cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/7623713
I made a blog post discussing my biggest issues with Lemmy and why I am kind of done with it as a software.
Unfortunately I remember during people moving from Reddit to Lemmy, several people on Mastodon trying to warn others away from doing so due to its lacking moderation tools, and some mainly focusing on the developers, both of which have proven to hold true in various ways.
However, at the time, there really weren’t all that many federated alternatives developed enough to go to. If memory serves Kbin was kinda scrambled out to meet the moment, and it’s been struggling along since then with its own issues. Aside from those, there were a couple centralized options with Tildes and Postmill being open source, but some were understandably wary of moving to yet another site with a centralized structure (and one of those closed source alternatives people did try out didn’t last long).
Now it’s kind of interesting as we see another open source centralized option developing (Discuit), Sublinks as you mention in your post, and also Piefed. It’s unfortunate that first there seems to have needed to be this rough proof of concept stage before more options appeared, but with any luck they may pave the way to better, more robust sites, and maybe give Lemmy some incentive to improve itself.
At least moving from one ActivityPub service to another isn’t as big a step as abandoning Reddit
I was on Discuit during/before the Squabbles(Squabblr) drama, and traffic to the site has died down considerably. I assume most people went back to Reddit having exhausted their search for a Reddit alternative.
Or, hopefully, some ended up on federated platforms. Like yourself - I’m happy you’re here!
What was the Squabbles drama? I remember that site being touted by some as a Reddit alternative during the APIcalypse but I never really cared for it for various reasons, both with the site itself and its founder.
I never really followed it further beyond making an account, though, as I ended up here.
Short version is that the admin went frEe SPeECh ABsOLutIsT, it went about as well as that kind of thing usually does and most users left.
I see. I did get some bad vibes from him from the off so I’m not completely surprised. I’m glad I never invested any time or effort into that site. I hope some of the users leaving found Lemmy.
This is the tl;dr I wish I wrote, but am saving for next time.
I think y’all are expecting too much from 2-3 poorly funded developers who are being overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of people who grew used to have a “free” product developed by a giant corporation who employs thousands of people and has revenue in the hundreds of millions.
I also think that this constant chasing for the next Messiah is counterproductive. I wish the best of luck for the Sublinks developers, but I also wish they could find a way to work to grow the ecosystem as a whole instead of competing for such a small slice of the Internet.
To put it all together: If the largest issue with Lemmy is tooling for moderation and proper instance management, I’d be more than willing to refocus my work on Fediverser into it. But I have to say that I can not put any more effort into it without getting proper compensation for anything. As much as I’m hopeful to see the Fediverse grow and for the downfall of Big Tech, I know that we will need more (a lot more) than just a handful of people working on this as side-job while thousands of other just keep watching and repeating “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”
I also think that this constant chasing for the next Messiah is counterproductive.
MariaDB is a successful MySQL fork. LibreOffice is a successful OpenOffice fork. Even within the Fediverse, Mbin emerged as an actively developed fork from Kbin.
I wish the best of luck for the Sublinks developers, but I also wish they could find a way to work to grow the ecosystem as a whole instead of competing for such a small slice of the Internet.
The choice of Rust limited the ability for people to contribute. If I had gotten a dollar every time I read “I would like to contribute to Lemmy, but I don’t have time to learn Rust”, I would get a beer to everyone in this thread.
we will need more (a lot more) than just a handful of people working on this
Definitely. Sublinks with Java, Mbin with PHP and Piefed with Python already make it easier for people to contribute to the whole ecosystem.
Fediverser
As a side-note, how is it going on that side? It’s been a while since the last time I checked.
Regarding status of fediverser: https://communick.news/comment/1760608
Still waiting for an update from NLNet
God I wish you get that grant. Your Fediverser project is super interesting and promising, and I think could be a great boon.
Thank you for your kind words, and if you don’t mind me taking this opportunity to remind everyone that you can support me via github and (even better) by joining Communick. Getting the grant would be nice, but being able to get continued support from the people that are really part of the Fediverse would be the perfect way for me to contribute and give back as well.
Fingers crossed!
Good luck!
The choice of Rust limited the ability for people to contribute.
That’s unfortunate. I think rust is particularly tailored to big projects with many contributors that need the performance boosts of a “low level” language. This goes especially for web apps, since they’re likely to grow in size directly correlated to number of users and use time.
