IMO the “replicate reddit, but decentralized” approach will be the downfall of Lemmy. You sound like you’re trying to do the right thing, but there is significantly more moderator centralization and authoritarianism on Lemmy than there was on early reddit. Most of the early reddit mods were people who genuinely had an interest or experience in that subs topic; not the tankie or excommunicated from elsewhere simply “domain squatting” dozens of popular community names and then dictating over them once they grew popular; trying to carve out their own personal safe space soap boxes. I have seen dozens of mods who’ll debate someone and when they lose they just delete all of the opposing comments and ban the user they disagree with. Often they are the one and only mod of that community.
Users left Reddit because they didn’t wanna have to deal with continued enshittification and unaccountable bad faith mods on a power trip. Lemmy only solved the former, and doubled down on the latter, while fragmenting users across numerous duplicate communities about the same topic; leading to significant post duplication amongst a sea of inactive duplicate communities.
If Lemmy doesn’t solve its core issues I don’t expect it to last long and will move elsewhere sooner than later. I feel like users should be able to join a group of communities about the same topic, and moderator control should be both diluted and distributed amongst them. As in, redistribute moderation across the user base by randomly showing a group of users a post/comment and using the average rather than relying on whoever created the sub to act in good faith. Decentralized services should be built as trustless/adversarial; expect and account for bad faith actors. I wouldn’t have any problem being required to moderate a post/comment for every post/comment I make, I just don’t want the responsibility of being a permanent mod, nor having to review every single thing myself.
If Lemmy doesn’t solve its core issues I don’t expect it to last long and will move elsewhere sooner than later.
you’re absolutely right however those “core issues” are intrinsic qualities that come from the fediverse’s tankie roots and they’re intend to shed power tripping & bad faith users by design.
those qualities like the “fragmentation” keep the discourse going despite the inevitable power tripping mod/admin. the fediverse effectively makes blocking/banning/defederation pointless because doing so only serves to exclude yourself from the main group chat that everybody else can see.
that “sea of inactive duplicates” is probably the biggest symptom of an intrinsic quality that serves to sustain its intended tankie users and repels everyone else. if you embrace the fediverse using it’s tankie roots on lemmy, you get a wealth of content from niche communities on an entire spectrum of activity levels like the bustling and relatively large star trek communities with the far-leftist/doomer-humor/genz-trans perspective on hexbear; or star trek communities with the sarcasm-mandatory/american-political-commentary/propaganda-speak/militant perspective on lemmygrad; or star trek communities with the center-right-leaning/moderate/capitalist perspective on .world onward all the way to the other end of that activity level spectrum to even deeper niche communities that you could also learn about for yourself by not banning/block/defederating.
the relatively large user increase from the reddit diaspora has effectively turned the lemmyverse into a digital version of an american center-right mainstrain group gentrifying a tankie digital lemmy neighborhood whose plumbing was built to ensure that no person/group from the entirety of the leftists spectrum can control/dominate the discourse and that plumbing is going to do it’s job and push away the self sorted and mostly inactive liberal echo chamber users.
it’s all effectively sort of like digital anti-homeless architecture (eg builtin spikes and split public benches); but with a focus on users who hold moderate views and only the people too unpleasantly rigid in their world views will be the ones to move on elsewhere only to discover that no reddit diaspora has ever survived and they’ll end up going back to reddit or bluesky.
and most fortunately the userbase bump and makeup from this diaspora was so huge and well suited compared to the other previous reddit diasporas that it guarantees that everyone that could be here to enjoy these leftists safe spaces is already here now and also gives the feddiverse the best likeliest chance for any reddit diaspora to survive…
Communities aren’t the same as subreddits, Lemmy communities are more like hashtags for an instance. Hexbear is an example of a leftist instance, and the Hexbear Games community is basically a Games hashtag. Trying to centralize communities on one instance is a bad plan IMO because that gives far more power to any given instance.
