Lemmy Needs to Fix Its Community Separation Problem

popcar2@programming.dev to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 109 points –
popcar.bearblog.dev

I made a blog post on my biggest issue in Lemmy and the proposed solutions for it. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

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Goes to show that bitcoin bros like to spam around!

Jokes aaide: I think you don’t quite get the point. The issue is not “are there enough mods?” but really “what moderation rules do you want to enforce?”. You can’t force collaboration on instances that have different views and rules on moderation because they will disagree on key elements. Some instances are very open to all kind of content, even offensive, and will enforce close-to-no moderation; others will have a very active moderation to protect their users against hate speech, for instance. You don’t solve anything by thinking those can work together. There are separate instances for a good reason, and it’s ought to stay like that.

You can’t force collaboration

You can. There's always the lowest common denominator. If there's a guy peddling viagra pills in the astronomy community, it's clearly offtopic. Most mods would flag the post regardless of their political or ideological affiliation. That takes care of the obvious spam.

  • cooperation = advantage
  • noncooperation = no advantage nor disadvantage

instances that have different views and rules on moderation

And that's ok. They will do as they always did. Hide posts, or users that violates their terms of service

  • cooperation = advantage
  • noncooperation = no advantage nor disadvantage

"You can force cooperation". Wow. A true fighter for free software, you are. Sure, let's use that as a new catchphrase.

(But if it was to be actually enforced on any actually decentralized network — a concept that you still have a hard time understanding, apparently — there would be forks up the ass from such an autoritative move. Just go on Reddit, that's what you're looking for.)

Additionally, you could even automate certain decisions. Let's say you are a pro-monarchy activist instance, and there is a post with title "Digest the aristocracy", containing pictures of peasants playing football with the king's head.

You could've easily set the following rule: if mods from both hermajesty.co.uk and puppiesandkittens.org flags the post, AND freedomforpeasants.com does not, auto-flag the post here as well.

In this scenario, even the "enemy" instance is making it easier for you to make the decision.