There are many different visions for "success" of decentralized projects, some of which require/imply explosive growth and some do not. There are also some goals, such as diversity and inclusivity, which can have complicated relationships with the concept of "growth."
I want all kinds of people (that are NOT BIGOTS) to be join the fediverse, participate safely and form their own communities[^1].
To achieve this, it's beneficial for it to be easy for folks to join the fediverse at all, e.g., being able to easily find an instance and sign up for an account and not worry about the infrastructure or instance politics, and critically to be able to easily find one another and interact. These are also features that just fuel userbase growth generally.
But to sustain it, it's necessary to have strong moderation (which in turn requires a manageable workload for mods) and to keep large pools of bad actors in check. It's also important on a safety basis for many users to be less discoverable because high discoverability of marginalized users results in high rates of harassment by bigots. These are features that support a better and safer experience for people who are in the fediverse.
These things are directly in tension, which makes it very difficult to have a healthy fediverse. The result on Mastodon has been a bifurcation of "successful" (by different definitions) instances into, on the one hand, very large but poorly moderated instances with garbage fire local timelines but lots of people and lots of content to interact with, and, on the other hand, smaller, well moderated instances that flourish internally but can be hard to join or to interact with if you're on one of the large instances.
Both models exert exclusionary forces in their own ways. If you keep everyone in your federation, and that includes nazis, then you are de facto participating in driving people who are targeted by nazis off of the network. But if your happy little closed instances are impossible to join and has a constraining monoculture, then a lot of other nice folks may get left out.
There's not an easy solution to this. The situation for lemmy will be similar in some ways and different in others. The piece that worries me particularly is that instance politics questions become potentially more charged due to the fact that instances are hosting the communities[^2] and not just the users, plus there's not yet a way to migrate communities.
[1]: in the sense of social connections generally, not just "community" as a lemmy feature
[2]: In the lemmy feature sense
I don't know that a formal charter is required, but I do think that it is important that all instance admins do a couple of things:
Develop and publish a moderation policy in some form
Determine and publish criteria by which they decide when to defederate from another instance
There isn't one right answer for either of those things, and the point isn't to ensure everybody passes a purity test. It's to set expectations for users on the instance, users on other instances who may participate in communities on the instance, and other instance admins.
Well-thought-out policies will be copied and forked by other new instances, and that will create consensus communities of instances that are at least on the same page when it comes to how a site is supposed to work.
It will also be helpful for the community to be able to talk about things like what instances have a lot of bad actors or poor moderation, something similar to #fediblock on Mastodon. The issues that mods face and that individuals targeted for harassment face are often invisible to the average joe user, and can also be invisible to admins if they aren't actively encountering reports themselves. #fediblock creates a place -- sometimes fractious, yes -- where folks can ensure that those issues are visible and give admins an opportunity to determine whether or not they need to take action.
One of the things that's very funny to me is when free speech absolutists confidently assert that defederation, a standard practice and indispensable tool of the fediverse, is inherently tragic and destructive, and that people who don't want to be in federation with the worst people and entities imaginable should leave and start their own protocol. (It would actually make more sense for those folks to leave and start their own platform where it's impossible to defederate.)
I'm not on lemmy.world, but I've joined some communities that are. I think an important question is, for any community mods who take this stance, do you plan to shutter your lemmy.world community and move to another?
This situation is one reason why it's important to get tools for community migration into Lemmy. (Another is: what if an admin simply has to shut down their instance for personal reasons?)
(Also FWIW there's already reason to defederate based on the garbage moderation even if you're not concerned about EEE, so I don't get admins who are in "wait and see" mode.)
Mastodon has a sort of lightweight verification which just signifies that you are to some degree in control of the URLs linked to in your profile. So for example, if you have your own domain or something that people associate with you, then you can use that in your profile to show that it's you. Of course, that depends on that domain meaning something to the end user, and the end user being savvy enough to, for example, know that someone could get the .com version of your .net domain, etc. etc.
however they’re never going to be able to advertise to most people in the fediverse, who also happen to be some of the most knowledgeable people in some fields.
Defederation is an important tool and is part of what makes the fediverse work. In my experience, people who are strongly defederation averse are mostly either quite new to the fediverse or have the relative privilege of never having to really deal with bad actors especially en masse.
The more the merrier for the Fediverse and if you don’t like it, join a smaller project or find one with the privacy policy that suites you.defederate
The good thing about decentralized platforms is that you don't have to immediately cede the public square to corporate ownership or resign yourself to sharing space with the worst bad actors.
You can certainly get a functional mechanical keyboard on Amazon. If you haven't used a mechanical keyboard at all and you want to try one out, I think buying a cheap gamer keyboard on Amazon and treating it as semi-disposable is quite reasonable.
If you want the ability to experiment with switches, look for one that has hotswap and cherry MX-style mechancial switches. If you want the ability to swap out for nicer keycaps, check and make sure the board uses a standard layout. Some consumer boards have unusually sized shift keys or space bars etc. that make them incompatible with many keycap sets.
Re: loud, this is also relative. Linear switches (red for lightweight ones, black for medium weight ones) will usually not be ultra loud, and you can also get "silent" switches, which have some dampening components.
It's easy to find cheap fullsize boards with numpad and arrows. (It's harder to find high end customs like this, though, as most enthusiasts prefer smaller boards.)
There are many different visions for "success" of decentralized projects, some of which require/imply explosive growth and some do not. There are also some goals, such as diversity and inclusivity, which can have complicated relationships with the concept of "growth."
I want all kinds of people (that are NOT BIGOTS) to be join the fediverse, participate safely and form their own communities[^1].
To achieve this, it's beneficial for it to be easy for folks to join the fediverse at all, e.g., being able to easily find an instance and sign up for an account and not worry about the infrastructure or instance politics, and critically to be able to easily find one another and interact. These are also features that just fuel userbase growth generally.
But to sustain it, it's necessary to have strong moderation (which in turn requires a manageable workload for mods) and to keep large pools of bad actors in check. It's also important on a safety basis for many users to be less discoverable because high discoverability of marginalized users results in high rates of harassment by bigots. These are features that support a better and safer experience for people who are in the fediverse.
These things are directly in tension, which makes it very difficult to have a healthy fediverse. The result on Mastodon has been a bifurcation of "successful" (by different definitions) instances into, on the one hand, very large but poorly moderated instances with garbage fire local timelines but lots of people and lots of content to interact with, and, on the other hand, smaller, well moderated instances that flourish internally but can be hard to join or to interact with if you're on one of the large instances.
Both models exert exclusionary forces in their own ways. If you keep everyone in your federation, and that includes nazis, then you are de facto participating in driving people who are targeted by nazis off of the network. But if your happy little closed instances are impossible to join and has a constraining monoculture, then a lot of other nice folks may get left out.
There's not an easy solution to this. The situation for lemmy will be similar in some ways and different in others. The piece that worries me particularly is that instance politics questions become potentially more charged due to the fact that instances are hosting the communities[^2] and not just the users, plus there's not yet a way to migrate communities.
[1]: in the sense of social connections generally, not just "community" as a lemmy feature [2]: In the lemmy feature sense