I get that the compiler is viewed as “training wheels” by the C and C++ coders, but it’s nearly impossible to ensure memory safety on a large project without something or someone checking and enforcing it, since no one can be reasonably expected to parse thousands of lines of code and keep the data flow in mind at all times while considering edge cases and also trying to add on to it while other also grow it.
The choice of Rust limited the ability for people to contribute. If I had gotten a dollar every time I read “I would like to contribute to Lemmy, but I don’t have time to learn Rust”, I would get a beer to everyone in this thread.
Rust is really not as hard to learn as some people claim. If they dont have time for this, how will they have time to contribute to Lemmy? Besides lemmy-ui is written in Typescript and could also use a lot more contributions.
“Mod logs are always publicly visible in the public mod log.”
This is seen as a bad thing?
It can be a source of harassment to not be able to anonymize actions.
Communities should know what their mods are doing. It’s an important stop gap against abusive moderation tactics.
Transparency is a beautiful thing, always!
Do you mean anonymize as in hide which specific mod took a particular action? Because that makes sense as an anti-harassment feature, and doesn’t conflict with everyone who’s retorting about transparency.
Mod actions should be publicly available, but not necessarily which mod is taking the action. That can just lead to witch hunts and ignores the complicity of other mods
Bruh.
CSAM is still unfortunately an issue on Lemmy. Just yesterday I had to contact an admin of the 2nd largest instance directly to get a post removed that had been up for several hours. Worst of all, it had more upvotes than downvotes. I do applaud the admin for taking action the minute I notified them, but it should never have been able to get that far.
Also, some of the issues involving Lemmy developers really remind me of major Minecraft servers back in the day lol. There’s just an inability for the “helpers” to do much problem solving because of the lack of tools, and absolute reliance on the person at the top to take action. Even then, the person at the top doesn’t always have the skill set necessary to solve the issues that arise.
I look forward to seeing how Sublinks goes, but without a good reason for users to migrate it could be dead on arrival.
I agree quite a bit with your second point, as someone who used to run a Minecraft server long long long ass it was quite bad.
And yeah, I think there will be solid reasons to get users to migrate. But for the most part it wont really be needed as instances themselves will be able to convert lemmy instances to sublinks instances eventually. It wont require much effort from users unless they want to switch instances entirely.
instances themselves will be able to convert lemmy instances to sublinks instances eventually
That sounds really cool, do you just import and convert all the user/comm/post/comment data from Lemmy?
I think there’s a good chance people will leave once Lemmy integrates with Threads. So if you time things wisely, you can probably get a good base of users to swap their coms to Sublinks.
What’s your planned policy for karma? I know users hated it, but as a reddit mod I found it super useful to determine between a misinformed user and a troll. If your plan for mod tools is as good as you’re saying, I wouldn’t mind going back to modding.
I dont get the hate for a voting system, I think naming it after karma feels a bit weird…. but in general a voting system does hugely improve the quality of crowded conversations and naturally avoids the problems web forums have with only one conversational thread being possible at a time.
People get angry that downvotes should be applied only in valiant noble ways, but honestly sometimes you just gotta downvote somebody for being an asshole and if they are actually an asshole than usually the huge amount of downvotes defangs someone’s ability to claim their viewpoint is held by some exaggerated significant portion of the community.
you just gotta downvote somebody for being an asshole and if they are actually an asshole than usually the huge amount of downvotes defangs someone’s ability to claim their viewpoint is held by some exaggerated significant portion of the community.
The issues is that the asshole is going to downvote you back, and will bring his ten alts to make sure your comment is buried into oblivion. Downvotes can be identified by admins with the current version of Lemmy, but that’s a new can of worms (and work for the admins)
One downvote from the OP to troll; one downvote from the troll to OP; ten downvotes from the troll’s arsenal of alts to OP; hundreds of downvotes to the troll from the community.
Reddit with their quirks and issues have at least demonstrated it’s fine for the most part. Established communities can identify trolls quickly, make them easier to spot for moderators through voting, and enable moderation tools to act and block quickly. Whereas the current Lemmy system feels like burying their head in the sand, and pretending trolls can’t exist because only admins can, through convoluted queries, see the users’ historical vote aggregate.
