Hypothesis: Insufficient moderation tools lead to instance protectionism, which leads to a decline in the overall discussion quality on Lemmy

Comments

• CassowaryTom@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I don’t understand this. I cant even name a single community native to the instance I use. I picked one that hadn’t defederated from anyone, and I block communities as needed. Also subscriptions are a thing.

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  • jose1324@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    How do you find out if they defederated from instances?

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    • Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      defed.xyz

      Built by yours truly

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    • EnglishMobster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      lemmy.world/instances

      Replace it with your instance domain.

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    • Dsklnsadog@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      If you find out please let me know too. Thanks

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    • CassowaryTom@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I found a link to a list of who is defederated from whom on a “fediverse for beginners” post. I will see if I can find it again if you need, but it looks like some other commenters already got you covered.

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  • normal_user@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Actually lemmy.one doesn’t allow lemmygrad.ml Which is kinda weird because they allow everything else but I guess it’s okay.

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    • CassowaryTom@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Ah. Interesting. I sort of forgot about lemmygrad altogether. Guess that explains why.

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• RickRussell_CA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  “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.

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  • Scew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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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    • ech@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Sounds like you’d like it better over there full-time.

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• Bodongs@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m an example of a filthy casual reddit user who is really struggling to find value in lemmy. Finding an instance where local is of value is difficult, world may as well be “everything”, and “everything” is a nightmarish hodgepodge of memes for teenagers, furry porn, really niche technical discussions, and star Trek memes. I never stay in the app longer than a few minutes and I feel like I spend more time blocking weird porn communities than I do reading interesting articles.

  The other major issue is having to sort through the exact same article 60 times because people cross post not only to local communities but then also the same communities are duplicated on every instance. I’m probably going to abandon this soon unless I can find some kind of curated community list to subscribe to or something.

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  • Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t really get all the “‘all’ is bad” discussion. Isn’t that what the “subscribed” feed is for? Just sub to the communities that interest you and browse from there.

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    • Bodongs@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The big difference is 1. Finding communities is not easy. Can you name every one of your interests off the top of your head? 2. Just punching in communities from reddit 1 for 1 doesn’t work. 3. Content and user base. There is no discussions for my favorite podcasts here and if there are where do I find them.

      It took me a decade to build out a decent sub list on Reddit and I still stumble upon new interests now and again. I don’t know how to “stumble upon” decent communities on Lemmy and I’m sick of wading through cartoon horse cocks.

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    • theragu40@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      One thing I don’t like about the approach of blocking things is that the frontpage of reddit still allowed some level of discovery. If something in a niche community got hot enough it would break into my feed even though I didn’t subscribe to that community. It was a cool way to expand my content on an occasional basis.

      If I’m going to only view my subscribed list on lemmy then I have to also manually go out and intentionally discover new communities. That’s hard, because some of my favorite small reddit communities were ones I never would have thought to search for.

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    • MargotRobbie@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I mean, I use my LW account for local and lemm.ee for all (because it can see more posts). They are just… different, although I am getting pretty annoyed at the mass of r/politics level politcal discourse on the LW local feed.

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  • TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I browse all and block communties I have no interest in.

    Bye bye Star Trek memes and may the force live long and prosper.

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  • jeffhykin@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Did you hide all NSFW posts and still get that problem?

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• VentraSqwal@links.dartboard.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.

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  • jherazob@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Their recent-ish AMA doesn't show that they care about moderation much

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    • PoopingCough@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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?

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  • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Just waiting on someone to create Reddit in forum form so long discussions over weeks/months/years on any type of subject can happen…

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    • Scew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Think those are just called forums?

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    • Erk@cdda.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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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    • VentraSqwal@links.dartboard.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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?

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    • nix@merv.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Ironically that’s also lemmy github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB

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• Jimbo@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  ???

  Why do people not seem to know that the subscribed feed exists?

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  • xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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    • ttmrichter@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      See the problem is that if they use subscribed, other people might look at things they don’t think other people should look at!

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  • calavera@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Because they want to find new stuff maybe?

