imaqtpie @ imaqtpie @sh.itjust.works

Posts

19

Comments

1,264

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

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Sure, but there's no reason it can't be both. They caused an issue with their actions, but we can either continue to make the situation worse or begin to repair the damage, depending on how we react.

Like I said, it was a good healthy discussion, you have differing opinions on the topic and you expressed them clearly and respectfully. Nothing wrong with that. I'm also a stubborn mfer

Agreed. But to be fair, there's never been a forum like the fediverse before. People are still learning how to navigate this complex, multifaceted space. It's not just one audience, it's many different ones.

You absolutely nailed it with that comment, 5/7, perfect score.

Honestly it probably would get downvoted if you made it as a separate post, but that's just because kvetching about lemmy.ml is the flavor of the week and most people are sheep.

Was hoping you’d chime in :)

You should know by now that I can't help myself, I like to hear the sound of my own voice 😅

What you're talking about is really similar to gui.fediseer.com, except that's on an instance-wide basis. I think it's a really good idea and seems pretty simple to set up if it's not already possible.

This particular situation is kind of rare, because typically you'd either want to block the whole instance or just a handful of problem communities. But since lemmy.ml has so many active communities, there are too many bad ones to block manually, and too many good ones to block the whole instance. So yeah, a sharable user-curated community block list would definitely be useful right about now.

I hear you. My perspective may be slightly different from yours because I have more faith in the devs. I believe them when they make statements about supporting privacy and open source. I understand that they have some extreme beliefs regarding political ideology, but I think it's unfair to use that as evidence that their ethics are compromised in other aspects. They certainly have an agenda, but they also ultimately have principles and I would be quite surprised if they committed such a betrayal.

It's like the old adage about conservatives being pro-life right up until the baby is born. People compartmentalize their feelings on different issues and parts of their life, and I think that within the compartment of software development, the devs seem quite ethical. Within the compartment of sociopolitical theory, they have opinions that many would characterize as unethical. But I don't think the latter implies that the former is likely to be compromised.

I'm not really well versed in software, so I can't offer much in terms of discussing potential vulnerabilities on that level. I'm glad that someone is worrying about it though.

And that brings me to my second point, which is that the Lemmy userbase is chock full of techies, skeptics, and critical thinkers. Even if they did have some grand scheme to propagandize us, I just don't think it would work. It'd be similar to what's happening now, with people independently calling them out and then collectively dealing with the issue.

The time when the Lemmy devs could hope to control the evolution of this platform is long past. They're outnumbered and there is a substantial negative sentiment about them amongst the userbase. I'm really not too worried about the harm they might cause. I'm more concerned about making a rash decision that creates more problems than it solves.

Ah, I see what you mean. In that case, you are technically correct. The best kind of correct.

And I support you doing so, you could literally post anything and I would upvote it (please don't take that as a challenge).

But it's still not a meme. Anyway, I think the other guy was kinda joking around, at least I hope they are not genuinely upset by this 😬

Don't mean to be a dick, but that was genuinely a very satisfying little internet spat. It was like watching a tennis match with you two volleying back and forth, and even the insults were pretty classy.

I think you each made several solid points, and I was brought slightly closer to forming an opinion regarding the public upvote/downvote system. This is likely to become a significant point of contention in the future, when Lemmy competitors will potentially seek to differentiate themselves by obscuring the visibility of votes.

Anyway, just remember that there are other people reading the thread who got something out of your contribution, even if you couldn't come to a personal understanding with each other.

Cool little community you linked there, thanks!

You're funny af bro. You do you.

That being said, the man's not wrong in this particular case.

It’s good to know that ml users aren’t disproportionately causing problems.

Yeah, precisely. It's a very different situation compared to hexbear, who would flood threads on our server and deliberately try to rile up our users. The problems with lemmy.ml mainly come from users going into their communities and saying things that go against the grain.

If you get banned from lemmy.ml in that situation, I feel like it's not a bad outcome. Just join the equivalent community somewhere else. Defederating them is almost the equivalent of banning yourself anyway, if you think about it.

I think the post over on Technology has the right idea - move the non-political communities off of ml to other instances [...].But a community call to action is harder than a blanket defederation.

I think the moderation issues are more than a minor annoyance, but I agree that defederation, at this point, would be excessive. And I think we’re all happier not addressing the elephant in the room because, well, we wouldn’t be here without them.

Very well said. I completely agree that it behooves us to move a good chunk of communities off lemmy.ml. I think I missed touching on that point in my original comment, thank you for expressing it so well.

It is marked NSFW.

First of all, the complaints are not without substance. Some of their admin decisions are highly questionable and obviously politically motivated. However I think the idea of defederation is a huge overreaction.

What do people think about lemmy.ml?

They have always been left-aligned, despite officially being privacy/FOSS focused. This is largely due to the history of Lemmy, which was created by leftist developers and existed in relative obscurity for a couple of years prior to the reddit API exodus a year ago. They have received a good number of relatively apolitical users since the API exodus due to their branding, but many of those users eventually chose to leave to other servers.

