We need to be careful on Lemmy. Only the fact that the moderators and admins have goodwill are keeping Lemmy from becoming like Reddit. If Lemmy gets big and starts attracting people who want to pay to take over communities, that will stretch the moderator goodwill to the limits.
It can be used to pressure admins to remove problematic moderators. It can be used to pressure admins of your instance to defederate from other instances with problematic admins. It means mods can’t gaslight people about their actions. Obviously it doesn’t magically stop bad actions but it gives us a lot of ways to resist it and counter it.
You’ve only seen one case of mods not being able to gaslight people? I’m been a little cheeky because it’s so much more than getting mods to step down or apologize or shit like that. If they’re the problem people can make a new community. If the instance is the problem you can jump ship to a new one. Hell, you can even self host if it comes down to it.
Thats where federation comes in. Don’t like how mods are running things? Just set up a mirror forum on a different instance and people will come if theyre sympathetic.
It’s a fair point. Don’t discount the power and value that comes from keeping the same platform, APIs, and client software during a community migration away from the censorship. Plus having a clear line delineating the extent of a mod’s power to suppress viewpoints likely reduces the incidence of abuse in the first place.
As the number of users goes up, it becomes more difficult to enforce that way. Even if many people switch communities, when new ones search for the community by name, the one with the most users will pop up first. And it becomes more and more difficult to justify defederating an instance over a couple of communities if the instance has a ton of big communities.
It makes me think that maybe “communities” wasn’t the way to organize, maybe you subscribe to a topic and see all posts for that topic on all instances.
But moderation is good, and defederation is too severe a tool to use for moderation. It feels like there is no good solution.
It might be some sort of vetting to know all your users are real people.
I’ve considered setting up a Lemmy/Piefed for my neighborhood, but I’ve been told I’m unlikely to get the neighborhood off of our very active Facebook.
Which will make the return on investment questionable, especially if the whole thing gets meme’d into the spotlight. And if it doesn’t attract more attention, it probably didn’t need to be shut down in the first place.
We need to be careful on Lemmy. Only the fact that the moderators and admins have goodwill are keeping Lemmy from becoming like Reddit. If Lemmy gets big and starts attracting people who want to pay to take over communities, that will stretch the moderator goodwill to the limits.
Public mod logs help a lot.
It doesn’t, at all. They don’t care.
It can be used to pressure admins to remove problematic moderators. It can be used to pressure admins of your instance to defederate from other instances with problematic admins. It means mods can’t gaslight people about their actions. Obviously it doesn’t magically stop bad actions but it gives us a lot of ways to resist it and counter it.
In theory, yes. I have seen one (1) case of it working, across hundreds of communities.
You’ve only seen one case of mods not being able to gaslight people? I’m been a little cheeky because it’s so much more than getting mods to step down or apologize or shit like that. If they’re the problem people can make a new community. If the instance is the problem you can jump ship to a new one. Hell, you can even self host if it comes down to it.
Again, in theory, yes. But no.
Thats where federation comes in. Don’t like how mods are running things? Just set up a mirror forum on a different instance and people will come if theyre sympathetic.
If we ignore the network effect, or the effort it takes, it’s a great idea!
It’s a fair point. Don’t discount the power and value that comes from keeping the same platform, APIs, and client software during a community migration away from the censorship. Plus having a clear line delineating the extent of a mod’s power to suppress viewpoints likely reduces the incidence of abuse in the first place.
The difference being that Lemmy supports multiple communities with the same name.
If an instance is allowing their communities to be sold, they can be defederated.
As the number of users goes up, it becomes more difficult to enforce that way. Even if many people switch communities, when new ones search for the community by name, the one with the most users will pop up first. And it becomes more and more difficult to justify defederating an instance over a couple of communities if the instance has a ton of big communities.
It makes me think that maybe “communities” wasn’t the way to organize, maybe you subscribe to a topic and see all posts for that topic on all instances.
But moderation is good, and defederation is too severe a tool to use for moderation. It feels like there is no good solution.
Piefed has topics I think (I’m mostly on mobile so not something I use but I remember it being there when I set up my account)
It might be some sort of vetting to know all your users are real people.
I’ve considered setting up a Lemmy/Piefed for my neighborhood, but I’ve been told I’m unlikely to get the neighborhood off of our very active Facebook.
Which will make the return on investment questionable, especially if the whole thing gets meme’d into the spotlight. And if it doesn’t attract more attention, it probably didn’t need to be shut down in the first place.