this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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Fediverse memes

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (45 children)

I'm just not really getting all the hate hate. These people started a community or worked their way into a mod spot. They had a specific set of rules for the community that was posted and reasonably fair. Their community got popular. They realized their site admin was modding their community according to rules that they didn't want to also enforce. They tried to move the community to a better fit instance as non-dramatically as they knew how.

That's all perfectly reasonable to me. Clearly they did a shit job at doing it non dramatically but they're communicating and adjusting their position to try and accommodate others and that alone should buy them a little good will. They are trying to figure out what to do, everyone is trying to figure out what to do. What's with all the hate?

[–] Noel_Skum 55 points 1 week ago (22 children)

From what I’ve seen it appears that (at least one of) the mods claim to “own” the community - which is a disturbing way of thinking about moderation, in my opinion.

[–] southsamurai 10 points 1 week ago (16 children)

Nah, it's one of the use cases for sites/services like reddit and lemmy.

A way to have a forum for your specific interest that you can build into the kind of community you want.

The barrier to hosting a standalone forum is very high. Prohibitively so. The time, the money, the level of skill needed.

Reddit, for a long time, treated subs exactly like that. It hosted your forum, and as long as you didn't do illegal shit, they would leave you alone. You owned it as much as you can own anything on someone else's hardware.

Lemmy is entirely a clone of reddit based in a reaction to reddit stopping that way of doing things.

The key to lemmy though, is that instances are individual reddits. You host the instance, you decide how "subs" are allowed to function. Some instances have a looser way of doing things, others are more hands on.

But, really, a moderator that creates a community should be as close to the owner of the community as you can get when it's hosted on someone else's hardware. You can try a fully democratic community, and they can work. But they don't work better than what amounts to a dictatorship model. It's just that it takes a higher number of people being jerks to fuck up a community when it's democratic. Organization by a panel is slower to adapt, and also more open to disruption because of that.

It's all about the benefits and drawbacks.

All of that is still trumped by the fact that whoever literally owns the instance can nuke, take over, ban, whatever any community or users. So it isn't like you can escape ownership without making a formally run instance with a legally binding structure. Without that, you still have to hope that the owner doesn't go crazy.

[–] Noel_Skum 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

As I’ve mentioned somewhere else I’d take all that in to consideration if it was a more niche sub - but it isn’t. It very much seems to be that a already existing community found its way to Blahaj where (almost) all of the contributors were happy. Then some mods arbitrarily decided that they didn’t like the instance and moved to… .world, of all places. Back towards centralisation and the possible looming spectre of interacting with meta users too.

[–] southsamurai 3 points 1 week ago

Fair enough.

Though, I would call 196 pretty niche, just not small. That's piddling over word usage though, and not at all relevant to the real point you made.

I definitely agree that the moving was a bad call, btw. Particularly where it moved to, and for the same reasons you gave. I don't have a stake in it, I've always found the 196 thing a bit too silly even for my absurdist tastes. It still seems like a horrible way to handle everything overall.

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