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.
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.
Funny enough, the apps here are the identical same as were available for Reddit. Like Boost that so famously was rate-limited by Steve Huffman. But they in turn only wanted to spend so much time in development of the app until (1) the Lemmy codebase itself supported options on the back-end, and (2) the number of people actually using their tools made their efforts feel worthwhile. Why spend an additional 20 hours a week on top of your regular job making features that only a few tens of people will ever use, in an app that only a few hundred ever download, on a platform of mere thousands (the vast majority of which may be either bots or definitely at least alts, some trying to get around bans but all representing the same smaller subset of people irl).
It is a chicken and egg problem wherein Lemmy would have to develop the software enough to make using apps worthwhile first before app devs would bother, and then most users demand apps before becoming willing to make content posts. Except then the Rexodus happened, and all those apps came in basically for free, along with a huge userbase of tens of thousands of people, and the flood of content with it.
An experiment that has partially failed. Lemmy’s peak userbase was ~55k after the Rexodus, but now despite how much worse Reddit continues to make itself (it’s more complex than I said before: Reddit allows for transparency in those few respects, but the culture of current mods choosing to use those options that are available to them is a different matter entirely - after all why would “landed gentry”, as spez called them, bother?), Lemmy’s active userbase has fallen down down down down and down again (stats), and looks like it will never rise even back to that former peak again. Hopefully I am wrong - maybe when Reddit finally kills off old-reddit for good it will happen, but I highly doubt it. That thought terms of the “This will finally be the year of the Linux desktop!” type of wishful thinking.
Meanwhile, PieFed is digging deep into the systemic things that were holding back and replacing all of it with code that actually can be developed quickly (as this past year has proven empirically), essentially restarting the whole project. Which tbf Kbin (now Mbin) also tried, but that project has only ever had ~2k users worldwide, compared to Lemmy’s 30-60k, a large fraction of which PieFed stands to inherit when people get tired of hearing of all the wonderful things that PieFed offers to them, whereas Lemmy is stuck in its rut and increasingly looks like it never will for some matters, and for other matters they will still trickle out on the timescale of years to a decade rather than weeks to a year for Piefed.
Btw, PieFed now retains deleted posts. The portion that the OP first offered and then requested to be deleted is still gone, in respect to how OP owns their own content, but the discussions that ensued independently of the OP are now retained for anyone to continue to see afterwards. e.g. OP asks a question, many people offer answers in response, then OP deletes their question, which now no longer works to also delete all of the answers. PieFed is amazing! 🤩