Moderating is hard and requires a set of skills to run moderation cheaply. You’re probably going to have a group of known mods on Lemmy doing the same, just because mods with these skills will be sought after.
A bigger issue is that Lemmy seems to be continuing Reddit’s practice of mod rank by time only. The implementation of a guild model would be better for mod governance, as it allows for better discussions of mod policy and allow greater input from the invested community.
Of course, trigger happy bans are still going to happen as people troll and worse.
I think we lose sight of why “powermods” gained power: they built the big successful communities. Reddit was largely successful due to some fantastic communities being built up, and that takes work. We need that work on Lemmy just as much as we needed it on Reddit.
Yeah, it’s not ideal if a small number of people control a large number of communities but we should understand why they got there, and I think the structure of Lemmy is likely to make it a bit less prevalent.
Nah, once it become possible to group communities from multiple instances into one (aka multi-reddit on reddit - needs another name on the fediverse), power mods will have no power. Someone could just create an instance with the same community name and it could end up in the community group.
That’s only if they are chosen to be added. If I create a world politics sub and fill it with anime titties, I shouldn’t expect to be auto added to all world politics community groups.
Right now there are people who sign up with an instance like lemmy.world, who then create loads of communities, because they don’t fully understand the nature of things and can’t quite believe that the URLs for lots of different IPs are available. For Reddit, if you snagged the likes of r/starwars early on, that gave you some power. For Lemmy, it’s meaningless: if you just want to moderate 100 communities, and not spend time actually building a Community up, then you’ll just be overtaken by the Community at one of the many other instances.
Exactly this. On Reddit, you would end up with stuff like r/TrueStarWars and such as a result of bad mods moderating badly — but those communities would have a harder time taking off due to the name being less searchable, and individuals needing to be "in the know" about why one sub has "true" out the front.
With everyone being able to take the same community name, just across different instances, there's a potential for a better, more competitive process to take place instead. It won't be perfect — @starwars is going to be in a much more immediately advantaged position than, say, @starwars — but in theory the playing field is closer to being level.
It’s impossible here in any broad way. If an admin allowed it to go too far, they end up running off users, and possibly end up defederated if it gets really crazy.
There’s already duplicates of half the c/s out there, particularly among the reddit copies.
You might think that power admins could be the equivalent problem, but we’ve already seen problematic instances be defederated widely.
Pretty much every instance out there right now that has enough users to have power mods already has specific rules against going bonkers with moderation.
It’s a different system, a different culture, and the ultimate control is decentralized and distributed.
About the only people that could maybe upend that are the lemmy devs themselves, and it isn’t like lemmy is impossible to fork. I couldn’t do it, but there’s plenty of folks that can. And, let’s be real, those guys may be on the radical end of their political beliefs, but everything they’ve done so far points to them handling the project in a very socialist way. They could have forced the entire thing into an echo chamber instead of making it open source. They could have built in controls that would give them the ability to screw with instances remotely, but didn’t.
So, nah, power mods aren’t going to be a thing on lemmt any time soon. When it does happen, it’ll be on single instances and rapidly handled.
That does mean we need many instances, and always be creating new ones. We should never settle on one instance. There should always be alternative versions of each sub/community/magazine, just in case power mods become insane at one of them.
For me personally, I never saw too many powermod-driven issues on Reddit (not that they didn’t occur, just that I didn’t experience them in the communities in which I participated).
One solution was to create a fork; lots of “r/actual___” or “r/true___” communities were born this way. To Little8Lost’s point, I think this will be even easier on Lemmy.
I’ve been permanently banned from the League of Legends subreddit for saying a team that had caught Covid wouldn’t die because they’re young and vaccinated. In a post about them having caught Covid. And in response to someone calling it a fatal disease (which it can be for some, but really isn’t if you’re 20, vaccinated, and otherwise healthy).
Though dying may be lower risk for them people could still feel long standing effects from it. Though those are also less likely given they were vaccinated.
I looked up my exact quote, which isn’t perfect, but a permanent ban seems kind of crazy.
It’s not really lethal if you’re vaccinated, especially if you’re young.
I wouldn’t downplay long Covid. And if I had to do it again, I’d change some things. But saying that once in an appropriate thread seems pretty innocuous to me.
A lot of those community forks on Reddit were more related to the original communities growing too fast and then losing the original feeling than to powermods too (not all though).
Right, but you also have examples like r/politics where white supremacists publications are whitelisted as legit sources because at least some of the power mods were fascists and there is nothing anyone can do. No recourse whatsoever.
I like moderation and appreciate moderators, but it’s definitely a problem on Reddit.
You‘re absolutely correct imo! But the reason for white supremacists (i.e.) being able to seize power is users being unwilling or unable to stand up for themselves or others.
On reddit (same as here I assume) users can demand mods being removed from subs and new ones instated instead.
The ultimate escalation is making a counter sub with a close enough name and just doing better. That and informing, posting about the issues will massively improve the situation.
It is the fundamental problem with democracy. It is fragile as people need to actively keep it alive since power hungry people will always abuse and undermine it.
Organizing, sharing and keeping your own ego in check in the process is very hard but the ultimate democratic task imo.
Because it is easy to think of all our own ideas to be best but they rarely are. We should concentrate on those we know are better and find others to help with theirs.
TL;DR: Evil powers rely ok the indifference/lethargy of the masses. Work towards positive change
I was a mod for a unpopular opinion sub aimed at unpopular political opinions. It was as bad as you could imagine. At most I’d only have one or so posts a month that i didn’t have to remove.
One of the best friends I’ve ever had banned me from one of his subs because I was fucking with him as a prank of sorts
The guy poured his time and energy into making any sub he was associated with being as relaxed, friendly, and free of bullshit as possible.
And the dude got death threats.
Reddit ran off the best mods, the ones that really cared. Most of those came here.
Most mods are like him, they’re trying to help build something good, and keep it that way. Even the ones that wield the ban hammer often tend to only do so for disruptive assholes like me.
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