I was recently talking to some friends about Lemmy and the whole Fediverse idea, as it seemed like a really cool part of the Internet. As I was talking about it, though, I realized how unusually friendly this whole place is, and I joked that I “surprisingly haven’t found any bigotry.”
I’m wondering if anyone has come across that, by any chance. If it’s rare, my guess is that even though it’s decentralized, each instance has a set of rules and values that are shared throughout the Fediverse, and I’m guessing it’s easy to defederate with any seedy communities haha.
A little, but most of it isn’t even targeted at our users. Lots of the stuff I see is just stuff reported by our users, in communities that have nothing to do with us specifically.
Otherwise … and I’m essentially quizzing you here, so feel free to ignore me
Do you think lemmy/kbin’s relatively poor and insufficient moderation tooling is partly to blame for what you’re seeing?
Do you think that the communities based structure make this sort of thing more likely to be bad or problematic?
Not as such. The moderation tools lead to redundant handling, and make it easy to miss reports you shouldn’t miss, and force you to leave reports open so that others don’t miss them, but the actual number of reports is more of a cultural thing than anything else.
So, the microblogging fediverse (which I’ll call microfedi) existed for years before twitter crapped the bed. It housed queer folk who had left main stream social media, and those queer folk set the culture and ran the instances. So when twitter happened, even though the culture changed, there was a sufficient mass of existing instances to ensure that bigots remained unwelcome in the mainstream fediverse.
However, when reddit crapped the bed, by comparison, the threadiverse basically didn’t have an established culture. There was a handful of lemmy instances (we were one of them), but the only one of notable size was lemmy.ml. kbin didn’t even exist in any meaningful way until a couple of months before reddit died.
So, when reddit died, there was no established culture. Instead, people brought reddit culture with them, and reddit culture, because of lax admins, was much more tolerant of hate speech than microfedi. And so, people who are “reddit people” more than “fediverse people” set up lemmy and kbin instances, and brought those reddit norms with them.
So then, you get instances like blahaj and beehaw that are threadiverse instances, but have the “old school” microfedi approach to bigotry. We smash it down hard at the first hint of seeing it, but most of the instances we federate with don’t attack it so aggressively.
And thus, on microfedi, much of the work is done by remote admins before I ever see it, but on the threadiverse, it’s often just not done by remote admins (unless it’s aggressively hateful), and that means I end up seeing a lot of shit, and blocking a lot of users that wouldn’t have had a chance to get established in the microfedi universe
Thanks!! And, that all makes a lot of sense.
I’m curious, if you’re willing to answer.
As lemmy.ml and beehaw are older and have closed/application based sign ups … can you tell that there’s less bigotry coming from them?
Interesting feedback
I’ve personally been wondering this and wanted to ask you precisely this but didn’t because I figured it’d be rude. I hope it’s going ok!?
But yea, it unfortunately makes sense that the reddit migration would have brought over more “mainstream” rubbish.
This, plus what’s happening over on Threads and the arguments here about the fedipact etc, for me, have seriously raised the prospect that as much of a critique can be leveled at the culture often (and pejoratively) dubbed “HOA” etc, actually being protective of a culture to the point of coming off as “gate keeping” etc has real world value.
I mean, that’s the selling point of this instance. We are aggressively protective of the queer community. I explicitly aim to cut the toxicity off at the source rather than forcing each of our users to react to it after they see it. The wall is there to ensure we can exist without having to be on guard all of the time, and the HOA stuff is often driven by people who don’t care if we’re on guard, or actively want us to feel unsafe
… sighs … yea
I think @zens / @bri_seven puts it quite well whenever someone tries to describe aspects of the fediverse as inevitable … they repeatedly say something to the effect that the real danger is the one that tries to convince the victim that the abuser/monster is simply a force of nature that must be accepted.
Just my ranting there … hope your instances go well and the moderation work isn’t too much for you!! And thanks for the response!
🫡