Hello everyone,
Recently we have been dealing with a lot of spam from the kbin.social communities. There is a bug in kbin where moderation tasks are not federated to other instances. That means even if a moderator over at kbin removes a post, it will still be visible on Lemmy instances and it’s up to the instance admins to clean it up.
There have been talks about this in the Lemmy admin channels with some instances considering defederating from kbin.social - and others who have already made that step.
We don’t want to defederate, because we know this would impact the kbin community greatly - but we have to do something. That’s why we have currently removed most of the kbin communities from Lemmy World, making them unavailable to our users. But the kbin users can still view and interact with our communities and users.
This means that those spam-accounts will stil be able to post in our communities too, but at least it makes the task of moderation already a little bit lighter on our team. But it was either this or defederation. The moderation tools on kbin are in an even worse state then Lemmy’s.
We will keep monitoring the situation and will keep you up to date should anything change.
We hope you understand and support our decision.
The Lemmy World team
Small communities are still meaningful to community members. Cutting off useless appendages doesn’t make a platform worse because “less users,” that’s a “quantity > quality” mindset which has been proven demonstrably untrue by all of the large social media brands that currently exist
Arguably a “meaningless presence on the web” is a good thing, because it doesn’t incentivize people to join who are just in it for the memes and shitposts but don’t give a damn about the community.
Yet those platform thrive and grow, including Reddit white Lemmy is what it is.
Yes, until you’ve to go into Reddit because there’s no content and/or people here that might reply to you.
Yes because they’ve focused more on quantity than quality.
I rest my case
Idk if we’re talking about the same platform, but the reddit I was on for years had 2 major kinds of communities:
Loud shouting matches with tons of no-effort content drowning out the quality discussions, where people with the worst opinion or stalest jokes struggle to be top comment
Small communities that get a handful of new posts per week, where the community is engaging but relatively inactive.
Now these two aren’t exactly mutually exclusive, so there were small dogshit subs and >100k subs that were enjoyable (as long as you avoided the comments).
What I realized was that the smaller communities weren’t generally better because the people were a different breed, but—because of the slow pace and small size—people didn’t feel driven to treat it like a popularity contest; those who did would get frustrated and act out until they were kicked or blocked by the majority. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but it was still better than the large communities.
I’ve blocked !memes@lemmy.ml, which means I’m limited to the second kind of communities here.