Hello world!

We would like to start by saying thank you ❤, no really 🙏 THANK YOU to ALL the moderators out there!

Without you folks, we would have no one to help keep our community safe and help build the communities both here on Lemmy.World and on other fine instances. To this end, we want to make sure your voices are heard 📣 loud and clear📣.

So, in the spirit of transparency, we would like everyone to know that we are looking to help out the folks working on Sublinks. Over the last several months we have grown to be more than just Lemmy.World. We’ve added platforms such as Pixelfed and Sharkey to help offer our users more diverse options for expressing themselves online. We still are very committed to Mastodon as well.

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time. Any changes in our core services would need to be discussed extensively internally AND externally with our community members. We firmly believe in the growth of the Fediverse and without the users, there would only be software, and that’s no fun!

Sooo…

The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.

Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.

👉Moderation Survey HERE👈

Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.

We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!

=Sincerely,
Fedihosting Foundation

PS … also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘

  • maegul (he/they)
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    9 months ago

    Apologies for a bit of a negative thought here …

    But I went through the survey, mainly curious to see what SL are thinking about in terms of moderation tooling, and was somewhat disappointed to see mostly broad and open ended questions. While these can be very valuable in surveys for picking up on as much information as possible, I was hoping to see more specific ideas about moderation tooling for people to provide feedback on, instead of “what do you find difficult” etc style questions.

    To be harsh for a moment, it almost feels like the SL team decided they’d work on moderation tooling, then realised they don’t quite know what to do and so are looking for ideas on what should be done. Now I know that’s likely untrue, given that some admins and the SL teams have already had conversations. But still, I was hoping to see some manifestation of those motives and conversations in this survey. Maybe that’s unreasonable of me … I’m not sure.


    All of that being said, a complaint I’ve made in this space before (to other platform devs), which I’ll share here again …

    platform specific moderation work is a bit of a shame on the fediverse. It may not be tractable, but some form of platform generic plugin style moderation tooling really seems like where things should be headed. It would be cool if something like that was what was being worked on here rather than reinventing the wheel for a ~50,000 MAU userbase.

    It could be in whatever language or stack you want. APIs are there and if new ones are needed they’d be worth working on too. You could make whatever frontend for it you like. And there is likely some interesting protocol involved too. I know there’s talk about such things over on the mastodon side.

    But generally, IMO, plugins, rather than whole new platforms (with blackjack and hookers) is likely what the fediverse needs at the moment given its scale (and lack of major growth in the near future).

    • Rooki@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Thanks for your feedback, sadly lemmy is not in that stage and is not build for plugins in mind.

      The sublinks team didnt meant to be too specific on some questions, i will give your idea to the sublinks team for any further surveys.

      Sublinks is already heading there where you can listen to events, trigger events etc. but yeah instance plugins would be very cool and could be easier used by third party developers improving the current platform they support.

      Thanks Rooki

      • nutomicA
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        9 months ago

        This is not true, Lemmy can definitely have plugins and there is an extensive discussion about this topic. The conclusion is that plugins should be implemented in webassembly, so that they can be written in many different languages. See extism for details. Whats needed is someone with a clear use case who can implement a proof of concept, as it wouldnt make sense to add plugin hooks that no one uses.

        Also mod tools can be implemented as api clients such as LemmyAutomod.

        • Rooki@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Ok thanks never knew about such discussion! But it is missing like hooks, events, triggers. Otherwise a plugin is almost useless and just hooking directly to the db would be more effective.

          External bots, have one big downsode that kills it for most “plugin” use case, it is pull, many use cases want a push method over a trigger, event or similar. And to fetch the api every second is inefficient if you say so. Direct db access is not available for everyone.

          • nutomicA
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            9 months ago

            Sure the plugin hooks still need to be implemented. It wouldnt make much sense to do that now before any actual use case exists, then the hooks would remain unused or wouldnt even work properly. Thats why it should be implemented together with a proof of concept plugin.

            • Rooki@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              On sublinks we already do stuff apready with those hooks. So that is already implemented

              • nutomicA
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                9 months ago

                I couldnt find it in the repo, what sort of plugin hooks do you have?

                • Rooki@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  In the services, the “events” all of those can be hooked into. In our case the only thing that is missing is a way to load a plugin into the software is missing. But it is comming up and if someone really needs that urgently a custom build, it is really easy to integrate a logic into it and build it into a custom build, by simply putting it into a custom file and then pulling upstream for updates.

    • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      feels like the SL team decided they’d work on moderation tooling, then realised they don’t quite know what to do and so are looking for ideas on what should be done.

      You dislike being asked to provide your opinion on an anonymous survey with optional demographic questions? And then you post your opinion on the same comment with your screen name attached? Why?

      • maegul (he/they)
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        9 months ago

        You are misreading my post and putting words in my mouth.

        The point was not wanting to do the survey. Not at all. Just that isI’d presumed there would have been more concrete concepts in there.

        Why are you responding this way? Seems a bit reactive.