I guess one thing I like already is that there’s no requirements for Karma, stupid rules about Reddit’s filters which got my 100k karma account permanently banned for no reason at all.
Would you prefer Lemmy to be smaller like it is now or get to a reddit level popularity but without the reddit jank.
If you appeal a suspension they should be required to prove in their response that they read your appeal
I want Lemmy to do a better job than reddit at keeping fascists from being free to spread their poison. Lemmy is already better at this with defederation, but its something to keep an eye on always.
I think it would be cool if Lemmy were a bit bigger than it is now. Enough of a population to keep niche communities moving would be great, but Lemmy at its current size is a nice escape from a lot of the political landscape you see on Reddit or Twitter.
I don’t disagree, however my main issue with reddit was it’s awful system at triggering bots and it’s moderation system. I think we SHOULD have moderation always to keep guys like that away and innapropriate stuff, otherwise you’ll have another 4chan.
However I think Reddit is just too power hungry with bans for no reason as well, I’ve heard people here got banned from Reddit for “Violence against ICE” it’s ridiculous.
Overall, I’d like this website to be more free.
I want Lemmy to do a better job than reddit at keeping fascists from being free to spread their poison.
What fascists? They’re rarely here.
Tankies, too? They’re already here.
What fascists? They’re rarely here.
Yeah, that was my point when I said it was already in a better situation than Reddit with defederation. They’re rarely here because they get quickly defederated. It’s part of why I’ve stayed.
Tankies, too? They’re already here.
Yeah and they’re also mostly defederated too
They’re rarely here because they get quickly defederated.
I think it has more to do with their not wanting to be here & online communities voluntarily segregating themselves into their respective ideologies[1].
Defederation is not an effective control against the individuals you want to contain. As we can see with tankies, their annoying conduct rarely rises to the level to result in bans from the unblocked instances they join.
As for spreading their poison, I don’t think people are mindless automatons who must become awful when exposed to offensive rhetoric all day. If mere exposure is all it takes, then they probably lacked decent principles. Sheltering a fragile position that disintegrates at the slightest challenge due to ignorance is a weak strategy that doesn’t build a firm, reliable foundation.
A better solution is to develop a sturdier position on principles everyone is keenly familiar with to effectively defend. They acquire that familiarity through observed & practiced success to defeat challenges. The best answer to speech we dislike is better speech that condemns & challenges it. People need robust principles to do that & acquire them by doing so.
a problem for civil engagement & deradicalization ↩︎
Its not good against individuals, but it keeps this from becoming a space where they can congregate and try to attract people in the pipeline already.
Of course people aren’t automatons, but people can and do often unconsciously mirror and internalize things they see as normal in a community. Defederation does do a good job of keeping the bulk of Lemmy from being a Nazi bar, so that will happen less here. Its not a perfect solution, but its better than reddit in that regard.
I don’t know why you keep bringing up tankies, you do realize they founded the site right? I don’t think that gives them any special right to be here, but its also hard to imagine Lemmy without tankies. Its a part of what makes the space unattractive to fascists, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t enjoy seeing Hexbears tear their posts into pieces. I think the numbers of tankies here is a lot lower than some users would have you believe, and the main instances are largely defederated or default blocks. I’m fairly content with how that is working out.
As for the rest, you won’t be able to debate fascism into the ground. Fascists have to be crushed through collective action. People differ on what that would look like, in my ideal we would band together march through the streets and dismantle the engines of war that fascists rely on. Burn the factories, abolish their institutions, and set about the work of preparing the world for climate disasters. They’re not going to fall over and stop being fascists because of perfect inescapable logic. They’re going to stop being fascists when the tools they would use to oppress us both physical and cultural are broken and they see they cannot win. Your debate tactics will have a place breaking their cultural tools, but it has to be accompanied by a large enough unified front to make fighting back infeasible, and the removal of avenues for them to retake control by physical destruction of weapons, weapons manufacturing, and vehicles of war including those used by the police.
As for spreading their poison, I don’t think people are mindless automatons who must become awful when exposed to offensive rhetoric all day. If mere exposure is all it takes, then they probably lacked decent principles.
Tankies are kinda deceptive and manipulative tho. They pretend to be leftists, then when Mamdani gets elected, they started slandering him, calling him a “zionist” or some bs, even tho he’s a Muslim.
Reason why their shit doesn’t work on me is because I was born in one of those “communist” countries they constantly praise about, which is very contradictory to my lived experiences. I know enough to recognize tankie bs and also the far-right bs.
It’s maybe hard to have alongside privacy, but I liked that on old forums, it was often real people. On one forum, there were a few meetups with BBQ. The site owner/admin called me on my birthday. It led to real-life relationships.
