• archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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    6 months ago

    Honestly, the size of lemmy.world kinda negates the benefits of federated social media. Instances are supposed to be small so as to be more manageable to moderate, so that you don’t have to defederate with every instance with a slightly different background.

    The defederation campaigns from about 8 months ago ended up narrowing the spectrum of users and content along a pretty specific political line, and that means that certain political topics get a pretty drastic misrepresentation of opinions. Lemmy.world in some ways became defined by those disagreements, and so any time a topic approaches that line you get a crowd of people trying to enforce the distinction.

    Other instances (even the ones lemmy.world ended up defederating with over political disagreements) have far more varied opinions on the exact topics that .world seems really uncomfortable with.

    • whoreticulture
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      6 months ago

      Are the defederation campaigns the reason people call me lemmygrad? I only joined a month ago and people hate me for existing and not repeating their echo chamber.

      • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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        6 months ago

        edit: just noticed you said ‘deconfederation’, and idk if that was intentional but it’s actually 'defederation. Deconfederation makes it sound like it was a civil war (maybe that’s an apt description though…)

        Yup. The use of ‘lemmygrad’, ‘hexbear’, ‘tankie’ (at least it’s frequent usage on lemmy.world) all stemmed from that tumultuous time just after the reddit migration where the various instances were fighting over politics. It’s a deep lore and maybe even a bit more complicated than I alluded to, but that period has definitely left its mark on the community.

        Other instances are much better, but because lemmy.world is so large and their communities attract the most activity, they kinda set the tone for the whole lemmy/kbin activitypub implementation.

        • whoreticulture
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          6 months ago

          Even if simplified, thank you for explaining! I wonder if mastodon has had a similar thing happen … (I was never much of a Twitter user so I never became active). Like, is this a result of the fediverse in general or just something unique to Lemmy

          • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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            6 months ago

            I’m on both; this is a pretty lemmy-specific thing. I think it stems from people who migrated from reddit into a platform that was already being used by groups with a much stronger left-lean. If you’ve been on reddit you might be able to guess: they did not cope with that well.

    • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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      6 months ago

      I think the real moderation should always be happening at the community level. Admins should only be influencing accounts doing illegal or immoral stuff and through their general tolerance for trollish behavior. The same stuff applies to the communities though. I like that there are multiple “politics” communities so you can choose your flavor of community moderation, but there’s certainly a tendency to just assume the biggest is the “real” one.

      I think what Lemmy needs to solve this issue is being able to easily tie in the comments from all the cross-posted subs you subscribe to, then assuming say someone subscribes to politics on .world, .ml, and beehaw, you can get all the flavors without one set of mods or users being able to define the whole Lemmy “politics” culture. And if one flavor annoys the shit out of you, you can just unsubscribe from that one and not have it be part of your experience.