Comment on The lemmy.ml Problem
kabe@lemmy.world 5 months ago
There are some good points here, but I think defederation should always be a last resort and especially so in this case, given that we are talking about lemmy.ml here.
Since it was the former flagship server (in activity, at least) before LW came along, there are still many thriving, non-political communities hosted there. To cut them all off would be a net-negative to the average Lemmy user, I would argue.
That’s not to say that I agree with the actions of the .ml admins, or don’t think that opening a dialogue with them about moderation policies isn’t a great idea, of course. Let the individual user figure out for themselves which communities they want to engage with and which ones they want to avoid, I say.
there are still many thriving, non-political communities hosted there. To cut them all off would be a net-negative to the average Lemmy user, I would argue.
Agreed. To address this, I started this thread to see which lemmy.ml don’t have alternatives on other instances: lemmy.world/post/16235541
Hopefully that can help people who want to avoid lemmy.ml.
I guess at the end of the day, people should be able to choose whether they go to the lemmy.ml communities or the alternatives
See, now that’s a much more positive approach. Users making informed decisions and organically migrating is much more in keeping with the Fediverse spirit than admins wielding the defederation hammer, IMO.
Agreed, but let’s also be honest about this:
The smaller, less visible alternative communities seldom grow. It’s the classic case of the biggest and oldest trees getting all the sunlight, while the saplings in their shadow are stunted.
We saw this on Reddit, too. Alternative subreddits, usually born out of protest of the moderation on the original, popped up all the time and never grew. Some did, some even overshadowed the original, but that was rare.
Unless there’s an effort made to give more visibility to the smaller and less established alternative, there’s a good chance it goes nowhere.
So in reality the user choice you’re describing is less about choosing between two communities, and more about choosing between a community or a DND group that gets together once a week, but half the people flake out anyway.
LW communities are already much more active than lemmy.ml ones, there are just a few missing, I wouldn’t worry too much.
Absolutely agree, which is why I would advocate against defederation. It’s is better to let users organically migrate away from problematic moderation than for the LW admins to preemptively make the decision on everyone’s behalf.
Lemmy is still a relatively small community, and too much defederation is only going to be detrimental to it’s overall health.
The non-political communities on .ml are poisoned by mods who ban users based on their political opinions they voice in other communities. If you’re critical of China, you will likely be banned from all communities on .ml, regardless of if they’re political.
They banned the Plex mod, who was doing good work, for basically nothing as far as I can tell. Effectively killed the community. Rest in peace BrooklynMan
let the individual user figure out for themselves
What a ton of people will figure out is that the fediverse has a serious problem with propaganda and moderation. They’ll come check out the Fediverse, see it’s full of extremist political content, and go back to Reddit.
I’m thrilled about the potential of the Fediverse to be something great, but I won’t even tell anyone I use it in it’s current state.
Defederating malicious propaganda instances like Lemmy.ml should be a no-brainer. It’s not “people I disagree with,” it’s a murderous authoritarian government’s tool for spreading lies.
First impressions to new users is an important factor, I agree, but is it really"full of extremist political content"?
Scrolling through the first 4 pages of Lemmy World today, I see no extremist content at all. All of the political posts are standard liberal/left-of-centre talking points and the only things related to .ml content are three posts complaining about tankies, off the back of the original post that made a splash yesterday.
I can’t see anything that would be putting potential newcomers off in droves.
Yes, you’re right. I was being facetious and that’s not helpful in this situation.
The Fediverse is full of propaganda, but extremist content is usually limited to Hexbear, Lemmygrad, and lemmy.ml.
Hard to forget Hexbear accounts saying they were going to murder me when they started their revolution, but that’s not a generally a problem in the rest of the Fediverse.
Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world 5 months ago
And that, in fact, is my main concern with ml. They have lots of communties which are non-political for sure but, these communities come along with an assortment of lies and Propaganda. At which point the negative outweigh the positive?
And even in the non-political Communities your comments gets censored when they are not on line with their views.
kabe@lemmy.world 5 months ago
So block those individual communities that post what you consider propaganda.
With a server like, say, Hexbear, this would be an easy calculation. Defederate and what does the average user miss out on? Not a whole lot. On the other hand, .ml has a wide variety of technology, open source, gaming, hobby, etc. communities that don’t even touch on politics.
I regularly visit many of them, so for me at least, it would take a lot more on the negative scale to even break even.
Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world 5 months ago
For sure I can block them for myself (as I have mentioned in my Post itself) but this won’t solve the Problem of policing non political Communities and injecting them also with propaganda.
kabe@lemmy.world 5 months ago
To what extent is this actually an issue? What examples do you have so far?