#Pixelfed just overtook #Lemmy as the 4th most used #Fediverse software. Here’s the raw numbers in terms of total users:Pixelfed: 474,151Lemmy: 470,716Pixelfed is moving close towards overtaking #P...
As it is, Lemmy is simply a more authoritarian version of Reddit - at the low level I mean, next to the users, who e.g. have no modmail recourse to discuss anything, nor even receive a notification that their content has been removed. Even while it is also open source so allows instance admins greater freedom to implement whatever policies they choose - disabling downvotes for example.
Anyway the more the technology can do the less reliance upon human efforts to moderate. e.g. to facilitate automated community discovery, so that there is lowered barriers to getting away from bad moderators.
PieFed is highly promising, but I wish you didn’t feel the need to go overboard with criticizing Lemmy. Calling Lemmy a more authoritarian version of reddit… that’s a pretty wild take.
That’s like calling tribal societies more authoritarian than Stalinist or fascist states. There’s no such thing as low-level authoritarianism, that doesn’t make any sense. The users can message the mods directly, and they can go as they wish and do as they please. It’s like calling the nuclear family unit authoritarian, it becomes a nonsensical concept when applied to human-scale social organization. It refers to large scale social units such as nations and political parties, not small groups of freely associated individuals like Lemmy.
You’re still stuck in the reddit mindset where there isn’t anywhere else to go, everything is contained in one closed box controlled by spez. On Lemmy you can go and build your own box, and there are already dozens to choose from that are free and open to join.
The lack of modmail and notifications when content is removed is still an issue. Not authoritarian, that seems much, but a better moderation experience from both sides would make the platform better for everyone.
Nobody is arguing that and it’s irrelevant to my comment. You’re simply pointing out the fact that Lemmy moderation tools are not yet full featured, which is unsurprising given we are still in alpha. This is a completely different criticism than the criticism of authoritarianism which I was defending against.
Please stop responding to every single comment I make, if you wouldn’t mind. I’ve had to reply to you like 50 times over the past week. I’ll let you do your thing and you let me do mine.
How would the users message mods directly when the modlog just says “mod”? They could message each one directly, or mass spam all at once, but in general the tools are highly biased to protect mods rather than grant power to the content creators.
On Reddit - which I haven’t used since practically the Rexodus so am definitely not shilling for it here - after a post is removed, people can still continue to discuss things in it. So if I typed a long reply to someone it would still make its way to them. Here, it’s just poof gone, and a whole long response, possibly not even to OP but to someone else, I can’t even send it anymore. All of those discussions that the OP spawned - they are all just gone. Nor can I look them up later if I have the URL - the entire post is gone, not simply removed from the community listing of posts but taken away from the community entirely, all of the work put in, by The People, removed from them by a possibly capricious mod. With no recourse to do much of anything except complain.
I already mentioned how the admins have more freedom yes, so I am talking here strictly below that level, the interactions between mods and content creators.
Remember the context of this thread is me responding to “People still wonder why Lemmy has a bad reputation even in the entire Fediverse…” So my purpose is not to whinge but to discuss practical solutions to improving that reputation. Putting the power back into the hands of The People rather than mods would go a LONG way. Like, even just sending a notification upon removal of a post or comment - there is much that Reddit does that if we did, would help. Or perhaps we can find even better solutions, but not if we don’t even so much as try.
Also, even if you did become your own instance admin, that does next to nothing for you if you still want to interact with people on other instances - it allows you to create your own communities on your own instance, but if you want to make comments on OTHER communities on OTHER instances, then everything that I said above still holds true - you still don’t get a notification if your content is removed, you still can’t continue conversations or even so much as view posts that have been removed, etc. Looking at the moderation practices of the Lemmy developers used on Lemmy.ml explains so much of why admins and mods have so much power, but the individual posters have so little. In some ways
Reddit is more authoritian - at the top - but in other ways we are even more so here than there. We need to do better. I doubt that we will, but we should. Although we won’t unfortunately, which means that people will remain on Reddit. Especially the ones who already seem okay with spez - to them, there seems not much to entice them to come here, for an objectively worse experience, for someone who doesn’t want to put in the effort to learn how federation works much less to host their own instance? At which point we seem to me to be deluding ourselves - “People still wonder why Lemmy has a bad reputation even in the entire Fediverse…”, bc we are not honest about who and what we are. e.g. we may be Linux users and self-hosters, who nonetheless still have fewer rights in some ways than we did on Reddit. Which we were fine with bc the software is still being developed but… how long has it been since the Rexodus, and we have seen little improvements made in some of these areas? And in this particular area, actual negative progress made bc the modlog used to say the name of the account of who removed something, whereas now it just says “mod” - which would be fine if there were a modmail, but again, there isn’t.
