- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- foss@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- foss@beehaw.org
cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623713
I made a blog post discussing my biggest issues with Lemmy and why I am kind of done with it as a software.
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CSAM is still unfortunately an issue on Lemmy. Just yesterday I had to contact an admin of the 2nd largest instance directly to get a post removed that had been up for several hours. Worst of all, it had more upvotes than downvotes. I do applaud the admin for taking action the minute I notified them, but it should never have been able to get that far.
Also, some of the issues involving Lemmy developers really remind me of major Minecraft servers back in the day lol. There’s just an inability for the “helpers” to do much problem solving because of the lack of tools, and absolute reliance on the person at the top to take action. Even then, the person at the top doesn’t always have the skill set necessary to solve the issues that arise.
I look forward to seeing how Sublinks goes, but without a good reason for users to migrate it could be dead on arrival.
I agree quite a bit with your second point, as someone who used to run a Minecraft server long long long ass it was quite bad.
And yeah, I think there will be solid reasons to get users to migrate. But for the most part it wont really be needed as instances themselves will be able to convert lemmy instances to sublinks instances eventually. It wont require much effort from users unless they want to switch instances entirely.
I think there’s a good chance people will leave once Lemmy integrates with Threads. So if you time things wisely, you can probably get a good base of users to swap their coms to Sublinks.
What’s your planned policy for karma? I know users hated it, but as a reddit mod I found it super useful to determine between a misinformed user and a troll. If your plan for mod tools is as good as you’re saying, I wouldn’t mind going back to modding.
I dont get the hate for a voting system, I think naming it after karma feels a bit weird…. but in general a voting system does hugely improve the quality of crowded conversations and naturally avoids the problems web forums have with only one conversational thread being possible at a time.
People get angry that downvotes should be applied only in valiant noble ways, but honestly sometimes you just gotta downvote somebody for being an asshole and if they are actually an asshole than usually the huge amount of downvotes defangs someone’s ability to claim their viewpoint is held by some exaggerated significant portion of the community.
you just gotta downvote somebody for being an asshole and if they are actually an asshole than usually the huge amount of downvotes defangs someone’s ability to claim their viewpoint is held by some exaggerated significant portion of the community.
The issues is that the asshole is going to downvote you back, and will bring his ten alts to make sure your comment is buried into oblivion. Downvotes can be identified by admins with the current version of Lemmy, but that’s a new can of worms (and work for the admins)
One downvote from the OP to troll; one downvote from the troll to OP; ten downvotes from the troll’s arsenal of alts to OP; hundreds of downvotes to the troll from the community.
Reddit with their quirks and issues have at least demonstrated it’s fine for the most part. Established communities can identify trolls quickly, make them easier to spot for moderators through voting, and enable moderation tools to act and block quickly. Whereas the current Lemmy system feels like burying their head in the sand, and pretending trolls can’t exist because only admins can, through convoluted queries, see the users’ historical vote aggregate.
One downvote from the OP to troll; one downvote from the troll to OP; ten downvotes from the troll’s arsenal of alts to OP; hundreds of downvotes to the troll from the community.
Except when other people get into the discussion,and you realize that other people are also part of the circlejerk that the initial troll initiated.
Reddit with their quirks and issues have at least demonstrated it’s fine for the most part. Established communities can identify trolls quickly, make them easier to spot for moderators through voting, and enable moderation tools to act and block quickly. Whereas the current Lemmy system feels like burying their head in the sand, and pretending trolls can’t exist because only admins can, through convoluted queries, see the users’ historical vote aggregate.
On this I agree, Lemmy is definetely lacking on moderation tools. Votes should be visible to mods too.
instances themselves will be able to convert lemmy instances to sublinks instances eventually
That sounds really cool, do you just import and convert all the user/comm/post/comment data from Lemmy?
Unfortunately I remember during people moving from Reddit to Lemmy, several people on Mastodon trying to warn others away from doing so due to its lacking moderation tools, and some mainly focusing on the developers, both of which have proven to hold true in various ways.
However, at the time, there really weren’t all that many federated alternatives developed enough to go to. If memory serves Kbin was kinda scrambled out to meet the moment, and it’s been struggling along since then with its own issues. Aside from those, there were a couple centralized options with Tildes and Postmill being open source, but some were understandably wary of moving to yet another site with a centralized structure (and one of those closed source alternatives people did try out didn’t last long).
Now it’s kind of interesting as we see another open source centralized option developing (Discuit), Sublinks as you mention in your post, and also Piefed. It’s unfortunate that first there seems to have needed to be this rough proof of concept stage before more options appeared, but with any luck they may pave the way to better, more robust sites, and maybe give Lemmy some incentive to improve itself.
I was on Discuit during/before the Squabbles(Squabblr) drama, and traffic to the site has died down considerably. I assume most people went back to Reddit having exhausted their search for a Reddit alternative.
Or, hopefully, some ended up on federated platforms. Like yourself - I’m happy you’re here!
At least moving from one ActivityPub service to another isn’t as big a step as abandoning Reddit
“Mod logs are always publicly visible in the public mod log.”
This is seen as a bad thing?
It can be a source of harassment to not be able to anonymize actions.
Communities should know what their mods are doing. It’s an important stop gap against abusive moderation tactics.
Do you mean anonymize as in hide which specific mod took a particular action? Because that makes sense as an anti-harassment feature, and doesn’t conflict with everyone who’s retorting about transparency.
Mod actions should be publicly available, but not necessarily which mod is taking the action. That can just lead to witch hunts and ignores the complicity of other mods
Transparency is a beautiful thing, always!
I think y’all are expecting too much from 2-3 poorly funded developers who are being overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of people who grew used to have a “free” product developed by a giant corporation who employs thousands of people and has revenue in the hundreds of millions.
I also think that this constant chasing for the next Messiah is counterproductive. I wish the best of luck for the Sublinks developers, but I also wish they could find a way to work to grow the ecosystem as a whole instead of competing for such a small slice of the Internet.
To put it all together: If the largest issue with Lemmy is tooling for moderation and proper instance management, I’d be more than willing to refocus my work on Fediverser into it. But I have to say that I can not put any more effort into it without getting proper compensation for anything. As much as I’m hopeful to see the Fediverse grow and for the downfall of Big Tech, I know that we will need more (a lot more) than just a handful of people working on this as side-job while thousands of other just keep watching and repeating “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”
I also think that this constant chasing for the next Messiah is counterproductive.
MariaDB is a successful MySQL fork. LibreOffice is a successful OpenOffice fork. Even within the Fediverse, Mbin emerged as an actively developed fork from Kbin.
I wish the best of luck for the Sublinks developers, but I also wish they could find a way to work to grow the ecosystem as a whole instead of competing for such a small slice of the Internet.
The choice of Rust limited the ability for people to contribute. If I had gotten a dollar every time I read “I would like to contribute to Lemmy, but I don’t have time to learn Rust”, I would get a beer to everyone in this thread.
we will need more (a lot more) than just a handful of people working on this
Definitely. Sublinks with Java, Mbin with PHP and Piefed with Python already make it easier for people to contribute to the whole ecosystem.
Fediverser
As a side-note, how is it going on that side? It’s been a while since the last time I checked.
