Part of this is that I’m new, a Reddit refugee, and still learning my way around.
Part of it was prompted by Beehaw’s choice to defederate with lemmy.world & other instances - there’s a clear disagreement on how to keep difficult people from dropping turds in the punch bowl.
And part of it is from watching the enshittification of Reddit.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to set up a nonprofit organization for the purpose of promoting independent distributed social media. Conceivably, it could fundraise to help keep servers alive, have some people promoting the Fediverse elsewhere on the Internet, lobby and keep lawyers handy to keep government from squelching free speech. Something along the lines of EFF or FSF.
There could be a mutual agreement among members on ground rules for users (for example, requiring all member instances to ban/block/delete hate speech). Or it can operate services like anti-spam/anti-hate blocklists so mods have better tools to keep the riffraff out. And it can serve as a venue to resolve disputes in a civil way.
And I say it needs to be a nonprofit so it’s enshittification resistant. For-profit companies are required by law to maximize profit for owners/shareholders, which makes enshittification inevitable. A nonprofit’s mission in life is to perform beneficial things for the community, be it stopping teen suicide, running an orchestra, or promoting independent social media.
Just my random brainfart, I’m sure half of this has already been done.
Beehaw vets its users to try to keep the trolls out. On Reddit, there were some tricks like requiring minimum karma or minimum account age to post in a subreddit. But yeah, it’s impossible to keep a determined troll out. I’m thinking the best that can be done is to keep more eyes on the board, have better tools to identify problem posts & problem users quickly, ideally, deleting their crap five seconds after they post it.
One small secret reddit had-
Some users took pride in their account’s age, and/or karma. Here- well, that doesn’t really exist.
I can spin up a new account right now, and nobody would know any different.
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