Weird racist posts from dank memes keeps showing up in my feed. Are we doing anything to prevent becoming Voat 2.0? We’re really concerned about Threads and that’s a big unknown. Weird racists already destroyed the last Reddit escape are we concerned about that? Like are we going to make a policy of defederating hate groups?
I’m pretty confident this community is using fake accounts since every post starts at ~20 and then gets down voted after it’s been forced into a bunch of people’s feed.
If not that’s fine I guess but does anyone have a suggestion for somewhere that will?
I am not even sure that needs to happen to lemmy as a whole. Server level consortia can be made by the people hosting servers. As I understand it, the vision would be that there will be hate groups and spam on lemmy. But that everyone who doesn’t want it, will easily escape it by simply being on a “normal instance”, which is not associated with any of the finge content by anything but the name “lemmy”. Everyone who wants to move on the fringe can also do that, by joining an instance which includes all the bad things which normal instances defederate.
My go to scenario for thinking about difficult situations, is the “reddit 2016 situation”, where you had the annoying trump sub, with the annoying trump people annoying the fuck out of everyone who was even remotely normal. And you couldn’t get rid of them, their spam, and their shit, because admins didn’t want to do anything (Free speech!), you couldn’t engage with them on their turf, because you would get instabanned (Free speech?), and everyone just had to tolerate them spamming the frontpage with their worthless shit. Because they were a community on reddit, had every right to be there, and nobody could do anything. That kind of problem will not appear here. There will be instances which allow the annoying Trumpers. There will be instances which defederate them. And how much split you want, will depend on the instance you use. There is no central “lemmy”, which contains hate speech, or does not. And that’s the difference to centralized solutions.
The reason I think there needs to be some kind of federation/consortium/whatever is because it’s a huge load on individual server admins to have to make determinations about which servers to federate with and which not to. That, plus maintaining their server, finding some way to pay for it, fighting spam/abuse/etc, is a lot or work. Ultimately, unless there’s some kind of formal process most servers are just going to end up copying what the big instances do, which centralises power a bit too much for me.
I think the situation of a server admin here, is not that different from the situation of a subreddit moderator, back on the other site.
With the big difference that there is no central instance, which has a final say over things: On reddit the mods of big subs arguably do a lot of similar work. In exchange for having to host and pay for a server, the instance admins here get additional powers which make things easier to manage.
And yes, of course a lot of servers will end up copying what big instances do. But they don’t have to. That’s the critical difference.
While on good old reddit as a mod, you often just don’t have the power to do what you want to do: If you want to get rid of that annoying racist Trump community and its members? You are out of luck, because reddit admins like their traffic. And on the other hand, reddit mods will ultimately have no choice but do what the admins decree, without any recourse whatsoever. We are seeing that now: “You will not label your sub NSFW! If you do, we will boot you, and take over your community!”
Instancing solves those two flaws quite well, because the option to do something else remains open.