Community repitition isn’t a bad thing, it’s an advantage.
IMO the “replicate reddit, but decentralized” approach will be the downfall of Lemmy. You sound like you’re trying to do the right thing, but there is significantly more moderator centralization and authoritarianism on Lemmy than there was on early reddit. Most of the early reddit mods were people who genuinely had an interest or experience in that subs topic; not the tankie or excommunicated from elsewhere simply “domain squatting” dozens of popular community names and then dictating over them once they grew popular; trying to carve out their own personal safe space soap boxes. I have seen dozens of mods who’ll debate someone and when they lose they just delete all of the opposing comments and ban the user they disagree with. Often they are the one and only mod of that community.
Users left Reddit because they didn’t wanna have to deal with continued enshittification and unaccountable bad faith mods on a power trip. Lemmy only solved the former, and doubled down on the latter, while fragmenting users across numerous duplicate communities about the same topic; leading to significant post duplication amongst a sea of inactive duplicate communities.
If Lemmy doesn’t solve its core issues I don’t expect it to last long and will move elsewhere sooner than later. I feel like users should be able to join a group of communities about the same topic, and moderator control should be both diluted and distributed amongst them. As in, redistribute moderation across the user base by randomly showing a group of users a post/comment and using the average rather than relying on whoever created the sub to act in good faith. Decentralized services should be built as trustless/adversarial; expect and account for bad faith actors. I wouldn’t have any problem being required to moderate a post/comment for every post/comment I make, I just don’t want the responsibility of being a permanent mod, nor having to review every single thing myself.
you’re absolutely right however those “core issues” are intrinsic qualities that come from the fediverse’s tankie roots and they’re intend to shed power tripping & bad faith users by design.
those qualities like the “fragmentation” keep the discourse going despite the inevitable power tripping mod/admin. the fediverse effectively makes blocking/banning/defederation pointless because doing so only serves to exclude yourself from the main group chat that everybody else can see.
that “sea of inactive duplicates” is probably the biggest symptom of an intrinsic quality that serves to sustain its intended tankie users and repels everyone else. if you embrace the fediverse using it’s tankie roots on lemmy, you get a wealth of content from niche communities on an entire spectrum of activity levels like the bustling and relatively large star trek communities with the far-leftist/doomer-humor/genz-trans perspective on hexbear; or star trek communities with the sarcasm-mandatory/american-political-commentary/propaganda-speak/militant perspective on lemmygrad; or star trek communities with the center-right-leaning/moderate/capitalist perspective on .world onward all the way to the other end of that activity level spectrum to even deeper niche communities that you could also learn about for yourself by not banning/block/defederating.
the relatively large user increase from the reddit diaspora has effectively turned the lemmyverse into a digital version of an american center-right mainstrain group gentrifying a tankie digital lemmy neighborhood whose plumbing was built to ensure that no person/group from the entirety of the leftists spectrum can control/dominate the discourse and that plumbing is going to do it’s job and push away the self sorted and mostly inactive liberal echo chamber users.
it’s all effectively sort of like digital anti-homeless architecture (eg builtin spikes and split public benches); but with a focus on users who hold moderate views and only the people too unpleasantly rigid in their world views will be the ones to move on elsewhere only to discover that no reddit diaspora has ever survived and they’ll end up going back to reddit or bluesky.
and most fortunately the userbase bump and makeup from this diaspora was so huge and well suited compared to the other previous reddit diasporas that it guarantees that everyone that could be here to enjoy these leftists safe spaces is already here now and also gives the feddiverse the best likeliest chance for any reddit diaspora to survive…
Communities aren’t the same as subreddits, Lemmy communities are more like hashtags for an instance. Hexbear is an example of a leftist instance, and the Hexbear Games community is basically a Games hashtag. Trying to centralize communities on one instance is a bad plan IMO because that gives far more power to any given instance.
Community repitition isn’t a bad thing, it’s an advantage.