I am not counting negative progress as “progress”. And I am losing all hope for Lemmy to ever improve in these regards yes - in fact I no longer recommend it to anyone, ever, bc I’ve been burned far too often on that in the past. I do still hold out strong hopes for the Fediverse tools though - Mbin, PieFed, and possibly Sublinks all show much promise for the Threadiverse (or whatever name for forum-based Fediverse). One day far from now Lemmy will remain the tankie Threadiverse, and people won’t be dependent upon having to choose between just Reddit vs. it, bc there will finally be other options, and people will begin to be more free. And before you argue back: yes, it was thanks to Lemmy that got us here (or more to Kbin for me and so many others). But that is no reason to not seek to continue to improve by putting power into the hands of The People, even if Lemmy is not willing or even if it wants to head in the exact opposite direction.
How would the users message mods directly when the modlog just says “mod”? They could message each one directly, or mass spam all at once, but in general the tools are highly biased to protect mods rather than grant power to the content creators.
Message one mod who seems active or all the mods at once if you lack patience. Message an admin if the mods don’t respond. It’s not rocket science.
On Reddit - which I haven’t used since practically the Rexodus so am definitely not shilling for it here - after a post is removed, people can still continue to discuss things in it. So[…] With no recourse to do much of anything except complain.
This is false. Any comment that you made in the thread still exists in your profile. I’m not sure why you’re lying about this.
It’s very apparent that you are despairing and miserable. Have you considered that your negativity and that of people like you is more responsible for the failure of this platform to grow than any of the minor complaints you continuously harp on? You’re either an absolute fool or a reddit shill to constantly be arguing that users on Lemmy have less rights than they do on reddit. That is complete and utter nonsense, users on reddit have ZERO rights. Z. E. R. O.
By all means, contribute on github or make some constructive suggestions for features, but to constantly harp on the lack of features for a platform with a small underpaid dev team is just extremely entitled and negative behavior, and helps absolutely no one. It creates a toxic climate on Lemmy for absolutely no reason.
Or go use all the great PieFed communities with their perfect moderators. Oh wait, they don’t exist. The only way for me to understand your constant, pointless attacks and trivial complaints against the only viable alternative to reddit right now is to conclude that you are in fact a reddit shill. Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense to me why you would be acting this way.
Lemmy isn’t perfect. Constantly bitching about it while contributing nothing isn’t making it any better.
I use a bridge to matrix for private messages to the bot accounts, reports for posts for which there are multiple bot accounts on different instances because federation is broken for reports, and new posts to the communities (where the last one was merged just few hours ago). We are also contemplating getting ourselves the functionality to automatically message users when we take action on their post/comment.
It’s crazy how far we have to go to make moderating stuff easier/more pleasant to do. I hope lemmy improves in that by a lot at some point.
My another gripe is no ability to detect image reposts because in image heavy communities they’re very common and remembering what was posted and when is a massive pita. That would fall under a bot category and not integrated feature (but would be cool if it was deeply integrated into lemmy so situations where it would tell you if it’s a repost BEFORE you even post it could be possible) but it’s still something that makes it harder to moderate. Same goes for posting to other communities because you need to check if it was posted recently or not if you aren’t chronically online to know that already.
For the image issue, if it is a link then wouldn’t Lemmy detect that already? Links to news articles and such at least work that way but I don’t know about images.
This is a link detection and not an image one. Two wildly different things. It also wouldn’t handle images with slight differences like an edit here and there because again, doesn’t handle images. Same goes for varying levels of compression. In fact it wouldn’t even detect the exact same images with different sources or when reuploaded by users. Even if there were people who source images from the same place it would still be irrelevant without an overwhelming share of the users doing that to make the feature actually relevant. And EVEN if there was this high coordination then any trackers, shorteners, arguments, etc. varying the link to the same source they would be treated as a different links without recognising them as a duplicate like with youtube for example. So users would need to be a literal mindhive to coordinate on this level and at this point the tools would be pointless because the knowledge would be shared between everyone anyway.
