Tennessean here who tried to organize on my state/city subreddits. Can confirm this kind of partisan censorship is not new.
A while ago I made a innocuous enough post on my city’s sub about a “Release the Epstein Files” billboard that went up and was paid for by our local Mobilize chapter. Within an hour it was the most upvoted post of the past month. Within 2, it was removed without reason and I was blocked and banned permantly
Reddit mostly cleared that up by deleting the posts, and banning the users. They couldn’t risk looking like they did anything wrong, like working alongside a company to check for running apps on iOS, when it’s specifically designed to be sandboxed. Not surprisingly, other users discovered Apple was turning a blind eye to the attempts to check systems memory for hooks.
I was banned from Reddit by Reddit for calling out a shill. And then they censored my post and deleted it from my data request so that it was impossible to prove I wasn’t inciting violence. That whole place is fucked.
It sounds exactly like the behavior of Reddit moderators. The entire platform was a form of hidden marketing; if anyone discovered it, they would flag or ban you.
We need to be careful on Lemmy. Only the fact that the moderators and admins have goodwill are keeping Lemmy from becoming like Reddit. If Lemmy gets big and starts attracting people who want to pay to take over communities, that will stretch the moderator goodwill to the limits.
As the number of users goes up, it becomes more difficult to enforce that way. Even if many people switch communities, when new ones search for the community by name, the one with the most users will pop up first. And it becomes more and more difficult to justify defederating an instance over a couple of communities if the instance has a ton of big communities.
It makes me think that maybe “communities” wasn’t the way to organize, maybe you subscribe to a topic and see all posts for that topic on all instances.
But moderation is good, and defederation is too severe a tool to use for moderation. It feels like there is no good solution.
Ive always thought it would be good to elect mods from the community. Instead of having a mod that is in charge of EVERYTHING in a community, it should have periodic elections (or just a vote of no confidence by a certain % of users, then an election). The ones that vote have to joined the community for X number of days/months/etc… That way it prevents a bit of the brigading. Also if communities are basically dead, it can help revive them.
It might be some sort of vetting to know all your users are real people.
I’ve considered setting up a Lemmy/Piefed for my neighborhood, but I’ve been told I’m unlikely to get the neighborhood off of our very active Facebook.
Which will make the return on investment questionable, especially if the whole thing gets meme’d into the spotlight. And if it doesn’t attract more attention, it probably didn’t need to be shut down in the first place.
Tennessean here who tried to organize on my state/city subreddits. Can confirm this kind of partisan censorship is not new.
A while ago I made a innocuous enough post on my city’s sub about a “Release the Epstein Files” billboard that went up and was paid for by our local Mobilize chapter. Within an hour it was the most upvoted post of the past month. Within 2, it was removed without reason and I was blocked and banned permantly
they’ve shut off posting so that no more pesky informational posts can be made.
That’s Reddit, I was banned from a Pokemon Go subreddit for being against Niantic forcibly leaving their sandbox environment on iOS.
Super curious about the Pokemon Go thing, wasn’t able to find anything on Google though. Could you tell what to search or share a link? Thanks <3
Reddit mostly cleared that up by deleting the posts, and banning the users. They couldn’t risk looking like they did anything wrong, like working alongside a company to check for running apps on iOS, when it’s specifically designed to be sandboxed. Not surprisingly, other users discovered Apple was turning a blind eye to the attempts to check systems memory for hooks.
I was banned from Reddit by Reddit for calling out a shill. And then they censored my post and deleted it from my data request so that it was impossible to prove I wasn’t inciting violence. That whole place is fucked.
It sounds exactly like the behavior of Reddit moderators. The entire platform was a form of hidden marketing; if anyone discovered it, they would flag or ban you.
We need to be careful on Lemmy. Only the fact that the moderators and admins have goodwill are keeping Lemmy from becoming like Reddit. If Lemmy gets big and starts attracting people who want to pay to take over communities, that will stretch the moderator goodwill to the limits.
The difference being that Lemmy supports multiple communities with the same name.
If an instance is allowing their communities to be sold, they can be defederated.
As the number of users goes up, it becomes more difficult to enforce that way. Even if many people switch communities, when new ones search for the community by name, the one with the most users will pop up first. And it becomes more and more difficult to justify defederating an instance over a couple of communities if the instance has a ton of big communities.
It makes me think that maybe “communities” wasn’t the way to organize, maybe you subscribe to a topic and see all posts for that topic on all instances.
But moderation is good, and defederation is too severe a tool to use for moderation. It feels like there is no good solution.
Ive always liked subscribing to hashtags so you get user led topics. EX: https://piefed.social/tag/peertube
Ive always thought it would be good to elect mods from the community. Instead of having a mod that is in charge of EVERYTHING in a community, it should have periodic elections (or just a vote of no confidence by a certain % of users, then an election). The ones that vote have to joined the community for X number of days/months/etc… That way it prevents a bit of the brigading. Also if communities are basically dead, it can help revive them.
Just an idea.
Piefed has topics I think (I’m mostly on mobile so not something I use but I remember it being there when I set up my account)
Yep and it works well: Example: https://piefed.social/f/fediverse
or ~fediverse@piefed.social (this resolves if you are on a piefed instance)
It might be some sort of vetting to know all your users are real people.
I’ve considered setting up a Lemmy/Piefed for my neighborhood, but I’ve been told I’m unlikely to get the neighborhood off of our very active Facebook.
Which will make the return on investment questionable, especially if the whole thing gets meme’d into the spotlight. And if it doesn’t attract more attention, it probably didn’t need to be shut down in the first place.