Context: Admiral Patrick replied and included this gem:
And might I add that not one person complained until db0 went internet Karen with his hissy fit because I took his toy away from him.
“Not one person complained about my explicitly obfuscated blacklists! Damn internet Karens making a big deal!”
I really appreciate the statement. I don’t agree with the action and think they are stupid and dangerous for the Threadiverse, as a frontend shouldn’t decide what the user sees, the instance administration is the one to decide. If an instance want to go beehaw, to build a peaceful place and attract Normie’s, that is great. But it’s not for a frontend developer to decide. If the block list and block policy would have been communicated very prominent for everybody to check out, fine. But this is just stupid.
And by the way, I wholeheartedly agree with a lot of OPs opinions. The Threadiverse is toxic on many occasions. Instances like Lemmy.ml and dbzero are problematic and probably partly responsible for the Threadiverse not to grow. But again, it’s the instance administration who should decide what the user to see. It is just not understandable for the user to have multiple levels of administrators.
You’ve got it backwards. Its the heavy handed administrative approach which stalled out growth in the fediverse. Not users you find personally annoying.
Fediverse growth is stalled for the same reason every alternative stalls: there’s no one here, so there’s no reason to join. Add on that there’s no way for content factories to recoup the costs of content creation, no way to ensure their work reaches maximum eyeballs, and you pretty much guarantee a niche platform.
It’'s the whole reason I’m here. I’m not interested in bullshit engagement-bait or people competing for imaginary internet points. Administration is going to do whatever administration wants, but if they’re open and explicit about it, I can shop around for an instance that fits me. If they obfuscate their heavy handed administration, then I might as well go back to the algorithm.
Who knows, right now the small size may actually be a straight up benefit. Yes, there is almost no content compared to Reddit. But we’re also so small still that it’s not particularly worthwhile to have bots going here compared to Reddit. So there is a much higher percentage of actual human interaction here. The other place is almost all bots now, it’s actually unbelievable.
I’ve watched the consequences and damage which admin and mods have caused. They view the fediverse or their subs as theirs to control, case in point.
So what’s your solution? Because we can’t just have less moderation and administration without something to replace it. If you want to move it to the frontend, then at least make it opt in and tell people (except spam)
Like in the bluesky model (atproto) you can pick and choose between appview, clients, moderation lists, etc. You can even bypass your current appview (frontend server) to fetch directly from a user’s host or from another index (appview or relay)
You’re also ignoring that there are many different types of users, and that lurkers drastically outnumber active posters. You lose a few active users from strict moderation, and you lose masses of lurkers from obnoxious users flooding every thread. And you get new active users from lurkers.
There is nothing to be solved? Or rather nothing to be solved in regard to silencing voices.
Don’t like someone’s opinion? Get into arguments with strangers online about it. Change their minds. Or don’t. That’s up to you. But structural silencing and obscuring of voices and communities isnt the way.
The real issue here is accountability and that we do need a solution for. And the answer is already in the fediverse, I. That we need to have a democratic approach to moderation and to some extent administration.
Take for example what happened recently with @PugJesus@piefed.social. Real permanent damage was done to our community and there will be no accountability on the parts of the admins who made those decisions.
You are not entitled to an audience, people who want to see less of some things are allowed to see less of it.
Yes accountability, etc, is needed. The variant I’m in favor of is stuff like a content addressed protocol where you can “fork” a forum to substitute misbehaving mods (or server admins). But removing layers of moderation can not be a solution. Bluesky’s atproto has similar mechanisms but there’s not a lot of activity in making forum-shaped sites with it.
Can’t believe we lost PugJesus over some stupid vote rationing bullshit.
Their is a self righteousness and petty authoritarianism that comes with a perceived sense of ownership over a community, platform, or project. In many ways we’re reenacting the same motions which ended up destroying reddit as a community platform, one which was built through the organic involvement and voluntary contributions of millions.
I’ve always seen Lemmy as the “2.0” experiment to identify and improvement upon the issues associated with the Reddit type long form threaded discussion platform so many of us prefer. And it’s been extremely useful in that we continue to understand where the real friction points are in growing these kinds of communities. Examples like @Jordon@kbin.social editorially banning @return2ozma@lemmy.world for explicitly political reasons at critical moments during a highly visible political campaign, this shadow ban list, pretty much every moderator action that squid ever took, these secretive matrix chats behind closed doors. The “3.0” version of whatever this has needs far better tools to support moderators, but also to hold moderation and moderators accountable and to give the ability for community to replace them as needed. Also, the ability to merge or fork communities and to migrate communities or accounts from instance to instance. Its simply unacceptable to do some of these activities and many of them while questionable at the time, have in retrospect turned out to be quite nefarious and destructive to the overall project.
Migration is definitely one thing holding us back, I think. While migrating your user to another instance would be nice, community migration is absolutely critical. We absolutely need to be able to move a community to another instance and have all the followers/subscribers automatically carry over. So many small communities have suffered and languished after moves, and it also ultimately drove off PugJesus in a way.
I think a merge/fork/subscribe system would also be critical and could revolutionize somethings.
Say you have a community for dirt biking, but it’s not big and doesn’t have traction, you can merge it into maybe ‘motorcycles’ till a critical mass for ‘dirtbiking’ is met. Its really one of the issues we faced early, and part of it is that the current design is for each instance to be a self contained replacement to reddit.
Except for the fact that your time and attention are the most precious resources of your life, and you don’t owe them to anybody, least of all the worst assholes of this place.
Block the users, communities, and instances that cause problems for you. Continue on with your life and enjoy things. Maybe even touch some grass from time to time.
If nobody offers a default filtered experience then most people will refuse to join.
Maybe you should try your own advice.
If people wanted the “experience for adults” they’d be on 4chan already! There’s already places to go for that! And they aren’t going there because they don’t want it!
So when others create moderated spaces, don’t get mad that others want something nicer.
If you want to offer a default filtered experience, you do that at the instance level, not as a frontend dev.
And you absolutely do not do that in secret, deliberately not informing users of the ‘filtered experience’ they’re signing up for and disguising the filtering as technical failures.
If you want to start a Lemmy instance for centrist normies that blocks its users from all the ‘extreme’ stuff (and you are transparent to those users about what you’re blocking and why), that’s perfectly fine. Go ahead. I don’t think your “I’ll decide what should be censored for you” approach will be as popular as you think, but there’s no reason not to try it.
I already do. Regularly. Which is why I recommend it. What, are you suggesting I should block you or something? Honey, you’re not nearly annoying enough to block. Not yet, anyway.
Just to be VERY clear, I do not defend hiding the moderation choices, especially not in places where they aren’t expected!
But the statement I responded to was about wanting less moderation than the current default. That’s the only thing I talked about there. Users should have a CHOICE and that includes an informed choice in degree of filtering
This should also have been obvious from my prior reply just one step up!
uh oh, someone’s got a stinky diaper! oh wait I’m on blahaj.zone so I’M toxic! quick, shadow-block me on your frontend instead of using the built-in moderation tools or picking an instance that would block me!
He WAS doing that, he had his own instance and instance blocklist. Which was fine, if he wanted to block half the Threadiverse from his instance that was his prerogative. But then he decided to take it one step further and try to push his blocklist on as many people as possible.
when I get banned, even temp banned, for bogus shit nobody else gets banned for I just block the community.
I’ve lost count of how many communities I was active in that that happened in.
heavy mods silence the most active users in a community and it stagnates.
Its an option. I do consider it to be the easy option.