There is no digital community that can do better than my living room. When adults meet face to face in someone’s home, there is an automatic degree of dignity and respect established even when there are opposing views.
The fedi is on some extreme push to promote mass migration by folks in places like Facebook. It’s a kind of braindead paradigm to just grow without strategy. If your livingroom has culture of a couple dozen progressive freedom fighters who run free software and value things like privacy and human rights, all is good until you open the door to thousands of random normies. They flood in with shitty values and fuckup your missions by dilluting the rich culture that was there.
It is not smart to just cattle-herd masses into the fedi and think your work is done. The mess is just brought to our doorstep. Then what? Consider [email protected]. It’s evident just from the voting that a large portion of readers inherently oppose the purpose of that forum. It’s ruined by adversaries because of open access to all while simultaneously coupled with ad hoc concealed voting (you can only see who downvotes if you run an instance).
In principle, we would still need an ETS outreach type of community which is open to all. But then we need a separate invite-only ETS community where we can cherry pick constructive accounts. Just as I would never approach someone wearing a MAGA hat and invite them into my living room, I would not invite an ETS-hostile account into an ETS activism/cult forum. The outreach venue would be used as a recruiting area from which we separate the riff raff from the favorable accts.
With no tooling changes, the only way to pull this off would be for the mod to selfhost, defederate from all, then invite people to register. It’s high effort for the organiser and the participants, it excludes non-self-hosters, and it’s overly isolated.
Lemmy needs to evolve more to solve this.
Moral purity beatings will continue until morale improves.
Seriously, I doubt that Lemmy will ever offer tools to foster such community support, seeing as how the authoritarian views of its dev team trend less towards the desires of an individual user and rather more towards the mantra of “I, as an admin/moderator, have decided what you shall know and like Ukraine and Hong Kong and South Korea and Greenland, your choice is to STFU and enjoy it”.
e.g. in Lemmy when a user blocks someone, that someone can still: read, vote on, and reply to your comment, send you DMs, and a later change to the Lemmy software further expanded these rights for blocked users to trigger notifications on behalf of the recipient. On the other side, the rights of the person wanting to do the blocking include: the ability to delete their account and move to some other instance where an actual admin has banned the people that you want blocked. Note that some of what I have said here relates more to “instance blocks” but also some applies to “user blocks” as well. Instance admins have supreme rights, but as an individual end-user, you not so much.
That said, I believe that PieFed offers a solution to what you are looking for. Both generically in terms of offering a far more democratic set of rights to end-users, and specifically in this case by restricting voting to only subscribed members of a community. The latter would help limit the impact of drive-by downvoters arriving casually from browsing by All, as well as more specific brigading attempts. I think another option (I’ve never personally tried to create a community on a PieFed instance, so this is all 2nd-hand info from just reading) is to limit votes to only be allowed from “trusted instances”, with that I think being defined by the instance admin.
And if you did need to spin up an entire instance, PieFed uses fewer resources and is a lot easier to set up and maintain as well (see e.g. https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed). I also love its philosophy of offering democratization of moderation features, providing more tools to increase the capabilities of the end-users rather than restrict it more to the hands of only admins. Learn more at https://join.piefed.social/.
It’s just a thought to consider!:-)
Thanks for the info! Piefed seemed to be resource intensive for the /user/, at least in the early days. I should have another look at it… esp. if users are more empowered. The /only subscribers can vote/ sounds more sensible for sure.
Ah I forgot to include this link (I even went to the trouble of looking it up and copying it:-P): https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed tells one story of an irl admin, and https://piefed.social/c/meta/p/1413365/scheduled-maintenance-for-server-upgrades-next-weekend another, both of whom are switching to PieFed, including your very own slrpnk.net sometime in 2026 it would seem.
Also, PieFed sends 25-fold less data per post to the users (though 5x more posts per homepage view, so only 5x less data total if measuring empirically and using that measure rather than a single post page).
So while I’ve never tried personally to run my own instance, either Lemmy or PieFed, everything I’ve heard suggests that people are saying that PieFed uses far less resources. Indeed that might not have been true years in the past (before those above links I posted were written).
