Tennessean here who tried to organize on my state/city subreddits. Can confirm this kind of partisan censorship is not new.
A while ago I made a innocuous enough post on my city’s sub about a “Release the Epstein Files” billboard that went up and was paid for by our local Mobilize chapter. Within an hour it was the most upvoted post of the past month. Within 2, it was removed without reason and I was blocked and banned permantly
We need to be careful on Lemmy. Only the fact that the moderators and admins have goodwill are keeping Lemmy from becoming like Reddit. If Lemmy gets big and starts attracting people who want to pay to take over communities, that will stretch the moderator goodwill to the limits.
As the number of users goes up, it becomes more difficult to enforce that way. Even if many people switch communities, when new ones search for the community by name, the one with the most users will pop up first. And it becomes more and more difficult to justify defederating an instance over a couple of communities if the instance has a ton of big communities.
It makes me think that maybe “communities” wasn’t the way to organize, maybe you subscribe to a topic and see all posts for that topic on all instances.
But moderation is good, and defederation is too severe a tool to use for moderation. It feels like there is no good solution.
It might be some sort of vetting to know all your users are real people.
I’ve considered setting up a Lemmy/Piefed for my neighborhood, but I’ve been told I’m unlikely to get the neighborhood off of our very active Facebook.
Which will make the return on investment questionable, especially if the whole thing gets meme’d into the spotlight. And if it doesn’t attract more attention, it probably didn’t need to be shut down in the first place.
Tennessean here who tried to organize on my state/city subreddits. Can confirm this kind of partisan censorship is not new.
A while ago I made a innocuous enough post on my city’s sub about a “Release the Epstein Files” billboard that went up and was paid for by our local Mobilize chapter. Within an hour it was the most upvoted post of the past month. Within 2, it was removed without reason and I was blocked and banned permantly
That’s Reddit, I was banned from a Pokemon Go subreddit for being against Niantic forcibly leaving their sandbox environment on iOS.
We need to be careful on Lemmy. Only the fact that the moderators and admins have goodwill are keeping Lemmy from becoming like Reddit. If Lemmy gets big and starts attracting people who want to pay to take over communities, that will stretch the moderator goodwill to the limits.
The difference being that Lemmy supports multiple communities with the same name.
If an instance is allowing their communities to be sold, they can be defederated.
As the number of users goes up, it becomes more difficult to enforce that way. Even if many people switch communities, when new ones search for the community by name, the one with the most users will pop up first. And it becomes more and more difficult to justify defederating an instance over a couple of communities if the instance has a ton of big communities.
It makes me think that maybe “communities” wasn’t the way to organize, maybe you subscribe to a topic and see all posts for that topic on all instances.
But moderation is good, and defederation is too severe a tool to use for moderation. It feels like there is no good solution.
It might be some sort of vetting to know all your users are real people.
I’ve considered setting up a Lemmy/Piefed for my neighborhood, but I’ve been told I’m unlikely to get the neighborhood off of our very active Facebook.
Piefed has topics I think (I’m mostly on mobile so not something I use but I remember it being there when I set up my account)
Which will make the return on investment questionable, especially if the whole thing gets meme’d into the spotlight. And if it doesn’t attract more attention, it probably didn’t need to be shut down in the first place.