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Why? Are we not doing enough?
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by fedidb.org
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this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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It's because when you go to /c/books , the default view is not every /c/books on every server. But one /c/books on one server. Therefore Lemmy is doomed and the dev refuse by principle to fix it.
what do you mean refuse by principle to fix it? the solution that comes to mind is for a whitelist that is implemented either in federation broadly or lemmy specifically for certain categories (think TLDs) which are agreed to have a certain focus, like on literature or video games or music, where the instances themselves can join or link to.
kinda bypass a community being held hostage (or kept isolated) by an instance, the whitelists can be determined through a simple majority (first past the post) or any other method by members of communities rather than instance moderators/admins.
i get that many folks don't like hexbear and i have nothing against them, i certainly don't want to force them to see content they don't want; giving granular control over specific content (not just a blacklist like per-user instance blocking) seems ideal.
what do you think?
When you go to "/c/books" on any server, the default should be an agglomeration of all /c/books on all federated servers (notwithstanding the already ongoing defederation wars)
The -USER- then decides if they want to filter by whitelist or blacklist, the user decide what server or community@server goes on the list. Realistically, users will just follow other user's lists, which should be sharable easily. You might even subscribe to someone else's blacklist/whitelist and get updated automatically.
But none of that is possible if the baseline view is not the ability to "see all /c/book on the entire fediverse in its raw unedited form". You can filter out data you can't access.
Whitelists, of course, are poison were just just deem everything to be garbage except "the chosen ones", usually handed down from above by your betters.
A public blacklist model would be much better. You could then build your own blacklist by scanning all user profile for what is on their blacklist and use that as a basis for building your own blacklist, this is mostly how spam filters work. Because in the world of email, if you say "everyone I don't already know is garbage" well, then you might as well just abandon email entirely.
So like the relays or whatever that Mastadon has but topic and community focused?
Ideally, the user should search for "books" communities and the top result should be the largest/most active community. If they don't like that community, they can try the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th result to see if they are better. Unfortunately, the Lemmy sort algorithm needs a lot of work.
idk if i'm missing something but i use connect and this is what it does on the "communities" tab
For the communities I have searched for, both "Hot" and "Active" sort are bad (the main community about a topic is barely top 5, no other relevant results at the top of the list). When I switch to Top Year, I start to get good results.
A system like that can't have a second books community, let alone a second or third. The current books community has 133 user. They're not going to have 13 communities split between them.
Instead they all have to accept, whoever is the biggest, (realistically, whoever is first) community, gets to shape the books discussion on lemmy forever. That's just how first mover advantage, compounding advantage works in this obviously broken system.
This will certainly spell the end of Lemmy. You think defederation is a problem, You've seen nothing yet.
You end up with one community with 8000 user , second community 17.
Unless there a major fuckup, only the biggest community is viable and gets seen by anyone. It sucks the air out for everything else. Because nobody is going to manually subscribe to 50 microscopic /c/books communities on as many servers.
That recreates Reddit mod power problem and it will kill Lemmy in the same way.
Maybe Lemmy simply already isn't viable, just a Reddit clone with meaningless federation feature that only decentralize unimportant stuff but not the strangleho lady that moderators have on communities.
The second community will never be viable because even if the first community messed up as bad as Reddit, we know less than 5% would even change their habits.
Lemmy is not spez proof, it empowers the spez as much as Reddit.
Except even on Reddit we saw large communities split due to some issue (for example r/questionablecontent and r/QContent, one has 13k and the other has 5.3k subs).
Yes, many communities have these kinds of fuck ups. In the best case scenarios you have a new community half the size and with its attention split. The newcomers still get split between the schism after it happened. The result is multiple weaker communities.
And it take a really monumental fuck up to even get this low level of user action.
Look at reddit, the admins fucked over absolutely everyone and they've made it clear they're only starting. Look how hard it is to get people to come over.
While on the other hand, if most users go to /c/books and by default they see every /c/books on every federated server, then the problem is sidestepped entirely.
No single mod team can get a stranglehold on a community.
Each user gets to choose, by applying or subscribing to a blacklist/while of users or servers. Or they can raw dog it with the click of a button.
But if most users who go to /c/books end up on the "one big /c/books instance" then every other /c/books community except the biggest one, will be a desert that is not worth your time to post to.
Assuming you merge instances, how would moderation work, especially if mods cannot agree on rules or interpretations? What about instance specific rules? Would a post be moderated by whatever instance the OP posted from?
If the mods have to agree on rules, you have the same exact asshole mod problem but now with extra name squatting.
Basic way, mods censor their own instance. What is not on their instance does not concern them.
Advanced way, mods actions are published as a filter, enacted on the client. User choose their mods, subscribe to them, their client obtain those mod action list and use them to filter the raw feed.
This way mods can "delete" things on other instances too.
In practice, every user is now a mod. You can include any user as being a moderator for you.
Very advanced way, the user's client, for a piece of content obtains all moderator actions, for each moderator automatically evaluate credibility and reputation score, weight mods action in proportion to that score, take all actions for all mods taking weight into consideration to determine "consensus action" and then apply this action to the piece of content.
There are many many other ways to do this. All of them better than current centralized abuse-prone Web 2.0 garbage
I imagine they don't attract a lot of talent since they're constantly asking for resumes and applications for unpaid positions.
I really don't get a lot of the rationale behind Lemmy. Love the gist, but damn, even basic access and recall are a nightmare.
It's a nice start. Maybe it'll be fully fleshed out one day.
Lemmy isn't really using federation, except to share user credentials. All content and attention remain centralized
The difference is that Lemmy is an answer to Reddit, not Discord. If a Reddit user wants to see if there’s a community for woodworking, he can search for “woodworking” and find it.
If a Lemmy user searches “woodworking” and the biggest woodworking community isn’t on your instance, you have to leave Lemmy and use an external service to search more instances and even then you might not find what you’re looking for.
I don't agree with your conjecture about the user not understanding how Lemmy works. My understanding is that he does not think it's a good system.
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I don't use that spyware but it's probably the same as every tech bro Reddit like.
Everyone flocks to the one big "books" community and that sucks the air out for any alternative.
Lemmy's one thing going for it was that it's was supposed to be decentralized and prevent concentration of power.
But you end up with one big community, and a unaccountable minority owns that community and does what every they want with it. Just like Reddit, they can sell your grandmother, we know users don't care enough to do anything about it and they'll just stay. The 2nd biggest will never matter.
This means there isn't a lemmiverse books community, there is one big books community, on one person's server, moderated by one guy and his disciples and that's it forever as far as Lemmy is concerned, the same end as Reddit.