Having this feature would help immensely both as a poster and as a mod to handle the images with high probability of being a repost. But at the same time I know it isn’t feasible due to image processing requiring quite a bit of computing power so it will continue to be a dream.
Moderation isn’t ideal, but absent moderators aren’t going to moderate even with the best tools
I mean, PieFed has some really cool thoughts about doing exactly that… I’m hoping for a lot there.
As it is, Lemmy is simply a more authoritarian version of Reddit - at the low level I mean, next to the users, who e.g. have no modmail recourse to discuss anything, nor even receive a notification that their content has been removed. Even while it is also open source so allows instance admins greater freedom to implement whatever policies they choose - disabling downvotes for example.
Anyway the more the technology can do the less reliance upon human efforts to moderate. e.g. to facilitate automated community discovery, so that there is lowered barriers to getting away from bad moderators.
PieFed is highly promising, but I wish you didn’t feel the need to go overboard with criticizing Lemmy. Calling Lemmy a more authoritarian version of reddit… that’s a pretty wild take.
That’s like calling tribal societies more authoritarian than Stalinist or fascist states. There’s no such thing as low-level authoritarianism, that doesn’t make any sense. The users can message the mods directly, and they can go as they wish and do as they please. It’s like calling the nuclear family unit authoritarian, it becomes a nonsensical concept when applied to human-scale social organization. It refers to large scale social units such as nations and political parties, not small groups of freely associated individuals like Lemmy.
You’re still stuck in the reddit mindset where there isn’t anywhere else to go, everything is contained in one closed box controlled by spez. On Lemmy you can go and build your own box, and there are already dozens to choose from that are free and open to join.
The lack of modmail and notifications when content is removed is still an issue. Not authoritarian, that seems much, but a better moderation experience from both sides would make the platform better for everyone.
Nobody is arguing that and it’s irrelevant to my comment. You’re simply pointing out the fact that Lemmy moderation tools are not yet full featured, which is unsurprising given we are still in alpha. This is a completely different criticism than the criticism of authoritarianism which I was defending against.
Please stop responding to every single comment I make, if you wouldn’t mind. I’ve had to reply to you like 50 times over the past week. I’ll let you do your thing and you let me do mine.
Honestly, for how many tech/open source people are on lemmy its surprising how few community contributions there are to the actual software.
How would the users message mods directly when the modlog just says “mod”? They could message each one directly, or mass spam all at once, but in general the tools are highly biased to protect mods rather than grant power to the content creators.
On Reddit - which I haven’t used since practically the Rexodus so am definitely not shilling for it here - after a post is removed, people can still continue to discuss things in it. So if I typed a long reply to someone it would still make its way to them. Here, it’s just poof gone, and a whole long response, possibly not even to OP but to someone else, I can’t even send it anymore. All of those discussions that the OP spawned - they are all just gone. Nor can I look them up later if I have the URL - the entire post is gone, not simply removed from the community listing of posts but taken away from the community entirely, all of the work put in, by The People, removed from them by a possibly capricious mod. With no recourse to do much of anything except complain.
I already mentioned how the admins have more freedom yes, so I am talking here strictly below that level, the interactions between mods and content creators.
Remember the context of this thread is me responding to “People still wonder why Lemmy has a bad reputation even in the entire Fediverse…” So my purpose is not to whinge but to discuss practical solutions to improving that reputation. Putting the power back into the hands of The People rather than mods would go a LONG way. Like, even just sending a notification upon removal of a post or comment - there is much that Reddit does that if we did, would help. Or perhaps we can find even better solutions, but not if we don’t even so much as try.
Also, even if you did become your own instance admin, that does next to nothing for you if you still want to interact with people on other instances - it allows you to create your own communities on your own instance, but if you want to make comments on OTHER communities on OTHER instances, then everything that I said above still holds true - you still don’t get a notification if your content is removed, you still can’t continue conversations or even so much as view posts that have been removed, etc. Looking at the moderation practices of the Lemmy developers used on Lemmy.ml explains so much of why admins and mods have so much power, but the individual posters have so little. In some ways
Reddit is more authoritian - at the top - but in other ways we are even more so here than there. We need to do better. I doubt that we will, but we should. Although we won’t unfortunately, which means that people will remain on Reddit. Especially the ones who already seem okay with spez - to them, there seems not much to entice them to come here, for an objectively worse experience, for someone who doesn’t want to put in the effort to learn how federation works much less to host their own instance? At which point we seem to me to be deluding ourselves - “People still wonder why Lemmy has a bad reputation even in the entire Fediverse…”, bc we are not honest about who and what we are. e.g. we may be Linux users and self-hosters, who nonetheless still have fewer rights in some ways than we did on Reddit. Which we were fine with bc the software is still being developed but… how long has it been since the Rexodus, and we have seen little improvements made in some of these areas? And in this particular area, actual negative progress made bc the modlog used to say the name of the account of who removed something, whereas now it just says “mod” - which would be fine if there were a modmail, but again, there isn’t.