But the flipside to that is the infamous Reddit meetup.
Ha, I hadn’t heard of any of this. What happened with the Reddit meetup?
Oh, haha, FR? I had no idea!
Baltimore 2012 meetup, I believe.
Interesting, thanks!
This is unpopular but I’d like to see LESS niche communities. I dont want to see 1000 game communities I want to see one game community where all the people are making threads about the games they like. When its big enough then that game can split into its own community.
Because i may not go out of my way to find a community like guild wars 1 but if I see a post about it in the games community I’d join in. The interest isnt always there it needs to be created sometimes. And it can be created by people seeing threads of interested people talking about their interest.
Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
And not allowing them kinda sucks for people who want to talk about smaller, less popular games (or niche topics/interests in general), because any posts on an overarching all-games-including community about a small niche indy game is almost certainly just going to get swallowed amongst the flood of posts about other games, and even if there’s people in that community who would’ve engaged with the post, most of them are likely to miss any given post, because they only make up such a tiny fraction of the total members.
For example, I love discussing the Eragon book series, but there’s no Eragon dedicated community on Lemmy (at least I didn’t find one), and I don’t really want posts about every other fantasy work ever in my feed, so I don’t really want to subscribe to overarching fantasy book communities.
And sure, if I explicitly feel the urge to talk about it, I can browse a big sub and filter for Eragon content (though the fact that niche topics posts on big communities are likely to get low engagement probably also discourages people from regularly posting about it in the first place, so there’d be fewer posts to even find), but this still robs me of the ability to see Eragon Posts Show up in my feed when I’m not explicitly looking for them.
How about community taxonomy?
Say there’s a gaming community.
Then there’s a PC gaming community, then a MMO game community, and there’s communities for individual games subdivided into that.
So if you’re in /c/PCgaming, posts in /c/GuildWars will (by default) show up in your feed.
If you are in /c/GuildWars, you (by default) get the hyper focus, and exposure from your post filtering up to more general tiers.
But this sharing is toggleable too. For example, you could choose to only float it up to the “MMO” level without drawing in the /c/gaming crowd
And this structure kinda naturally fits underlying database structures anyway.
Reddit could not evolve like this, but now that we kinda know what niches exist, that could be constructed from scratch and maintained.
Yeah I like that idea its a good solution.
I think this is an awesome idea! It would allow people to have the freedom to create any community they wanted, but still keep posts concentrated enough for visitors to see activity they can participate in. Excellent, maybe you could propose this to the developers of Lemmy and Piefed? Is Mbin still being actively developed?
I’ll make an issue in Piefed for sure! Probably Lemmy too.
I’m still thinking some things through for an initial post. For instance, how would moderation work? What level of control do the ‘higher’ community have over the lower one? Can mods ban posts, or throw the community out entirely? Or are they limited to simply hiding the lower community’s posts a la carte? Should they be able to hide the lower community without banning it?
…And is there any granularity for how that filters down the chain? For example, could /c/MMO be hidden in /c/PCgaming while allowing /c/GuildWars?
How does the integration start? Does it require approval from the “higher” community mods to join a taxonomical hierarchy?
…Can there be multiple parent communities, or max of 1?
Are there federation specific quirks? I’m assuming these hierarchies all have to exist in one server, but would it be technically feasible to have cross-server hierarchies?
And there’s a lot of conflicting incentives there. For instance, you don’t want to give too much power for a bot or troll to infiltrate a community via a subcommunity.
On the other hand, the fear of power-trippin’ mods may discourage linking under another community, so you want to give the subcommunities sufficient autonomy as well. I’m leaning to configurable defaults of:
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subcommunity requires permission from the one directly above, but not the whole chain
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all higher communities have the power to hide posts, hide “bottom tiers,” or even completely hide specific subcommunities by default, but logged in community users can opt to show them
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each community controls their own moderation unless they opt-in to accept moderation from higher ones
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higher ones can post rules required to accept the lower one, but once accepted, this is static text, unless all parties agree to change it
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lower communities can be kicked out. Or they can opt to leave the hierarchy system, and rejoin another
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lower users are not auto subscribed to higher ones by default, but this can be configured so, say /c/GuildWars auto subscribes you to /c/GuildWarsScenery
Fizz@lemmy.nz you may be interested in this too.
Those are all good questions. I’m inclined to think that keeping this as simple as possible and following similar principles to the existing moderation environment would help make this useful while not creating too much extra work for moderators or admins, as both groups already seem overworked. I think this will already be complicated enough to begin with (for instance, how will communities in other instances be handled?) and fraught with potential for conflicts (for instance, include or not include communities of certain political slants?), so care should be taken to keep this somewhat minimalistic.
