this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Which sounds good, until you start to notice that most instances have functionally dead communities, and the majority of traffic comes happens on a small number of instances.
Lemmy doesnt have the population to have mass community movement, so mods abusing power in any of the larger instances means you shut up and put up with it or abandon the instance with 1/3 of the site content on it.
Power modding is going to be a much much larger issue here, while the community is still small. Maybe if there were enough users, federation might resist mod abuse. But as it is now (and will be for a while at least,) you basically are making a copycat instance or community and hoping people join you.
This is key right here, but users need to be using a diverse set of instances. Lemmy.world needs to stop being "the default". There shouldn't be "a default". Maybe for when you first sign up, but people need to be moving to self-hosted and/or niche interest instances. That's the best way to prioritize diversity in the ecosystem.
Frankly, anyone who's on a
lemmy.whateverdomain orkbin.whatevershould be finding smaller, more manageable instances to move to as they discover the fediverse. This will be aided when 0.19.0 comes out in a few weeks and enables the export/import for accounts.One thing I appreciate about how the incentives of the platform are set up is that, since there's no global account counter of up/downvotes, there's really no loss in migrating. As long as I can keep my communities, subscriptions, blocks, and saved posts, I'll have lost nothing.
Hmm. Interesting points.
It doesnt help that mod tools here are very anti-user. Not even in a hostile way, the tools just arent finished or even made yet, so its very hard for users to play by the rules or know when theyre punished.
Like how you need to scroll through the modlog to see if your post/comment was deleted, and if youre lucky they might include why. Or how unclear and obtuse it is to check the instance global rules which change when you visit other communities, who themselves have a different list of rules.
These probably all have solutions, but thats gonna take time to build. And moderation is probably gonna be kinda wild west-esque until they are running.
A lot of why I’m reserving judgment is because everything is so very young still. It’ll take a lot of time and effort to develop it into something more mature.
Thats the same reason Im here. Learn the way this works while its developing, so if it evolves into a well developed community Ill already know my way around.
I'm also open to the idea that there's really no good social media, even when federated. We may still have to deal with hateful and insecure mods, for instance.