There is a Blog with several articles of interest here, if you want, including:
- https://join.piefed.social/2025/11/22/reducing-piefeds-dependence-on-cloudflare/
- https://join.piefed.social/2025/09/11/how-to-use-really-simple-licensing-rsl-to-block-all-ai-crawlers/
- https://join.piefed.social/2025/07/09/tuning-piefed-for-scale/
- https://join.piefed.social/2025/03/19/tuning-postgresql-for-piefed/
- https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
- https://join.piefed.social/2024/03/12/piefed-privacy-control-your-search-visibility/
- https://join.piefed.social/2024/03/07/moderation-the-design-of-social-platforms/
- https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/ - this is wherr I got the 25-fold less data stat from (again that’s 5x less data, but with 5x more posts, hence 25x less data per post)
PieFed really restores my hopes that a Threadiverse platform will be usable in the future, without having to subscribe to authoritarianism!
Just had a look at the Cloudflare article. CF dependency would be an absolute mission-defeating show-stopper for anyone who doesn’t lick corporate boots and values digital sovereignty.
I’m glad they kicked the CF dependency. But we need more progress than that. We need a platform that is Cloudflare-incompatible. That is paramount to decentralisation.
Just to clarify a bit - PieFed was only ever dependent on Cloudflare in the sense that running any kind of busy website is very difficult without a CDN. Also ActivityPub is quite chatty which makes it worse than usual. PieFed was never built in such a way that you absolutely needed Cloudflare to get it working - I agree that would be a grave mistake.
The Cloudflare article was written after I improved the way PieFed works so that the need for any CDN, including Cloudflare, is greatly reduced. That week there was a lot of hate for Cloudflare around so that was the angle I took with it.
But here, you ‘can’ set up your own and control it as such. That is the advantage. It may not be perfectly easy, but that’s what we’ve gained for now.
Set up my own /what/, exactly? I have created communities on slrpnk, but I only have a blunt choice between announcement community or completely open.
I could do announcement, then populate it with dozens of moderators. Might be worth it to experiment. Then there’s still the problem of open voting by outsiders, but I guess another hack would be to choose a no-downvote instance. But then trusted participants can’t downvote either.
You very likely know more than I do about this, but I did mean setting up an instance. It is indeed extra work, but then you do have the ability to have specific communities. I think that’s the spirit of what you are after. I also think that’s probably for the best of what decentralized media can offer. We do need our own, known communities of people, simulating the living room. Otherwise, yes it seems you would have to deal with many moderators from what I can see technically.
piefed just added private communities. I mean I also disagree. great things did not come from living rooms as much as cofee houses and bars.
Coffee houses and bars are indeed also great examples of strides above what Lemmy can do. The US Declaration of Independence started in a bar. Comparable to living rooms, patrons of those establishments also tend not to take a shit in the doorway.
this is why im a big proponent of blocking and of not paying attention to votes.
“Blocking” has so many different meanings across all the different fedi platforms, the word is almost meaningless. See what @[email protected] said about what it means on Lemmy, which is not at all what it means on Mastodon.
yeah I only use the lemmy/mbin/piefed stuff really. never really used twitter or like how facebook and stuff was so im rather narrow in my focus.
Not sure why you bring up FB and Twitter. Those are not fedi platforms. Those are corp centralised. There is FB threads, but I don’t give a shit what they do. The meaning of “blocking” is already inconsistent across the fedi. It’s not the same on piefed as it is on lemmy, which also differs from mastodon.
sorry I mean in the way they work. mastadon is twitter like, friendica is FB like. What im saying is I only use the reddit like part of the fediverse although I would call reddit like news group like to begin with. alt.games.whitewolf, rec.pets.dogs, etc. So the differences in the different types of federated social media don’t mean much to me as I only use one type.
The authoritarian Lemmy devs don’t give a shit what people actually want, or what others do. They made their own Reddit clone after being kicked out for being too toxic, and honestly that’s fine - they can do as they please, whatever.
Note how in so very many ways Lemmy is even more authoritarian than Reddit. Reddit at least notifies someone that their content has been removed, and offers a modmail to ask questions as to why, and when a mod curates a post, while it does get removed from the community feed, that submission content remains accessible by anyone who has the URL, allowing people the freedom and ability to continue discussions that were already previously started, including the person being moderated.
Lemmy has none of that, and the personal instance of the devs (Lemmy.ml) is extremely well-known for offering instance-wide bans, removing people from communities that they’ve literally never even heard of, in response to someone saying something critical (or not sufficiently obsequious enough?) about Russia, China, or North Korea (and, one wonders, how soon will the USA be added to that list?). Which is actually fine by me tbh - they should be free to run their instance however they like - except for:
(1) that fact is nowhere ever explained anywhere on their instance, and the rule most often cited there says nothing whatsoever to that effect, making it disingenuous and completely opaque (and therefore opposed to democratic principles such as transparency, as leaders serve at the will of the people rather than the other way around where Might Makes Right, and power is all that ever matters).
