OpenStars

Reddit has lots of “activity”, from many different “accounts”, saying lots of “different” things. [wink]

I didn’t make the criteria to define what a “Fediverse project” can or cannot include, just commenting that it seems to be based on people’s hopes and dreams. e.g. Sublinks, though that one had little to no activity for so long that people really did lose hope for awhile, while Loops is at least actively continuing its development - even though as you say not specifically in terms of federating.

Worst of all is how if the code were released, people would outright do that task for the chief developer, so holding back the codebase (to decide on a specific license or whatever other reason) is the primary limitation. Though - just like Sublinks - if there were any other project that even came close to promising to fulfill that same functionality (as Lemmy does for the forum-based Threadiverse) then people would forget all about Loops. Instead, right now it’s the only one of its kind.

This seems different than the situation with Bluesky though, where there is no hope of it ever becoming open source. I concede that eventually if the code to Loops is never released you’ll end up being right, it’s just that it still seems early enough in its development that people haven’t given up all hope for that yet.

Ofc the reason for this is that TikTok is so popular and was very nearly banned from the USA (and still might be unless they hand >=50% of their stock shares over to the leader of the USA), so having even the hope of a promise of a prayer of a thought of a dream of a “federated” alternative is of great interest to many people.

Even if the dream hasn’t been realized yet.

I am responding to you from PieFed right now, so yes that works:-).

Sublinks plans to go even further and be backwards compatible with existing Lemmy databases, for conversion of current instances rather than having to spin up a new one fresh and thereby lose all the old content.

Mbin likewise ties in not only with Lemmy but with Mastodon as well (plus others such as Friendica can connect with Lemmy as well, but with varying degrees of success).

So I get what you are saying, I do, but also if some features - like hashtag support - aren’t supported by all platforms, then the method of access can have such an enormous difference in terms of what “content” someone is able to access, even if staring at raw API calls from those various sources, that it seems to represent more than merely a method of access to the same material (imho at least).

More to the point, I meant that PieFed is written in Python (and Sublinks in Java iirc, and Mbin in PHP), whereas Lemmy written in Rust moves much more slowly ahead in terms of new features, as far fewer people know it.

Also the developers of Lemmy have a very noticeable bias towards authoritarianism that influences what the implementation is allowed to do - e.g. when a mod or admin removes content, there is no user notification nor any way to appeal that (as Reddit does with the modmail), and an entire post thereby disappears even for the users having deeper discussions no longer involving the OP, which end up getting squashed as well.

I doubt that will change even in the timeframe of several years, especially considering how a year ago Lemmy users were told that we would gain the ability to block users from an instance, which when the feature rolled out that only mutes communities but leaves all the trolls free to harass users on other instances that haven’t dared to defederated from them, showed us that the promises made in that regard were not serious. e.g. from Hexbear or even mods on Lemmy.ml, like that incident where the mod told a user “I hope you die soon.”, after saying that they - the mod - wanted to kill the user whose comment they had removed, over some trivial depiction of a kiss between people dating in a game. Yet to this day that same mod retains an account on that instance, protected by the admins and free to continue their pattern of abuse across the entire Fediverse. Moreover, “notifications” from instances that people choose to block used to be silenced, but then that protection was later removed, and to this day there remains no way in the Lemmy web UI to halt a barrage of messages from users that can continue for WEEKS and WEEKS (I’m not joking - this has happened to me, TWICE!), long after the person has lost interest in receiving such. (Tbf, some apps may provide that, I’m not sure, but I’m talking here about what “Lemmy” provides innately.)

TLDR: I’ve mostly given up on Lemmy - the platform I mean, not the users on it - to ever improve such matters. At which point I am pinning my hopes on PieFed, Mbin, and Sublinks moving forward, bc those “minor differences” in the codebase make ALL the difference in terms of avoidance of harassment i.e. the reception of the end user experience.

I have never visited either Mastodon or Bluesky before this week, but I finally did a test yesterday. I wanted to see how easy it was to find mention of that Reddit group fedinews that “everyone” seems to be talking about lately. Note, I’m not trying to promote Reddit here, it’s a legitimate trend and I wanted to see if there were meta-discussions about such.

First, on Lemmy there are zero mentions of this term that I could find with a search from the past six months.

Second, Mastodon.social had like 1-2 items tops.

Third, Bluesky had the topic plastered all over the front page, without me needing an account, making it darn near impossible for someone to miss even if they tried.