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  • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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

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    • Discover5164@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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

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• ryannathans@lemmy.fmhy.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  But I like the all feed

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  • blue_berry@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Me too but we are also on lemmy.world which is well moderated (and I think also has the resources to do so)

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    • ryannathans@lemmy.fmhy.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I am not haha

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• QuazarOmega@lemy.lol ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Can’t argue with that, hopefully they improve before the biggest instances decide to partly close on themselves

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  • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Too late for that!

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    • QuazarOmega@lemy.lol ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Is it?

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• v81@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The biggest thing killing Lemmy for me is needing a seperate account on every single instance if I want to participate in anything on an instance.

  I thought this wasn’t how it was supposed to work.

  I saw this post on another instance and tried to reply this exact message but got an error saying I couldn’t.

  Using Liftoff if it matters.

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  • shagie@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There is some friction of finding posts from federated content on your own instance, but you will note that I am posting from (and see this on) programming.dev rather than lemmy.world (where this community is hosted).

    You need to be logged into your instance, search for the post on your instance, browse it via search, and then you can interact with it there. You don’t need to create an account on the other instance to interact with it.

    And yes, that list of steps mentioned above is a lot of friction.

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    • PeleSpirit@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      They might be talking about instances that have been defederated from each other?

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    • idunnololz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Hello! Dev of Summit for Lemmy here. Summit actually supports switching accounts while keeping the same post open. Of course due to defederation it is not always possible to open a post on another account but it tries it’s best.

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  • vind@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That’s odd, you shouldn’t need another account. I’ve even made posts from this account to another instance

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  • CoderKat@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You definitely don’t need accounts for every instances (as long as you’re not defederated). That sounds like an app bug or something.

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  • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    On Liftoff you need to “open using another instance” and then choose the instance your account is on

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  • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I just subscribe to whatever content I want to see. Wish my feed defaulted to subscribed instead of all because I hate lemm.ee.

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  • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Also it can be really hard finding small communities from a different instance, a lot don’t show up or aren’t fully synced so some of the posts don’t show.

    Hopefully this is going to be fixed but I think it’s limiting the growth of more niche communities.

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  • SeaJ@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t seem to have that issue using Jerboa. I am on Lemm.ee and have no issues commenting on Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, etc posts. The only case where I could see not being able to is if there was defederation which the admin of lemm.ee does not want to do, even with the genocide deniers of hexbear.

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• nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  That’s what the subscribed feed is for.

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  • blue_berry@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    But you NEED a functioning feed to discover new stuff ACROSS the threadiverse. How else will you be able to find other communities?

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    • Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      !trendingcommunities@endlesstalk.org

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    • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Search, people link to them, looking at community lists on interesting instances, etc. Honestly all as it currently exists is one of the worst ways to find new communities. Maybe that could be improved but that’s where it stands today.

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    • blue_berry@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Why are people wondering that lemmy.world gets bigger and bigger if everone is told to stay on their local/subscribed feed

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• jaiden@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Yeah thats the problem - too many comments. /s

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• MargotRobbie@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Illecors@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Ironic you used lemm.ee account to talk about LW :)

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    • MargotRobbie@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Well, LW still shows up to my all feed, so I just comment on posts if it comes up.

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• ryathal@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Kichae@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Emperor@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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    • lalo@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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    • snooggums@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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  • ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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

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• mo_lave@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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 “your-instan.ce/c/fediverse@lemmy.world”).

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  • Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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

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• dipshit@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I don’t like seeing something on the internet. PLEASE CHANGE THE INTERNET FOR ME. kthxbai

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• Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.

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• blue_berry@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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).

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  • Jomn@jlai.lu ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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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    • shagie@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

      That’s where multiredits (which are poorly advertised) come in (and are a wish list item here for aggregating multiple communities).

      For example www.reddit.com/user/chiarastellata/m/french/ (notice the ‘m’ in there rather than ‘r’ or ‘u’) is a combination of several different French speaking subreddits that are aggregated into one feed.

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  • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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  • kubica@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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• Izzy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  What kind of moderation tools could help with this?

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  • NightAuthor@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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  • jherazob@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Here's a laundry list from one of the Beehaw people, and apparently the devs don't have any of this as a priority

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• stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Best take

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• TCB13@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Yes.

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• DisappointingIntro@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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

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• pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  i use the home feed

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