A bit of an effortpost :)
Please do crosspost in more fitting communities if you think of any
I absolutely want people to pick other solutions than reddit and zuckerfuck, but I’m not sure Lemmy is the solution either.
The large Instances already overdo the moderation, cracking down on specific words, or people not agreeing with gender issues or vaccination issues. Just a few examples.
And no, you can’t just join another instance because the ones without similar moderation rules are defederated from Lemmy.world, which acts as the center hub of content. So in practice, any Lemmy experience without Lemmy.world is a poor one, filled with tankies and insane things. That’s not what anyone intelligent wants.
I remember when we had forums, it was ok to be upset sometimes. It was fine to not agree. That’s why the discussions were interesting. There was no downvotes. No popularity contests. No karma points (or ok, some forums actually had user levels based on how much they posted, but nobody cared I think).
If you want to build a proper discussion forum, it needs to allow for actual discussions and actual emotions, heated debates, insults sometimes.
At least that’s the way I see it. Or you will just have memes and pointless things scrolling by.
I remember when we had forums, it was ok to be upset sometimes.
I remember mods and admins that would ban you because you gently disagreed with something they said.
There wasn’t a moderation team – it was one weird guy that got off on power.
Yes, but since you had many forums, you could move to one with more relaxed admins. They had no dependency. On Lemmy, instances are connected and there is pressure to have the same moderation rules or you get defederated because your instance is now creating discussions that leads to reporting of users on other instances.
Not really. This is a result of people “forking” Reddit due to a real fork being dumb and impossible. Everyone brought the same site culture with them. Mastodon is cleanly divided between Eugene’s hellmouth of Twitter liberals and evil anime libertarians who should all be legally executed for their very real crimes. That wasn’t inevitable. This place seems tailor made for people with a functioning honor system. Internet points are an abomination. People need to inquire more seriously into what is grinding the gears with social media. Techno-libertarian idealism outlived its usefulness long ago. I certainly don’t have any better solutions than ActivityPub and private frontends.
I had high hopes due to the defederated nature of the technology, but first thing that happened was that instances with different views started to defederate… That wouldnt be so bad if not all content came from just one or two large instances, but since it does, the entire network is now depending on them to survive.
This is 100% caused by every website about Lemmy linking to Lemmy.world, so that’s what users pick. It can be argued that there was very good intent behind this, giving users an instance with experienced admins to start their Lemmy adventures. But the downside of this is the very controlled, centralized nature of the Lemmy network now.
people not agreeing with gender issues
LW defederated about gender issues?