With that in mind, here are some possible concepts to consider:
Moderation: following the principle that Lemmy/Piefed allows moderation by users (through blocking users, communities, and instances), community mods (through removing posts and banning users), and instance admins (through overseeing mods and defederating or default blocking other instances), in that order, how about if the users themselves were the first (and perhaps only) ones to decide and control which lower-level communities they want to see structured in their feed and how? It seems to me that community mods should only be able to moderate their own community at each level, and not be able to moderate posts from levels below.
Creation and use of taxonomies: should the creation of the taxonomy be the job of users, community mods, or instance admins? I’m inclined to think that this should also ultimately be left to users to determine, but there could be a mechanism that allows anyone to share/publish a taxonomy that they find useful (or perhaps branches of a taxonomy, like Gaming), and allow other users to either import or subscribe the taxonomy or branches that they like, from a list of different available ones that have been shared/published. Admins could then have the option of setting entire taxonomies or a group of branches as defaults for users of their instances. This would allow users the freedom to create the structure that they would like to see while also allowing others to benefit from that work and not have to duplicate it, and finally also allowing for different competing structures to exist. Community mods could informally ask creators/maintainers of taxonomies or branches to include their communities in that structure. To add communities to a structure, there could be a simple button in each community that said something like “add to structure”.
I think that doing things this way would allow the most freedom, flexibility, and utility, while also minimizing additional work for mods and admins, as well as any potential for conflicts. Another factor to consider would be how much impact would this kind of thing have on resource utilization of instances?
I hope this all makes sense and helps provide some ideas for how this could work.
Ah, see that’s what I’m also trying to work around.
I don’t want “make-your-own-multicommunities.” Reddit has that, it doesn’t help with small-sub exposrue, and I’m not interested in using it myself. Fact is, most defaults stay as defaults, so if the goal is to drive exposure to lower subs, users having to opt in to see organized communities is not going to do that.
I’m inclined to think that this should also ultimately be left to users to determine, but there could be a mechanism that allows anyone to share/publish a taxonomy that they find useful (or perhaps branches of a taxonomy, like Gaming), and allow other users to either import or subscribe the taxonomy or branches that they like, from a list of different available ones that have been shared/published. Admins could then have the option of setting entire taxonomies or a group of branches as defaults for users of their instances.
While this is a neat idea, I think requiring admin confirmation is too much work for them. Especially as lower levels shuffle around: think of all the new games rolling under the ‘gaming’ heirarchy, for instance. Admins can’t deal with updates by-the-minute.
Similarly, operating as a ‘sea’ of user suggested heirarchies is just going to be massively fragmented, quickly get out of date, and so on. Take the gaming example again: say an admin adopts a ‘user’ preset… Who’s job is it to maintain it? Who’s gonna track all the new games that come out to try and group them sanely? Even if the user does, what if they leave?
I think its better for community creators to shoulder the load of finding a place in the tree, as they’re the one with the passion, expertise, and motivation in their niche to slot it where they want.
I’m also very wary of ‘recommendation’ subsystems like Reddit has bloated their site with. I don’t want lists of auto-suggested heirarchies belpw my community view, I want some sane structure there transparently, to the point that the Lemmy/Piefed user UI requires close to zero changes.
…Hence, it’d be nice if users could organize taxonomies however they want for viewing (which is a lot of software work on its own), but having a sane default taxonomy is extremly important.
Mind you, I am thinking out loud here.
I can understand that. I didn’t realize that Reddit had that feature. I totally hear you that defaults stay defaults.
I may not have been very clear, but what I meant was that users would be able to create and share their own structures without approval or interaction from admins or mods, then admins would be able to pick and choose from those structures that users created and shared, and then the admins would have the option to make those structures the defaults for their instances if they wished.
However, I can see that having this kind of sharing structure could get pretty messy with tons of different structures around. I can also see that the structures could get outdated quickly. I also agree with you that it would probably be better for community creators/mods to self-organize with other communities to structure this.
I think you’re probably right in your approach, but like I said before, it would benefit from being as simple as possible. Perhaps it would be the best to break down your ideas into smaller sets of features so they can be implemented in phases, or maybe even eliminate some features?
