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.

  • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOP
    11·
    18 hours ago

    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 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.