tl;dr: let’s stop the generic and almost-irrelevant-doom-and-gloom karma-harvesting one-liners that can be copy-pasted between any two articles written in the last century
Background
Anyone who has used Reddit for any decent period of time is probably aware of the drill – when you create an account, unsubscribe from the defaults and find the smaller communities. It will end up in a better experience.
Why were people told to dodge the defaults? They were the largest subreddits. But because they were large, the quality was often regarded as “meh” due to post and comment quality.
How bad was it? You’d find news posted about something, then you’d click into the comments, find they’re something to read, then move on.
A week passes and an article on a similar subject comes up. You click into the comments and a sense of “Is this deja-vu?” is felt. Is this comment thread for the article this week, or the article from last week?
Turns out, the discussion was too generic. It wasn’t uniquely thought provoking to the article posted. The comments didn’t offer much and could be copy-pasted between many news posts spanning any given year.
Reddit became boring after picking up on this pattern, especially as this became the norm on so many communities. The comments served as candy for feeding a doom-scrolling habit. At times I’d joke to myself that I could predict what the upvoted comments would be.
Why do I bring this up?
I’ve noticed that commentary in the most popular communities have been flooded with unsubstantial commentary as of late – the type of commentary that could be copy-pasted between almost any two articles in a given month. It feels like cheap karma acquisition, even though Lemmy doesn’t really incentivize karma.
The Lemmy community has a lot of energy and a lot of people who want to see it succeed. I do too.
So what should we do?
I am advocating that we collectively try to put in more thought in our discussions. I think Hackernews (sans the occasional edgy political take) and Tildes might be worth learning from. Let’s make it a goal to contribute content that others may learn from and do away with the copy-paste doom-and-gloom comments.
Just unsubscri-
Yes, the popular refrain to a lot of concerns about Lemmy is “just unsubscribe from those and join another community”. I disagree that is the right solution. This isn’t limited to just one or two communities of a given type and what habits are created in one community easily spread to others due to the very large overlap in users.
That was my mistake, I was unaware of the origin of that term and assumed it was merely a euphemism for a thread with a lot of arguing.
You clearly weren’t paying attention. It took us weeks to defederate from exploding heads, because we insisted upon having a democratic debate and vote where all users would be able to express their opinions on the topic. If you have time, you can pore through these threads and see how much pushback I gave regarding that defederation saga.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/564252 https://sh.itjust.works/post/611718
Also have a look at this post and this thread.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/433483 https://sh.itjust.works/comment/510653
There were at least two valuable users of this instance who left because they were outraged that it took so long to defederate EH, and they suspected myself and/or TheDude of being sympathetic to alt-right viewpoints and/or fascism.
https://sh.itjust.works/u/socialjusticewizard https://sh.itjust.works/u/Quill7513
Now, I have users such as yourself who accuse me of being a hexbear in disguise. The truth is, I am merely trying to make the right decisions for my server and Lemmy as a whole, and I believe that widespread defederation undermines the usefulness of this platform, so I resist it as a default. Although I seem to always end up looking like the asshole for not caving to the demands of the mob immediately, I believe that my philosophy regarding defederation is objectively the correct approach.
Lemmy.world and beehaw are servers that have consistently taken a safe, conservative approach of preemptive defederation. Sh.itjust.works and lemm.ee are servers that pursue more open-minded federation policies. It’s beneficial for Lemmy to have a diversity of options and spaces to cater to a diverse userbase with differing needs and expectations.
Perhaps this additional context gives you more reason to question my actions, but I believe that it vindicates me because it demonstrates that my decisions have remained consistent and are not politically motivated. I simply believe in seeing for myself what any given community is like, and I want to run a server for people of a similar mind. I’m not comfortable in an echo chamber where someone else decides what I get to see, and I want to treat my users like they are mature enough to make these decisions for themselves.
If you want to call me a naive idiot who doesn’t know anything about moderating online spaces, that’s a fair criticism, albeit a bit harsh. But please stop implying that I’m a tankie and/or fascist in hiding, because that’s simply not true.
Fair enough, I appreciate the in-depth response. For the record, I am generally against defederation. I was originally against defederating from exploding-heads, too. But you seemed to be taking a personal interest in maintaining federation with hexbear. I didn’t see a post from admins regarding exploding-heads as a “valuable asset.” Maybe I’m wrong on that. Just seemed like a far cry from our instance defederating from lemmygrad from its inception, due to y’know, the whole radical troll thing. I’m not interested in radical politics in my feed. And I expect most of our users aren’t, either. We still aren’t defederated from hexbear, despite a discussion, followed by a vote thread voting overwhelmingly for it. If a vote thread needs to be instigated by an admin, fine, please do it, most people will vote in the affirmative again. They could refederate at any time if they decide they’d like to “dunk” on us again. I’m not sure why we’re leaving them with the keys. Again, I do appreciate your response, and I appreciate that this is a pain in the ass, thankless job without pay, but the whole hexbear debacle has been pretty frustrating.
No, that’s correct. Exploding heads had about 20 active users at the time while hexbear has 1600, many of whom are extremely active. So I wanted to make an attempt to capture some of that activity and direct it in a more positive direction, for the benefit of Lemmy.
That was a personal decision by TheDude, I hadn’t even made an account at that point.
First of all, the fact that they defederated us is a tactical victory for our users. We countered their aggression and they were forced to retreat back to their hole.
Also, I trust the admins of hexbear to not do something like that, partially because it would serve no purpose.
If you think this has been frustrating for you, imagine being me. But I’m still optimistic about Lemmy because our users continue to produce high quality discourse like this thread.