Right now they are sitting right around 2.5k MAUs, same as us.

Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically?

I don't believe it creates problems for Lemmy users, but I can see the argument for why it does. I think there's a misconception that lemmy.ml is still the flagship instance or new users are being drawn to them, but I just don't think that's the case. People dont really recommend lemmy.ml to new users, because it's already common knowledge about their political leanings. And they've never prioritized promotion of that instance on join-lemmy.org or anywhere else that I'm aware of. This is borne out by the data I just shared, which shows their share of the Lemmy userbase has steadily declined over time.

For sh.itjust.works specifically, I don't agree that it's creating problems for our users. Our server has literally grown in the garden planted by lemmy.ml users. We are less dependent on lemmy.ml today than ever before, and now is when people decide they want to defederate? That seems really lame and somehow duplicitous.

I think to the extent that there are problems with the lemmy.ml userbase, they have come more recently after hexbear got defederated from most of the fediverse. I think some long time users on hexbear and lemmygrad who got a taste of the wider fediverse decided to move over to lemmy.ml so they could keep pushing their ideology. That's not ideal but I don't think defederation of the whole server is a proper response to a handful of hexbear trolls up to their old tricks.

For me personally as an admin, I can confidently say that I don't feel like lemmy.ml users have been disproportionately involved in bad behavior or trolling. I've removed my fair share of hostile comments in political arguments, but no more offensive or combative than stuff I see from our own users, lemmy.world, lemm.ee, or any big server. I haven't seen them brigading communities or threads, aside from the ones located on their own server, which is obviously fine.

In terms of their admins, I have to acknowledge that they sometimes make mistakes with moderation. But moderation on Lemmy is also a really difficult task. One important factor is that they host a disproportionate number of communities and especially political communities. Here on SJW, our most active communities tend to be fairly non-controversial. I cannot imagine the moderation burden for active political communities such as those hosted on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, and I'm thankful they're doing it instead of us.

TLDR Lemmy.ml is basically alright with me, aside from some minor annoyances. I think it's kinda embarrassing to talk about defederating them when none of us would be here without them. But that's just my personal opinion, I will of course abide by the wishes of my fellow sh.it.heads.

Makes a lot of sense, I have to agree with you that creating multiple accounts is not acceptable. Most of the people already here don't mind it obviously, but in terms of future growth that's a big hurdle that we need to figure out.

I'm definitely interested in the concept and I would certainly advocate for SJW to give it a shot in the future and see how it is.

That's a very interesting blog post you linked. Lots of interesting tangents which I'm not gonna go down. But I mainly agree about corporations monetizing identity in the modern age. But I don't think it applies to the fediverse, because instances are non-profit. And quite frankly, I don't see the harm in playing to people's sense of community and identity in order to lure them in. It seems to me that your vision is technically efficient, but maybe lacks some of the charm that Lemmy currently has.

Haha thank you for the info, I have been quite confused about this. At first I thought it was because it was already tomorrow in Australia, but then I checked a world clock and it wasn't even close 😅

I think that's a really cool idea, but I am apprehensive about unforseen consequences. I have previously pointed out that the current structure of Lemmy creates a nice balance of power between admins, mods, and users. I think all three groups have enough agency and independence that they can follow their personal preference in the fediverse without infringing too much on the experiences of the others. In theory, as the network expands, stability will continue to increase.

I'm not sure about messing with that paradigm in order to implement something like what you're describing.

The question is: who else would be interested in hosting these fediverser-enabled instances?

So just to clarify what you mean. The fediverser-enabled instances would be current instances like lemmy.world, except with additional functionality to subscribe to unaffiliated communities?

Or they would be a totally new kind of instance with only independent communities? Sort of like lemmy.myserv.one (they don't host local content), except instead of subscribing to communities on other instances, you would be subscribing to standalone communities organized in some kind of lightly moderated community list.

I think decentralization is preferable for a wide variety of reasons, most of which boil down to stability and adaptability.

As for why communities need to be associated with an instance, I think that's a much more interesting question. The first thing that comes to mind is moderation and liability. Ultimately, someone needs to be held responsible if shit hits the fan and somebody hires a contract killing on Lemmy or something. Right now, those people are the instance admins. If you could have free floating communities, the moderators of the distributed community would need to take on that responsibility instead.

Also how would that work technically? Stuff would presumably still need to be hosted and mirrored on instances, even if technically "unaffiliated".

Wow, good finds. Congratulations to those two, the real OGs. It's amazing how I've been an admin here for so long and a very active user before that, yet I still regularly encounter old, active accounts that I don't recognize at all.

Despite appearing miniscule compared to reddit's hundreds of millions, the 50k Lemmy userbase is still kinda massive when you really think about it.

Nice, another June 7th anniversary!

FYI we are currently the most senior users that I'm aware of, besides TheDude. There must be some June 6th accounts too, but I don't remember encountering any. Thank you for your long and distinguished service as a SJW contributor 🫡