Spyke

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Expressing concerns about moderation policy on lemmy.ml

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There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. … What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.

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Former Reddit Moderators, what kind of moderation tools do you think are missing from Lemmy?

The #1 thing missing is user notes. In my experience, being able to attach notes to users that are shared among moderators is essential, even for smaller teams or smaller communities.

As the number of things that need to be moderated grows larger, being able to maintain a list of pre-written removal messages will also help a lot.

And as lemmy continues to grow, it will be very important to have something that works like automod that can be configured on either a per-instance or a per-community level. Especially something that can do filtering and auto-reporting. There are a lot of cases where you don't want to outright forbid a certain kind of content, but you do always want to bring human attention to it.

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Expressing concerns about moderation policy on lemmy.ml

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Op is obviously trying to create drama which is being shared on Reddit to discourage people from joining Lemmy ( not lemmy.ml the instance). Any new user who would spend a bit of time would figure out that there are many instances to all tastes, if not they could create their own instance.

Honestly, it was my hope to avoid greater drama in the future. I am concerned that there will be a much larger problem down the line if people join lemmy.ml in large numbers due to events on reddit, and only come to understand afterwards what rules they have agreed to by registering their account there. If the rules are not communicated clearly ahead of time, then I think this is likely to make a lot of people very upset, and this could seriously damage the reputation and adoption of lemmy as a whole.

This is why I have attempted to clarify by commenting where others shared a link to my post in /r/lemmy, that this is only about lemmy.ml specifically as opposed to the entire network and, at least where I stand, only about a need to communicate its rules more clearly.

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Reddit CEO: We're Sticking With API Changes, Despite Subreddits Going Dark

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From my perspective as a user that has been on reddit for a while, its been on a downhill slide for a long time now. The moderation mechanisms there are really becoming the downfall. Its like police or politicians, the position attracts the very qualities that would make you unsuitable for such authority.

This really is a bigger and more complicated problem than I think most people realize. I helped moderate some larger subreddits for a while, but I burned out hard and will definitely never be doing it again.

You've got the people who really did care, at some point, but all of their empathy for the people they're supposed to be serving got ground down by the insults and derision that moderators always have to put up with, until issuing bans and removing posts and comments becomes rote and they don't see the humanity or the nuance anymore.

You've got people who seemed reasonable when they applied to become a moderator, but as more trust and autonomy is afforded to them they change and become outright abusive. Presumably because it's the only thing in their life that makes them feel powerful. And if they've been around for long enough and moderated actively enough, then removing them can be a whole stressful ordeal that blows a big hole in a team's ability to keep up with the mod queue.

And you've got people who do care, and who are able to take abuse from the community without it affecting their approach to moderation. But for these people, all the drama that arises in trying to work on a team with the former two kinds of moderators becomes increasingly demotivating, until they burn out and step away.

And god forbid you try to help moderate a subreddit that actually matters. On top of everything else, you will have bad actors actively trying to infiltrate the moderation team, to bring in new moderators with a certain agenda and to push out old ones. Or you'll have those who are determined to find a way to personally profit from having a position of power in a large online community, even at the cost of the community itself. I still don't know how one keeps these people out, once they've taken an interest.

I think there are some things that can help. I've seen that, on reddit, having a top moderator who is disengaged from normal moderation but who will keep tabs and step in like a benevolent dictator to arbitrate internal disputes and ensure that there are decisive resolutions can keep larger moderation teams more stable for longer. This way the top moderator isn't so involved and won't burn out, and everyone below them on the moderator list knows that there is someone they are accountable to. (Of course, this all hinges on the top moderator being suited to this kind of role.)

But even so, once a community grows past a certain point, I think it's just not viable to run it off the backs of volunteers anymore.

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Expressing concerns about moderation policy on lemmy.ml

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If you try to clearly state all rules, you will just end up with a huge wall of text that no-one reads other than some trolls that try to intentionally walk up right to the border of that is “legal” and test your patience as a moderator.

There was a clearly stated reason for these removals, but it is a reason that does not appear either in lemmy.ml's rules list nor on the page that you listed.

There were additional moderator actions citing the same "orientalism" reason that occurred while I was writing the post:

Screenshot of lemmy.ml modlog

It is my opinion that this is a significant rule to leave unstated.

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How do we deal with similar communities on different Lemmy instances?

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Extremely new to all of this. If each can have the same name, then would that mean one instance of a lemmy “subreddit” that share the same name not be able to see the other?

Nope! That's why community names are often formatted like community@website. As many instances can use the same community name as they like, everyone can see and individually interact with each of them. Even if two communities are both named tech, they are still distinct from one another by the website that's hosting them.