I am not counting negative progress as “progress”. And I am losing all hope for Lemmy to ever improve in these regards yes - in fact I no longer recommend it to anyone, ever, bc I’ve been burned far too often on that in the past. I do still hold out strong hopes for the Fediverse tools though - Mbin, PieFed, and possibly Sublinks all show much promise for the Threadiverse (or whatever name for forum-based Fediverse). One day far from now Lemmy will remain the tankie Threadiverse, and people won’t be dependent upon having to choose between just Reddit vs. it, bc there will finally be other options, and people will begin to be more free. And before you argue back: yes, it was thanks to Lemmy that got us here (or more to Kbin for me and so many others). But that is no reason to not seek to continue to improve by putting power into the hands of The People, even if Lemmy is not willing or even if it wants to head in the exact opposite direction.
Message one mod who seems active or all the mods at once if you lack patience. Message an admin if the mods don’t respond. It’s not rocket science.
This is false. Any comment that you made in the thread still exists in your profile. I’m not sure why you’re lying about this.
It’s very apparent that you are despairing and miserable. Have you considered that your negativity and that of people like you is more responsible for the failure of this platform to grow than any of the minor complaints you continuously harp on? You’re either an absolute fool or a reddit shill to constantly be arguing that users on Lemmy have less rights than they do on reddit. That is complete and utter nonsense, users on reddit have ZERO rights. Z. E. R. O.
By all means, contribute on github or make some constructive suggestions for features, but to constantly harp on the lack of features for a platform with a small underpaid dev team is just extremely entitled and negative behavior, and helps absolutely no one. It creates a toxic climate on Lemmy for absolutely no reason.
Or go use all the great PieFed communities with their perfect moderators. Oh wait, they don’t exist. The only way for me to understand your constant, pointless attacks and trivial complaints against the only viable alternative to reddit right now is to conclude that you are in fact a reddit shill. Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense to me why you would be acting this way.
Lemmy isn’t perfect. Constantly bitching about it while contributing nothing isn’t making it any better.
I use a bridge to matrix for private messages to the bot accounts, reports for posts for which there are multiple bot accounts on different instances because federation is broken for reports, and new posts to the communities (where the last one was merged just few hours ago). We are also contemplating getting ourselves the functionality to automatically message users when we take action on their post/comment.
It’s crazy how far we have to go to make moderating stuff easier/more pleasant to do. I hope lemmy improves in that by a lot at some point.
My another gripe is no ability to detect image reposts because in image heavy communities they’re very common and remembering what was posted and when is a massive pita. That would fall under a bot category and not integrated feature (but would be cool if it was deeply integrated into lemmy so situations where it would tell you if it’s a repost BEFORE you even post it could be possible) but it’s still something that makes it harder to moderate. Same goes for posting to other communities because you need to check if it was posted recently or not if you aren’t chronically online to know that already.
For the image issue, if it is a link then wouldn’t Lemmy detect that already? Links to news articles and such at least work that way but I don’t know about images.
This is a link detection and not an image one. Two wildly different things. It also wouldn’t handle images with slight differences like an edit here and there because again, doesn’t handle images. Same goes for varying levels of compression. In fact it wouldn’t even detect the exact same images with different sources or when reuploaded by users. Even if there were people who source images from the same place it would still be irrelevant without an overwhelming share of the users doing that to make the feature actually relevant. And EVEN if there was this high coordination then any trackers, shorteners, arguments, etc. varying the link to the same source they would be treated as a different links without recognising them as a duplicate like with youtube for example. So users would need to be a literal mindhive to coordinate on this level and at this point the tools would be pointless because the knowledge would be shared between everyone anyway.
Having this feature would help immensely both as a poster and as a mod to handle the images with high probability of being a repost. But at the same time I know it isn’t feasible due to image processing requiring quite a bit of computing power so it will continue to be a dream.