Like, for instance, why have permissions, hiding, or cross-community moderation? Why not simplify it to its most basic level: allow two communities to be linked with each other (at the request of either and agreement from the other for them to be in a specific hierarchy) and allow either community to rescind that linkage at any time? This link would make it so that users who subscribe to the “supercommunity” would also get all posts from any “subcommunities” (unless the same user has blocked any particular “subcommunity”, in which case they would still not see that sub’s posts). I think that just these two features would implement most of what I think we would both like to see, while being straight-forward. This could even be thought of as similar to a type of inter-community federation.
I’m thinking out loud too. :)
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Yes, thank you! This is a big mistake that I’ve seen new online communities make since at least the beginning of the internet. I first saw it with the old forums. Start a forum site for subject X, create sub-forums x1 through x57 for every possible subtopic, no matter how minor or niche. Go into most of those subforums, you only hear crickets. To encourage activity, most subjects should be concentrated in few forums at first, until those forums become too busy. Only at that time is it a good idea to split into subforums.
Some Lemmy sites have had the correct idea, where they don’t allow users to create communities. There should be a process where admins manage whether it makes sense to create communities after evaluating requests. Unfortunately, the decentralized nature of Lemmy makes this difficult to control, because as soon as one instance does this, someone wanting to create a new community will just move to another instance that allows it. I’m not sure if there is a solution to this.
As a whole, Lemmy isn’t really big enough to branch out into individual game communities just yet. They just end up petering out.
I wouldn’t be against it since r/games is used for mainly game announcements and r/gaming is a facebook tier cesspool. I wouldn’t mind a community like that.
Never start replacing vowels in 9 out of every 10 words with astrixes.
Ast*risks
Keep supporting 3rd party apps
I just want to get more people so we can have some niche communities going. The only thing I miss about Reddit is asking a random question in a niche sub and getting a response in like 15 minutes.
I don’t disagree at all, and that’s the only thing I miss about Reddit, when I had an established profile and could just ask in whatever subreddit I want, emphasis on the “established profile” while Lemmy I started day 1 and I could instantly participate in wherever I wanted.
And sure Lemmy has like 40-50k monthly visitors, Imagine if it was 500k or 1M the good thing to give you hope, I didn’t know what Lemmy was about a month ago, and now I do
I wish it was 100% devoid of nazis, fascists and other authoritarians.
Unfortunately the main developer of the software is a genocide denying tankie dipshit so fat chance of that happening.
I just got blocked from .ml for calling someone a tankie. Good riddance.
I’m of the opinion that as large as this community gets (or any community) it’s bound to have many characters.
I guess I don’t mind that much because I think A) You won’t ever have a large site where everyone 100% agrees with you all the way, unless you are on a specific political community and even then I’ve seen many infights and civil wars over small issues.
B) I’ve dealt with many of them in worse sites (Yes even 4chan) that I don’t mind them anymore, as long as they contribute in their own communities and don’t cause harm for the website then they can chirp on their communities as much as they want, I was the kind of guy that enjoyed Political Compass memes on reddit even though it got ruined by Right-Wingers now, I was on that subreddit long before though and as soon as literal Nazis joined the subreddit got worse.
C) We should absolutely have rules to ban people that post innapropriate, illegal stuff but I feel like this website should be easier than Reddit on the moderating stuff, I’m 100% on banning Nazis and fascists if they make the site worse for everyone else, though I happened to have some interesting conversations with some Conservatives. Reddit on a whole has an awful moderating system that ironically enough doesn’t ever get checked by human beings and I don’t want to see the same here, I’ve heard people that got banned because they had the mental health crisis bot even though they didn’t do anything, I’ve heard people got banned for similar ways that I did for posting a meme lol.
Take of this what you will.
There are literally openly communist communities on Lemmy… 🤦🏻♂️
“Communist”
Looks inside
It’s just a bunch of failed Vanguardist movements that ended up becoming Authoritarian State Capitalism
Authoritarian State Capitalism
Yeah exactly, communism.
Communism is by definition a stateless, classless society. A “Communist State” is therefore an oxymoron.
The more I read about state capitalism, the vaguer it seems.
an economic system where the government plays a central role by managing key industries and manipulating market outcomes
is the most coherent definition I can find. Examples
- the centrally planned, command economy of the USSR with wage labor
- the liberalized market economy of the PRC with some large state industries, a strong private sector, foreign investment, market-based trade
- the Norwegian economy with state ownership of the oil industry & some companies and ownership stake in large, publicly traded companies
- United States with its publicly funded bailouts & recent state ownership stake in some publicly traded companies.
Some economists argued it’s merely state socialism & planned economy relabeled.
Whatever it is, communist states like USSR & China have long claimed they’re transitional.
Communism is by definition a stateless, classless society.
No, that’s a communist society, a purely unsubstantiated, speculative, moneyless, post-scarcity utopia that has never once been realized & probably never will. Belongs in the realm of mythology.