TLDR: the content is either on Reddit or Bluesky, unless we are talking about using Arch btw, or promoting violent overthrow of the entire Western philosophy and way of life (having a bank account = being a landlord btw). Yes there are tiny niches on Lemmy, and I love them, but if our goal was somehow to replace Reddit or X for a source of discussions as to what is going on in the world… then we would have failed.

Bluesky seems to offer people what they want. I suggest that Mastodon copy that, if it is capable of doing so.

Edit: also, getting back to the original point, read this essay on features in PieFed, a Lemmy alternative, that will help offer democratization of moderation, putting the power back into the hands of The People to choose what they want to see or not rather than relying solely on a mod to make those choices for someone. e.g. there are icons that can go next to a username (“account is <2 weeks old”, “posts >50x more often than comment, could be an unregistered bot?”, “uaer offers controversial content, receiving >20x more downvotes than upvotes”, etc.), and people can choose to auto collapse comments with lots of downvotes (easily opened with but a single click though!) or even automatically hidden entirely. Different users can share the same community and each get the experience that they want out of it. PieFed is still not fully developed, but all of these features that I’ve described here already exist, along with many other highly-requested ones like Categories of Communities, hashtags, YouTube embedding, the ability to block all users from an instance of the users choice without requiring admin approval, and more. I have lost most hope for “Lemmy”, but PieFed gives me the hope again that I once placed into Kbin, only reluctantly transferring that to Lemmy.

It relates to Lemmy’s roots among self-hosters - the idea being that, as a user of Arch btw, someone could simply subscribe to whatever content they wanted, and then not have to pull down and retain stuff that they did not want (which could also be a bit dangerous, e.g. child pornography).

But if you want to contribute to the codebase the functionality that you are talking about, that’s awesome.

It won’t solve the major problems though: lack of overall content, lack of organization of content (though here the Lemmy alternative PieFed has an amazing start in its Topics feature - one day not too far distant I expect PieFed will overtake Lemmy), and contentious users that will troll and make fun of ESPECIALLY people from a Western nation (do an experiment: using GOOGLE, not Duck Duck Go or Kagi or anything other than what a non-technical normie would do, and look at the top instance that it recommends, and maybe count the number of posts that make fun of the USA, which btw is where the vast majority of Reddit users are from). Trying to avoid the trolls here on Lemmy takes an EXTREME amount of effort, which to me explains why literally 100% of the people that I’ve told irl about Lemmy have actually chided me for having recommended it to them (and when you do that experiment, you should see it first-hand yourself, although tbf now that the USA election season is over perhaps the rhetoric has been toned down? I haven’t tried lately).

Edit: here is a prior example that occurred just prior to the election, informing us how Biden and Trump were exactly tHe SaMe ThO:

I believe the lesson attempted to be imparted here is how despite the fact that Russia and China and North Korea are “not” doing genocide (any attempts to say otherwise result in site-wide bans), it is the USA that is bad, and more generally capitalism and the West (here, it helps to realize that Russia and China are “not” capitalist, in this formulation).

Anyway, the most important bits are how: (1) Google searches directs people to this instance, among all of them, bc it was one of the first and most popular, and (2) it has its feed set to show only Local posts by default for new users. They will see such anti-Western propaganda, and will miss all the other great content on other instances across the Fediverse. And then go back to Reddit complaining that Lemmy is the place made by tankies who got kicked out of Reddit for being too extreme. Which, tbf, is the actual truth.

I am not on that platform but I’ll offer a:

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.

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.

I guess I am a snowflake too then, bc to me consent should matter. And while the USA is a part of the world, and also has an oversized effect upon it due to the size of the economy and trade deals and the like, it also can be overwhelming for some, who feel ostracized and left out as if only the big guys (and guns) matter.

But on the other hand, it is known that moderation sucks across the vast majority of Lemmy - it’s somewhat baked right into the tools themselves, e.g. removing whole posts rather than merely taking them out of the community lists but allowing people to continue their discussions already begun, as Reddit does.

So you may want to take it upon yourself to either start blocking by keywords (maybe find an app that allows that - I’m not sure which ones), or user accounts that do that, or even find a better community to engage with.

Though I agree with your conclusion: I no longer recommend Lemmy to people irl by virtue of having been burned by that far too many times before. We’re toxic AF in this Alt-Left (rather than Alt-Right) “Nazi bar” space, and a lot of the people here are legit those banned from Reddit for exactly that behavior.

People like looking at photos of food and cats more than being railed for having "incorrect* political viewpoints? (/s for anyone not picking up on that btw:-P)