I made a blog post discussing my biggest issues with Lemmy and why I am kind of done with it as a software.
Many users on Lemmy seem actively hostile to the idea of decentralization in a way that feels self defeating. They don’t want a better alternative to Reddit, they just want Reddit 2.0 and attempts to sway them towards something better feels like pulling teeth.
I keep seeing this, and I don’t really understand. Lemmy is a link aggregator that allows users to organize those links into categories/communities/etc, and lets people comment on the links and have discussions about them. From an end-user perspective, that’s exactly what Reddit is. So I’m genuinely curious what’s meant when people say they don’t want Reddit 2.0 from a technical perspective. From a social perspective, the toxicity, brigading, shitposting, etc are definitely not desirable. But with shit moderation tools, those sort of things don’t get sorted, and federation just magnifies all of those problems. Though I think disabling voting definitely helps discourage shitposting and low-effort responses.
But I genuinely do think a lot of problems really come down to the fundamentals of federation. And given how many downsides there are to it, I’m not convinced it’s actually a benefit at all.
Domain blocks are always publicly visible.
Mod logs are always publicly visible in the public mod log.
What? It is crucial for the users, not a bug.
It can become a source of targeted harassment, as it has on the rest of the fediverse before.
Censorship and targeted sliencing of users are the source of bad moderation. To top it off, the mod can target and harrass the banned user and we wouldn’t know bc of censorship if allowed.
targeted harassment
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It is about the anonymity of moderator, not about modlog
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Quit this job as moderator if you can’t take it
if the social prescription to harassment of moderators is “quit because you’re a baby” then you’re going to have many fewer pleasant spaces on the Fediverse in which to exist—because yeah, a lot of people will just quit. i am agnostic on the public modlog overall, but this is an obvious concern with it that i’m not convinced can just be dismissed idly. i obviously have better things to do than a thankless, payless job in which harassment would be dismissed like that.
It especially leads to harassment of vulnerable people. There’s many aspects of moderation that is done here that if implemented in other fediverse software would become a vector for Kiwifarms level harassment.
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it demands that I log in, to view the post??
I migrated over to writefreely, here’s the new link. https://my.jewy.blog/my-love-hate-relationship-with-lemmy
Cert expired yesterday (6/4/24) and needs to be renewed.
Does anyone know of any Sublinks instances? The main page for it speaks in present tense, but I haven’t found any active instances. (aside from the demo, of course)
I apologize for my stupidity:
this is me
It hasnt been released yet, still working towards parity (but getting there soon)
The first instance using it will likely be sublinks.art and some other instances will be switching over from lemmy when it hits parity like programming.dev and literature.cafe
👏👏👏👏👏
Well said. I don’t disagree with a single point you made, and some of it echos concerns I’ve had since day 1. And extra points for calling out
.mlas lemmygrad-lite. I think I’ve called it exactly that as well.The only thing I really have to add is on the topic of toxicity. Like you, I’m an instance admin and have a bird’s eye view of a lot of behavior patterns. I’ve recently started wondering how many people are here because they’re too toxic for regular social media rather than because they want to be here. I won’t guess an actual number, but I would say it’s not insignificant.
I’m firmly the latter case: I want to be here, I want this to succeed, and I’m trying to put in the work toward that result. And I’ve interacted with lots and lots of people in the same boat. But, like you, I’m also growing disillusioned for many of the same reasons.
On the bright side, I’ve gotten much less rusty as a developer after having to write scrips and tools to fill in the massive gaps in moderation features.
I’ve recently started wondering how many people are here because they’re too toxic for regular social media rather than because they want to be here.
Dude yes, I’ve been thinking the same thing. I worry that users curious to leave reddit are going to go to a big instance, see concentrated worst-parts-of-reddit, and decide it’s not for them.
In theory, decentralization enables freedom from the average user being forced to put up with toxicity. But we don’t really have that (yet) until the ratio of jerk to non-jerk improves.