Communism is the ideology whose goal is the creation of a communist society. Much like Christianity with the 2nd coming of Christ, adherents insist it’ll happen someday inevitably. No possible way their great prophet Marx was wrong.
A communist state (also known as a Marxist–Leninist state) is a government consisting of a socialist state following Marxist–Leninist political philosophy with a dictatorial ruling class that promises to achieve a communist society. Unfortunately, while belief systems like Judaism had the sense to warn adherents against trying to force their dream utopia prematurely, Marx lacked such sense to urge the crazies against it.
Regardless, the overzealous failures here are some strain of communist: they follow the ideology.
Removed by mod
National socialism is by definition socialist therefore it is left wing and Marxist.
Lmao what bruh 🤣
You’re appealing to definitions as if they matter in real world contexts.
If I created a group called “the bad people killers” and started killing people would that “by definition” mean everyone I killed was bad?
Communism may be defined as a wheelbarrow full of monkeys for all that matters, in the real world every self-sufficient communist regime was a shitshow of state capitalism, coercion, censorship, and state violence. All the drawbacks of capitalism and none of the perks.
That’s what communism, descriptively, is. The day you figure out a way to manifest reality by sheer will alone without having to deal with the real world I will be interested in what something is “by definition”
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
I’m already having a good experience with Lemmy. A couple of features that would make it perfect for me are better discovery tools for communities and the ability to merge feeds from similar ones.
And I have to say, searching for anything (whether here or on Reddit) always feels like a bit of a challenge. A more robust search feature would be amazing! But overall, I’m really enjoying the vibe here.
Definitely, the good thing about Reddit is that it had a good player as well because I’m a guy who spent a lot of time making content, also you can upload videos no matter the size (I think) which is cool.
I’m new but also enjoying my time, I like how non judging this site is because on Reddit I’d get messages like “Uhhh OP has an interesting history” basically trolls and stuff, but It’s whatever, I don’t mind.
That’s so true about the video player and upload limits, it’s no doubt a huge plus for creators like you? And I totally get what you mean about the more welcoming vibe here; it’s one of the best things about this space.
Just a friendly heads-up as you’re getting settled: while it’s generally much kinder, Lemmy has its share of ‘interesting’ characters here too (a wonderful mix of great people and a few bad apples). But the ability to curate your own experience is much stronger here!
Glad you’re enjoying your time so far!
I’m enjoying my time so far, I’m waiting my 100 day ban pass I guess from Reddit (I’m like almost there) and see what I do, I’ll probably keep using this site since it allows me to be more free than reddit.
In general, I would also like to see this site adopting more niche subreddits, I know I can probably make a lot of those but I don’t have a lot of time to moderate stuff.
There’s already the fact that whatever algorithms there are haven’t been and likely won’t be tweaked or pushed to maximize engagement.
Heck I’m not even sure if upvotes are particularly critical to what I’m getting served…
I really appreciate that about lemmy.
Comments shot from the hip don’t shoot to the top and stay there.
A lot of these communities automatically sort by new, at least when it’s not very populated, or by the so-called hot or active comment sorts. They seem to have a better (less biased?) algorithm in general, even if that means I see something so stale or unengaging that I ask myself why they bothered in the first place. It takes all kinds though.
Still, to me, that sorting practice helps more nuanced, variably informed comments get decent air time. Ya gotta scroll it before you dole amirite?
A working search function, real annoying having to use a different search engine to find thing on a website that ostensibly already has one
- Enforcement of accessibility.
- No reddit-style moderation: the moderators at reddit are unaccountable tyrants.
- Minimal moderation preferably little more than legal compliance & accessibility/usability standards.
- Rejection of loaded reddit moderation concepts such as
- brigading
- sealioning
- calling anything annoying harassment
- Freedom to openly criticize moderators.
Years ago I moved to Reddit as it then had a majority of intelligent and knowledgeable people. So good to have topics discussed reasonably, many new things to learn.
But it turned into meme city. And then became corporate.
Lemmy is nice so far!
Frankly it being Federated in and of itself is already the biggest advantage over Reddit in my opinion. And let’s face it all of our opinions really that’s why we’re here. That already solves probably the majority of problems that Reddit had. As for the rest though? Bots are always a problem, not all are bad of course some are quite useful, but it’s something that requires constant vigilance to monitor because Bots can and will ruin communities. The other major issue is of course moderation. How do you police the mods? On that note I think the one thing I’d like to see done is limiting of power mods. Just like Reddit there do exist mods that moderate a large numbers of different communities. This will always lead to problems.