And (2) people donating to further code development are not offered the option to separate out the aforementioned horrible moderation practices from the development of the Lemmy codebase. Which here AGAIN is nowhere explained, AGAIN lacking transparency in how people’s funds are spent, on matters that they often express the polar opposite of consent for.
But anyway, they will do what they will do, while we should also be mindful of what we do as well. Hence why PieFed is such an attractive option, to people that believe in more democratic principles than authoritarian control. You do what you can with what you have to work with. Except the PieFed devs who just started building their own:-).
I hope this explains why PieFed’s operations like up more with how Mastodon works (both European working according to democratic principles) than with Lemmy (authoritarian control following Stalinist principles like the old USSR, China, and North Korea, and again one wonders how much longer until the USA joins in on that, though probably I should not speak too much about such or I will end up in a literal concentration camp).
Concur w/most of what you said.
Though I recall being shadow banned on Reddit and never getting transparency on Reddit. They have robots banning humans while humans are deceived into thinking their content is posted. Has that changed?
On Lemmy, it’s despicable that removals are silent. But I think when viewing your own profile removed posts will have a red padlock or something subtle next to them. The Lemmy proponents would say “what client are you using? It’s your fault you’re using a client that does not signal you… Write your own client.” This is how they fend off criticism of the stock Lemmy client. It’s almost kind of somewhat fair enough because we probably want the Lemmy devs to focus on the server anyway. We have to think of that shitty javascript web client as a demo tool for testing. I actually use the garbage but that’s out of lack of existence of a decent non-JavaScript desktop client with local storage.
The worst scenario: using kbin to post to a Lemmy community. When the post is removed, all traces of the content is silently destroyed and irrecoverable. You go to your own profile and it’s as if the post never existed. You suffer data loss of your own work.
I have yet to seriously try piefed. But certainly kbin/mbin and Lemmy are a shitshow with no decent apps.
I agree Lemmy has gone to liberal hell. The goal with herding people into the federation is that the prefiguration of this infrastructure will automatically improve people’s experiences because the community takes the shape the tools suggest.
Unfortunately, I think upvotes inherently produce populist bullshit, for whatever the lowest common denominator of your community is.
However, if you do think an upvote-based community is good as long as you’re the gatekeeper, you’re being lazy. The solution is what you dismiss in the last paragraph as “too much effort”. Your complaint that it’s overly isolated is entitlement to an audience’s attention.
The point of federation is to share a community that you respect. You do not respect the community of this federation so you should not want to be connected with them.
The point of being a mod on someone else’s instance is that you trust them to make infrastructure choices like federation on your behalf. If you don’t like their choices then don’t work to maintain their communities.
Maybe the question you want to ask is if there already are federations that have a nicer culture that you can move to.
However, if you do think an upvote-based community is good as long as you’re the gatekeeper, you’re being lazy.
Good tools enable us to be lazy. Whether I am am personally “lazy” is irrelevent. I tend to be motivated when the tools, protocols, and infra are well designed. OTOH, I become lazy when tools are lousy. I try to avoid poorly designed tools as much as possible.
The solution is what you dismiss in the last paragraph as “too much effort”.
Machines should work for humans. Not the other way around. If I were highly motivated to labor over blunt unsophisticated tools, every single invitee still has the extra labor of registration. To understand how that is a recipe for disaster, just look at MS Github. A vast majority of FOSS projects are jailed in Microsoft’s walled garden because all the users are too lazy to register more than one account.
I do not have access to an unlimited WAN uplink. I am often offline for long stretches of time. So it’s not just a matter of investing time but money as well. A good infra doesn’t limit community builders to those with deep pockets.
Your complaint that it’s overly isolated is entitlement to an audience’s attention.
It’s not entitlement. It’s opportunity. Shutting off visibility is a missed opportunity for exposure. It’s another recipe for disaster.
The point of federation is to share a community that you respect. You do not respect the community of this federation so you should not want to be connected with them.
That’s another very blunt lever. Every community has adults and children; philosophical deep thinkers, and clowns; civil people and hotheads and trolls.
