in 2022 with Twitter and Mastodon in mind, but the same principle still applies for Reddit vs Lemmy.
Lots of people say they want to “stick it to the man” but very feel are actually going to put in the work and/or money required to actually succeed.