this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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IMO the "replicate reddit, but decentralized" approach will be the downfall of Lemmy. You sound like you're trying to do the right thing, but there is significantly more moderator centralization and authoritarianism on Lemmy than there was on early reddit. Most of the early reddit mods were people who genuinely had an interest or experience in that subs topic; not the tankie or excommunicated from elsewhere simply "domain squatting" dozens of popular community names and then dictating over them once they grew popular; trying to carve out their own personal safe space soap boxes. I have seen dozens of mods who'll debate someone and when they lose they just delete all of the opposing comments and ban the user they disagree with. Often they are the one and only mod of that community.
Users left Reddit because they didn't wanna have to deal with continued enshittification and unaccountable bad faith mods on a power trip. Lemmy only solved the former, and doubled down on the latter, while fragmenting users across numerous duplicate communities about the same topic; leading to significant post duplication amongst a sea of inactive duplicate communities.
If Lemmy doesn't solve its core issues I don't expect it to last long and will move elsewhere sooner than later. I feel like users should be able to join a group of communities about the same topic, and moderator control should be both diluted and distributed amongst them. As in, redistribute moderation across the user base by randomly showing a group of users a post/comment and using the average rather than relying on whoever created the sub to act in good faith. Decentralized services should be built as trustless/adversarial; expect and account for bad faith actors. I wouldn't have any problem being required to moderate a post/comment for every post/comment I make, I just don't want the responsibility of being a permanent mod, nor having to review every single thing myself.
Communities aren't the same as subreddits, Lemmy communities are more like hashtags for an instance. Hexbear is an example of a leftist instance, and the Hexbear Games community is basically a Games hashtag. Trying to centralize communities on one instance is a bad plan IMO because that gives far more power to any given instance.
Community repitition isn't a bad thing, it's an advantage.
you're absolutely right however those "core issues" are intrinsic qualities that come from the fediverse's tankie roots and they're intend to shed power tripping & bad faith users by design.
those qualities like the "fragmentation" keep the discourse going despite the inevitable power tripping mod/admin. the fediverse effectively makes blocking/banning/defederation pointless because doing so only serves to exclude yourself from the main group chat that everybody else can see.
that "sea of inactive duplicates" is probably the biggest outward sign of the intrinsic qualities that serve to sustain its intended tankie users and repels everyone else. if you embrace the fediverse using it's tankie roots on lemmy, you get a wealth of content from niche communities on an entire spectrum of activity levels like the bustling and relatively large star trek communities with the comunist-socialist/doomer-humor/genz-trans perspective on hexbear; or star trek communities with the sarcasm-mandatory/american-political-commentary/propaganda-speak/anarcho-communist perspective on lemmygrad; or star trek communities with the center-right-leaning/moderate/capitalist perspectives from the reddit fueled instances like .world onward all the way to the other end of that activity level spectrum to even deeper niche communities that you could also learn about for yourself if it weren't for banning/block/defederating.
the relatively large user increase from the reddit diaspora has effectively turned the lemmyverse into a digital version of an american center-right mainstrain group gentrifying a tankie digital lemmy neighborhood whose plumbing was built to ensure that no one person/group from the entirety of the leftists spectrum can control/dominate the discourse and that plumbing is going to do it's job and push away the self sorted and mostly inactive liberal echo chamber users.
it's all effectively like digital anti-homeless architecture (eg builtin spikes and split public benches); but with a focus on users who try to power trip when solely permitting nothing but rigidly moderate perspectives through banning/blocking/defederation and only the people too unpleasantly rigid in their world views will be the ones to move on elsewhere; but only to discover that no reddit diaspora has ever survived and they'll end up going back to reddit or sign up for future enshitification with bluesky; where they will do this diaspora thing all over again in the future.
in the long run, the most fortunate thing about this diaspora was that the massive userbase bump was as big as it could be and the political makeup as well suited as possible compared to the other previous reddit diasporas; this effectively guarantees that everyone that could be here to enjoy these leftists safe spaces is already here now and also gives the feddiverse the best likeliest chance for any reddit diaspora to survive.
i once felt the same way about the lemmyverse you do and when i first joined as a reddit refugee. i spent most of my time on .world and the inactive diet reddit clones. eventually .world started defederating at first with hexbear and later with lemmygrad; the controversy peaked my curiosity due to the virulently and almost irrationally strong opinions from the reddit refugees and reading about it has begun to show me how propagandized i am as an american despite thinking that i wasn't as a leftist.
like martin luther king jr wrote about in Letter from Birmingham Jail: moderates have a shallow understanding and the information contained in those instances & known by its users that moderate users ban/block/defedrate from on lemmy have lots of information that edifies that shallow understanding. the moderate users' collective desire to maintain that shallow understanding is going to drive them away from lemmy and these leftists safe spaces are now as fortified as possible to keep chugging along ready to accept future bluesky refugees during their own future enshittification induced diasporas.
Can't you just spin up your own instance and mod/defederate the way you want it to be?
Distributing power across a group of communities over the same topic (e.g. like seats in a congress/parliament) is a nice thought.
However, my second thought was how vulnerable that is in a fediverse. To continue the analogy, an adversary could create new states (server/communities) of arbitrary population (accounts) at will.