Political Discussion and Commentary

The tools simply are not there. We already have a much higher moderator to user ratio than e.g. Reddit, but reportedly the moderation tools themselves are quite poor. The UI also is not as advanced as Reddit, although then again we don't have ads. And MAJOR federation issues abound, involving reporting of content, moderation actions, and even content itself.

Looking at any given post, the number of votes, and comments, differs wildly when viewed from Lemmy.World or elsewhere - e.g. a recent [post[(https://piefed.social/post/330559) of mine shows 172 upvotes on PieFed.social, but the same post viewed from discuss.online shows only 85 votes, and from Lemmy.World that post shows 180 upvotes and 2 downvotes. I'm using votes here as they are easy to see, but the set of comments also can vary, as I saw with a previous post from Star.Trek.website to the Ten Forward community on Lemmy.world: I could not respond to people even several days later, bc I hadn't yet been able to view their replies to me!

This issue has been known for a very long time, and tbf when Lemmy.World upgrades to the now-released 0.19.7 it should help. Maybe. With this one particular cause of federation artifacts.

However, what turns people away irl is the extremist content here, particularly on Lemmy.ml I think. 100% of the people that I have told about Lemmy irl have not only refused to join it but have actively chided me for having mentioned it to them, citing the presence of extremist content as their reason. They did not give details but take a look and it's not hard to see at all (well, perhaps the frequency has fallen sharply now, after the election? I've managed to block them so I wouldn't know) - posts against the USA, or the UK, or Germany, or basically the West in general, or capitalism, some even inciting literal murder of people merely for participating in it to the level of e.g. owning stocks. Setting aside the ethics of owning stocks - perhaps you or I would never choose to do so? - advocating for the murder of those who do is most definitely extremist, on par with right-wing extremism inside the USA, even if this other form calls itself leftist.

Mind you, Xhitter is becoming extremist as well, but (a) it has become grandfathered into the public consciousness, and more recently (b) even so, people are now finally leaving it in droves for similar reasons.

And because of this, Lemmy will never become "mainstream". You can't repeatedly punch people in the face - i.e. Western culture - and then hope that people from said Western culture feel entirely welcomed there. I almost left the Fediverse myself, after wandering into Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml and seeing what goes on there - why would I stick around after seeing that? But since before being on Lemmy I had started on Kbin, I knew that the Fediverse could get better, so I stuck around when I heard that I could block those two instances - whereas you on Lemmy.World are already defederated from them to begin with. The average experience for someone new just checking out Lemmy is SO MUCH WORSE than you may realize, outside of that protected environment, and especially with some websites talking about Lemmy mentioning that Lemmy.ml is the main instance (it used to be) - and btw, its default, with no account, is to show posts from Local, not All. So the West-(especially America-)hating posts are even more prominently displayed as other communities flee from that instance.

I think that PieFed and Mbin, as they improve their software offerings, has a chance to gain mainstream popularity - probably nowhere near the level of Bluesky and Xhitter and Reddit, but like Mastodon levels. However Lemmy does not. At least imho, though I suppose we'll see. The lack of moderation tools is an enormous one though, so as other implementations of the ActivityPub protocol gain traction, it should fall further behind, becoming more and more the echo chamber that everyone (rightly) accuses Reddit of having become. In contrast, PieFed is leading up to explore a democratization of handling unpopular content: instead of having a handful of moderators make the calls, the community itself can vote and the votes get translated into actions that are up to the recipient user to decide what they want to do with them. e.g. PieFed auto-collapses comments below one score threshold (it's easy enough to click to expand and see it though), and auto-removes comments below a different threshold (I basically disabled this entirely by setting it to 10000 downvotes). Here, instead of the binary model whereby a moderator "removes" content for everyone, or else not remove it, I get to decide myself what I want done, and there are multiple layers of choices.

I exceeded the character threshold, so here is a part 2, if it's not too annoying to have this long of a response. Definitely read the other one first though.

There are also indicator labels applied to user accounts, to distinguish between e.g. brand-new vs. established accounts, who may be unfamiliar with the way things work. There are already labels on Lemmy though iirc solely for yes-I-am-a-bot vs. not, whereas PieFed is extending that much further to include suspected bots, suspected trolls, etc. e.g. if someone receives more downvotes than upvotes, or especially like a week-old account whose sole claim to karma is 10 downvotes total, that account absolutely gets labeled. Now mind you, it's merely a label - not a "ban" or anything - and it's possible to come back from such.

Again, it's up to the individual users what to do with these labels - ignore them? Remove them entirely from their display? Filter content using them, so as to avoid wasting their time? The latter would be someone who would likely downvote the content in any case, so perhaps it's better for both parties involved that they can simply filter it out. In short, good fences make good neighbors, especially among the most judgemental people who rush to such without thinking.

You can read more about it here: https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/.

Now maybe in the future these indicator labels will go further and be used by instance admins or community mods to render judgements. But that isn't even possible now (yet), and someone can always spin up their own instance regardless, or as PieFed and Mbin (well, rather Kbin) did, even make their own entire implementation of the ActivityPub protocol. And on those instances, they could go back to the human moderation model, with appropriate tools provided to make that happen - if someone will put forth the effort to make those ofc. In short, we can do whatever we want, but so too can others. But anyway, for now they are merely labels, and some Lemmy apps already do similarly (e.g. put a label next to "new accounts"), which seems quite helpful to proffer that additional information in case it helps guide someone to how they want to position themselves based on users' measured "reputation" - which people do irl anyway.

I would worry more then about vote manipulation at that point: would corporate types spin up their own instance and make a bunch of bots that would downvote every post or comment that negatively mentions their product? If we had a large enough userbase, then they would be remiss in their profit-seeking strategies if they did not. There are definitely things to worry about for the future, but there's little point planning an endgame for Lemmy when it looks as though it will literally never reach mainstream like Mastodon has. We can either accept that, or work to change it.

Every vote for Trump normalizes his behavior. It's as simple as that. A clueless voter see 60 million people voting for him and thinks hey, he must not be so bad!

In my experience, they are quite vocal. Anecdotes are weak