

/r/StarTrek founder and primary steward from 2008-2021
Currently on the board of directors for StarTrek.website
Healthy for Lemmy, totally catastrophic for Pixelfed.
I know this comment is satire (well done… I think) but I want you to it hurt me deep in my bones.
I’m clearly not paying enough for a therapist.
Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold
This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it leads to mod burnout when they are getting drawn into rules-debates when it’s obvious the person is just trying to get around the spirit of the community’s purpose.
For example we had a rule that was literally just “be nice”. There’s no wriggling around that because it’s not some legal text. If someone is ““concerned”” about a request to “be nice” or “be honest”, they are not someone we wanted to be around anyway. These are discussion communities, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate in every single one of them.
As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it’s own preferred method of discussion.
99.99% of the time you see the phrase “power tripping admins” it means “Someone asked me to follow the rules”.
The Fediverse (and FOSS in general) is inherently (radically) political simply by the nature of it’s construction and organization. That said I think it’s important to stress to new users that one’s experience can be curated to the degree that normal social media cannot.
Until someone open-sources TikToks algorithm, the Fediverse cannot compete on entertainment value, what it competes on is quality and intentionality. I think it’s important we put that talking point front and center. We don’t need to convince the users who just want to scroll memes (even though this post is literall r/memes haha).
My least favorite fun fact is that Reddit forced the KiA mod to reopen after they went private calling it a “cancer”.
I was a mod at the time and Reddit always told us we had an extreme degree of editorial independence (hence the justification for allowing r/jailbait, /greatawakening, r/coontown etc) but that event made me consider for the first time that exposing normies to propaganda might not just be a side-effect, but a core function of the company.
Which ones? Searched and couldn’t find anything. This MotleyFool article is over 4 years old when COVID was still raging, hardly “recent”.
Urban dictionary says it’s a term that refers to when an undercover government agent fails to blend in with whoever they’re trying to blend in with.
Absolutely, if you’re seeing propaganda, it’s because it’s allowed on that instance. But the presence of propaganda has nothing to do if an account is an LLM or not.
Moderation on the Feviderse is different than on commercial platforms because it’s context-dependent instead of rules-dependent. That means that a user accout (bot or otherwise) that does not contribute to the spirit of a community will not be welcomed.
There is largely no incentive to run an LLM that is a constructive member of a community, bots are built to push an agenda, product, or exhibit generally disruptive behavior. Those things are unwelcome in spaces built for discussion. So mods/admins don’t need to know “how to identify a bot”, they need to know "how to identify unwanted behavior".
I don’t disagree at all, but I also think it’s important to keep the conversation focused on the benefits. eg: “I’m happy to trade Reddit’s UI for a platform that doesn’t encourage toxic behavior” (and so on).
EDIT: The threadiverse will not ever be Reddit and we won’t be able to please everyone, I think it’s important to portray confidence in the platform and not get bogged down defending the (less important) flaws.
Great image, saving that. Stuff like Lemmy will need to be brought up repeatedly for it to stick in people’s minds and an image post makes that easier.
Redditors gonna reddit.
Upvoted! I like that this is not in a RedditAlternatives community or anything.
EDIT: had to laugh at this comment:
“this site is a bit confusing, but the bigger deal breaker is the ‘not for profit’ angle for me.”
deleted by creator
You’re right that it’s nothing big, but the kind of people super into purity tests tend to congregate on the fediverse (which I find a little ironic but am also happy to have some people around who accept no compromises).
Good point but I will say even with immutable distros users are given a lot more control than Windows or Mac.
Yeah BlueSky is a solid side-step. It’s still for-profit and not federated but every BlueSky user is one not on X. And a lot of BlueSky’s userbase is comprised of particularly influential X users so them leaving is particularly harmful to the ecosystem.
I also think it’s funny how the journalists who repeat BlueSkys “decentralized” nonsense thought Mastodon was too weird and technical, and yet are promoting Pixelfed. Not complaining, but it is funny.