One downvote from the OP to troll; one downvote from the troll to OP; ten downvotes from the troll’s arsenal of alts to OP; hundreds of downvotes to the troll from the community.
Except when other people get into the discussion,and you realize that other people are also part of the circlejerk that the initial troll initiated.
Reddit with their quirks and issues have at least demonstrated it’s fine for the most part. Established communities can identify trolls quickly, make them easier to spot for moderators through voting, and enable moderation tools to act and block quickly. Whereas the current Lemmy system feels like burying their head in the sand, and pretending trolls can’t exist because only admins can, through convoluted queries, see the users’ historical vote aggregate.
On this I agree, Lemmy is definetely lacking on moderation tools. Votes should be visible to mods too.
Lemmy integrates with Threads.
But isn’t Threads a micro-blogging format, similar to Mastodon and Twitter, compared to the community-focused Lemmy and Reddit?
Can Threads display communities? Genuinely asking, I haven’t had a look at that in a while
Define display. Subscribing to a Lemmy community on Threads should “work”, but won’t be a pleasant viewing experience for your feed most likely.
They can, however, post directly to Lemmy communities should they wish, by @-ing the community.
Intermingling requires Threads users to specifically and actively seek Lemmy out.
If it’s the same way that Mastodon displays Lemmy communities, and Lemmy users not being able to post to Mastodon, then people are probably not going to leave Lemmy for Threads.
Mastodon, on the other hand, is very much at risk.
Leaving Lemmy for Threads was never really a concern I heard from anyone, they are completely different services. Like you say, Mastodon is more at risk.
What people on Lemmy were concerned with was rather whether undesirable users on Threads could filter onto Lemmy and negatively affect the user experience here. With the magnitudes larger userbase, Threads users could potentially dominate the Hot feed if they started posting to Lemmy communities.
Good point.
for users to migrate it could be dead on arrival
Sublinks isn’t meant to appeal to users, it’s meant to appeal to admins.
- Reports are auto forwarded without any anonymity. And yes, report retaliation bans happen from community mods.
Not just retaliation bans but also harassment and threats in DMs. Really community mods have no business being able to see who sends reports, only admins do, and even then, only admins on the homeserver of those reports, admins of remote instances should only get to know the instance it came from, nothing else.
- Reports are sent to both admins and community mods, with no means of forwarding directly to admins. Community mods can snipe reports before admins see them.
I’ve also experienced problems with this on more than one occasion, mods can essentially protect bad faith users and their community from having action taken due to policy violations by resolving all reports without action. I’ve gotten around this by DMing admins directly (on Lemmy.world it can also be done by emailing [email protected]) but there should really be grandular options like on Mastodon, both for forwarding to community mods and also whether or not to forward to remote instances.
- Domain blocks are always publicly visible.
- Mod logs are always publicly visible in the public mod log.
I disagree with this, transparency is important because without it, it enables abusive moderation practices which are much more difficult to uncover or find out about, also domain blocks should be visible because it allows people to know which servers are federated and thus which instance they should pick. Without transparency we get the incredibly user-hostile shadow moderation that places like Reddit are known for.
There is no granular federation options. Only domain blocks and that’s it.
As it should be. The whole point is this is all supposed to mesh together seamlessly, and there needs to be a standard for what federating actually means.
This isn’t a lack of moderation tools. You have the moderation tools. You can moderate by defederating.
What you want are curation tools, and that’s against the spirit of this. It’s not supposed to matter what instance you’re on, you’re supposed to see the same fediverse except for the case of defederation which should only be for extreme cases or hostile instances. This push for the ability to curate granularly is worrying, because it just comes off like admins not being willing to commit to the idea of this platform, but still wanting all the benefits of having other instance’s content.
Domain blocks are always publicly visible.
Mod logs are always publicly visible in the public) mod log.
Good. Users should know what the admin and mods are doing so they can make an informed choice about whether or not they want to remain on that instance.
We should not be encouraging shadow moderation and invisible curation like this. This should be a place that works on transparency.
Do you run an instance or have you ever ran a fediverse instance before?
There is this desire to be as widely federated on an instance and the idea that everything on the Fediverse is something they want to be able to see.
Reminds me of Geek Socual Fallacy #1