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Expressing concerns about moderation policy on lemmy.ml

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Locking this thread as the discussion isnt going anywhere productive. If you dont like the moderation in ![email protected], you can subscribe to a different one or create your own.

I have not complained about the moderation in ![email protected]. I am not asking that there be any change in moderation. I feel that I was very careful in making this clear, in the post.

What I have asked is that the moderation policy be stated more clearly and openly. I believe that it is in everyone's interest that people coming to lemmy.ml understand the rules that they are expected to follow.

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What are some great communities to follow that are not on lemmy.ml or beehaw

Here's some of the communities on lemmy.pineapplemachine.com. They're pretty small and quiet at the moment, but maybe they'll grow a little over time:

[email protected] - For software development
[email protected] - For game development
[email protected] - For compiler development
[email protected] - For video games
[email protected] - For Deep Rock Galactic
[email protected] - For Fortnight
[email protected] - For twitch.tv
[email protected] - For general tech stuff
[email protected] - For world news

lemmy

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Lemmy.ml and beehaw.org getting hammered with traffic because of spez ama

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It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just “Join Lemmy” and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren’t and it feels like it should be the other way around?

User accounts can be independent of anyone else's instance. You just have to host your own.

But it's always going to be much more convenient to register your account on someone else's instance, than to set up your own. Even if instance setup was made to be as effortless as possible, and single-user instances were made to be as lightweight as possible, say you download and run a single binary onto your computer that runs a lemmy instance and everything is automatic from there, most people still wouldn't want to do that.

The idea that you should be able to log in to your account from any instance is...less practical than you might think.

The technical reasons why are hard to boil down into an easy explanation. But the very short version is that everything comes with pros and cons. Doing it this way makes it a little less convenient for users, and a little harder to make a good UX for. Doing it another way could make it more convenient, at the cost of making it very easy for a bad actor to do things like post fake content under another user's name, or could add inconvenience somewhere else, like making it so that users have to manage a private key instead of or in addition to their username and password.

I do think there's room for improvement, but I think the overall idea of logging in and interacting with content specifically via the instance you're registered with is ultimately very unlikely to change.

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As a new lemmy user I've got some question?

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Is there any benefit to joining an Instance closer to your location (e.g. An Australian hosted instance vs one in Europe)

There is! Lemmy instances are generally going to be hosted from one geographic location, unlike a major corporate website like reddit that is likely to be hosted from multiple servers around the world. The closer the lemmy server is to you, the snappier and more responsive your experience will tend to be.

But there are other and larger factors, too. For one thing, if an instance is overloaded with more users than it can really handle, then that will more than outweigh the benefit of geographical proximity.

As things level out, though, and the increased traffic that lemmy instances are experiencing right now reaches a stable level, instance hosts should be able to adapt and overloading should become less of an issue. In the end I think you are likely to have the smoothest experience if you joined an instance whose server is located closer to you.

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The RustConf Keynote Fiasco, Explained

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Rust is a really cool language, but all this drama has been very off-putting. I sincerely hope the team gets their shit together and learns from this.

Agreed. Rust the language seems like a good tool, but I am very discouraged from getting invested in it when at least half of anything I end up hearing about Rust is some kind of new drama or in-fighting among the people who oversee the language and its community.

Shit happens, I know, but with Rust it feels like the frequency and magnitude is way out of proportion to other dev-centered communities. I am not involved, and I do not want to be, but from the outside it often appears like many of the people who are in positions of leadership are more concerned with posturing and politics and exercising whatever power is afforded to them than they are with the actual programming language and the well-being of its community.

So there was a mix-up with a speaker. So then the organization responsible should make it right, and announce that there was miscommunication and that it will be handled differently in the future. If it happened because someone was acting unprofessionally, then handle that internally and separately. It is ridiculous that one mishandled invitation is spiraling into a public mess of personal attacks and 4,000-word blog posts.

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What are some great communities to follow that are not on lemmy.ml or beehaw

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Hah, that’s what…four rival gamedev communities now? At least 😄

No need to compete! I'm self-hosting my own instance in any case, so I thought I might as well make communities for things I'm interested in. I've also subbed to every other gamedev community I've come across so far...

It would be really neat if there were a lemmy feature to easily co-promote related communities, maybe even give users an easy way to see them all in one feed.

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How can lemmy handle 5k+ signups per hour on Monday?

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i don’t think we need bigger instances, i think we need more instances, and a better, streamlined process for finding instances

For one thing, it might be nice if individual instances could assign tags or categories, and if pages like join-lemmy.org/instances could allow users to browse the list of instances with a given tag. Then prospective users could choose a tag that best represents their interests, and have an easy list of instances related to that tag.