It appears to me that the current state of Lemmy is similar to other platforms when they were smaller and more insular, and that insularity is somewhat protecting it.
I browse Lemmy, and it feels a bit like other platforms did back in 2009, before they became overwhelmed and enshitified.
If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar “landed gentry” moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?
What you’re worried about is basically what federation was built to stop.
If you don’t like the moderation of a community or other aspects, you or anyone else can make a new one on the same or a different instance, if you want.
You can even make it “private” (not federate) to keep others from coming in and recreating the problem you just fled.
To be optimistic, I’d hope the federation would be able to guard against deeper centralization like a more extreme .world or .ml, a la meta or whoever. There’s always space for grassroots instances, and I’m pretty sure there will always be someone out there running something or with enough interest to learn.
Federation.
There’s a reason why worldnews@lemmy.world and worldnews@lemmy.ml are not federated with eachother, yet lots of users are subscribed to both.
If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar “landed gentry” moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
For lemmy, it’s again a federation thing. You just don’t see many multiple defederated examples due to the small user count.
It’s not the most optimal solution, but it’s still miles better than dealing with single instance or single community issues.
On Reddit, before it went full goose step, you’d have the problem where the top mod of r/linux would be this weird open source zealot who would delete any thread that had any practicality in it. So actual discussion of using Linux would happen in r/linuxmasterrace, which was nominally a meme sub but it’s where the actual community landed. You could use Reddit’s vast namespace to steer around an individual top mod.
You couldn’t steer around Reddit’s admin though, they have root access to the servers, they can, have and increasingly do shut things down they don’t like. It’s double plus ungood.
Lemmy, and indeed the entire Fediverse, offers every user the Bender gambit. You can make your own instance with blackjack and hookers. There is no mechanism to shut it down everywhere. Instances are hosted by multiple people on multiple hardware platforms on multiple power grids in multiple countries under multiple jurisdictions.
The top mod of !linux@example.lol is being a shithead? You could make !actual_linux@example.lol, or you could start !linux@lemmy.world, or you could start your own instance and then YOU are in control of who gets to be a mod on at least one instance. No one person has the power to shut down everything everywhere; you start talking about severing undersea cables at that point.
Isn’t this still true of Reddit though? You could just make a new subreddit if you don’t like another.
How is it different?
Because at the end of the day, they’re all on Reddit. So when reddit says “you’ll get banned for upvoting content that promotes violence [against the oligarchs],” you can’t just make another subreddit because they’ll shut that one down too.
If the admin of lemmy.world says “you’ll get banned for upvoting content that promotes violence [against the oligarchs],” then you can say okay and make luigimangione@otherlemmyinstance.com. People on Lemmy.world can still access the new site, or even leave Lemmy.world entirely if they decide they’re not down with the admin. But they can still access all of the other federated communities they were subscribed to rather than having to quit Lemmy overall.
Ah that makes sense. Thank you for the clarification!
It depends which instance you are on. Some instances are full of mods that censor everything that doesn’t fit their ideology. Other instances are more relaxed with their moderation approaches. It definitely pays to shop around a bit before you settle on an instance that is a good fit for you.
On dbzero we have a governance community and instance users have the right to vote out mods/admins if they are unpopular. But most instances are run in a much more top-down BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) fashion.
On dbzero we have a governance community and instance users have the right to vote out mods/admins if they are unpopular
Most leftist thing I’ve ever seen.
Yeah democracy is so leftist
I mean in a sense yes, but that aside voting on your admins is very anarchist.
Having read some (but not all) the comments, I do agree with the idea that decentralization (federation) somehow is what helps to alleviate this problem, although it’s such a complex matter that you will have to see how it plays out. For my part, with some exceptions I was more or less satisfied with how Reddit used to be, and part of that was because Reddit was centralized. Reddit not being federated or decentralized is to its benefit because social platforms benefit from having everything all in one place, but what really seems to have done Reddit in was commercialization. It went from being similar to some kind of basic software tool to this corporate nightmare of tracking and ads, algorithmically shaping content, etc. It’s like Facebook now but with a red icon. Lemmy wasn’t designed to do that, and it will never do that. Federation does help with that.
As long as there’s centralization and data brokering, there will always be a capitalization. It’s basically the only logical path forward for a service that isn’t decentralized or running as a charity.
