i do agree with the sentiment, but i think we’re largely okay on that front:
among the big problems with reddit for the past, say, 10-ish years, was the consolidation of subreddit moderation in relatively few, extremely influential mods. some of which where widely known to be assholes of one kind or another…
the very design of lemmy provides a kind of natural resistance to this phenomenon by spreading communities over many distinct servers, with distinct admins and moderation teams.
it’s by no means perfect, but the simple fact that communities can choose to leave servers that have become unsuitable to hosting them (like we’ve already seen with some of the star trek comms leaving .world…i think that’s the server they left?), it becomes more difficult for power tripping admins or mods to utterly ruin communities. it still causes major disruptions, of course, but i think it’s a decent trade-off!
having already seen that part of the design in action; I’m really not that worried about lemmy turning into reddit.
what’s much more concerning is eventually being overrun by sophisticated, hostile discourse manipulators like bot and troll farms. (if we ever get big enough to attract those…)
while decentralization provides resilience against enemies within, I’m not so sure it does the same for enemies without:
coordinating bot defense and using proper authentication for end-users to ensure that the people talking are actually, you know, people, is probably going to be extremely challenging… eventually, at least…
i do agree with the sentiment, but i think we’re largely okay on that front:
among the big problems with reddit for the past, say, 10-ish years, was the consolidation of subreddit moderation in relatively few, extremely influential mods. some of which where widely known to be assholes of one kind or another…
the very design of lemmy provides a kind of natural resistance to this phenomenon by spreading communities over many distinct servers, with distinct admins and moderation teams.
it’s by no means perfect, but the simple fact that communities can choose to leave servers that have become unsuitable to hosting them (like we’ve already seen with some of the star trek comms leaving .world…i think that’s the server they left?), it becomes more difficult for power tripping admins or mods to utterly ruin communities. it still causes major disruptions, of course, but i think it’s a decent trade-off!
having already seen that part of the design in action; I’m really not that worried about lemmy turning into reddit.
what’s much more concerning is eventually being overrun by sophisticated, hostile discourse manipulators like bot and troll farms. (if we ever get big enough to attract those…)
while decentralization provides resilience against enemies within, I’m not so sure it does the same for enemies without: coordinating bot defense and using proper authentication for end-users to ensure that the people talking are actually, you know, people, is probably going to be extremely challenging… eventually, at least…