Is Lemmy.world centralization worth fighting against?
Probably a very polarizing question.
On the one hand, having most of the users and communities on LW causes technical issues (see this post), and also gives the LW staff too much power over Lemmy as a whole.
On the other hand, with 18k MAU on LW out of 47k (fedidb.org/software/lemmy/), every community listed there has a much higher chance of visibility compared to an alternative hosted on another instance
@otter, I wanted to ask you about something: I posted to !til in the past, but it seems that now the community isn’t actively moderated, and on the other side !todayilearned is getting a resurgence.
Do you think it is worth it trying to post to the lemmy.ca one, or should we go with the flow and post on the LW one to make it grow?
We were actually checking into this recently! While the mods look inactive from the post history, there is an active mod keeping an eye on the community.
I’m planning to make more posts to !til, and while I’m not sure which one will be best in the long run, I want to try and see if we can grow this one.
As for the other communities, I’m planning to go through and clean up moderation sometime in the next little while :)
Alright, good to know! I see if I can find stuff to post there, but usually I post to !interestingasfuck as there is some overlap, and the community got some traction a few days ago
Indeed, I use it from time to time, but from my experience, it seems like LW users tend to stay on their local feed, increasing the visibility of their local communities compared to ones from other instance
LW admins are hostile and unprofessional in my experience. There are better instances and I’ve noticed Lemmy has become a lot more spread out the past few months.
It’s a big problem all across the fediverse. New users have no idea which instance to join. In the absence of any way to differentiate between instances, they go with the most popular one, or the one they’ve heard of the most, or the one that sounds vaguely official or “vanilla”. Lemmy.world is the obvious choice for these users.
This leads to the biggest server becoming a runaway train, which is bad for diversity and also bad for the admins because it makes it harder to manage the load. It’s the same thing with mastodon.social.
I would encourage users to avoid the biggest instance as a rule, no matter which service they are signing up for. Ideally, avoid the top three or five. That will naturally lead to a healthier balance.
The problem is, there aren’t a lot of “general purpose” Lemmy instances. Someone following my advice, who doesn’t know better, might find themselves on hexbear, dbzer0, or lemmygrad. These are bad choices for a new user who expects something more or less equivalent to major centralized sites.
The problem is, there aren’t a lot of “general purpose” Lemmy instances.
Or there aren’t enough specific ones. If you go to Join Lemmy and you are presented with a number of general purpose instances, you are likely to pick the largest and only later realise the problems that entails and switch to another instance.
If you are a Trekkie or read books or game or program then it is easy to pick one. Ditto if there is an instance specific to your country (I should know).
If you look at Mastodon (which is more developed and has a wider and deeper selection of instances) you can see that these niches instances do well and I think we need to encourage more here.
They have a strange issue with their frontend, the instance is still running, and can be accessed using other front ends, but as you can see, not the best experience for a new joiner
lemmy.world also has at least a few divisive mods who are close friends of the lemmy.world admins and are known to retain their positions for that reason.
lemmy.world is by far the largest instance.
taken alone, none of these are a problem. together i find that concerning and exactly the kind of reason the fediverse was built to avoid.
I keep hearing about bad moderation, so I guess it’s indeed an issue.
It is really a compromise, there is no ideal situation. Should we initiate something and ask people to leave LW due to bad moderation? That would probably be seen as unnecessary drama.
encourage account migration to combat overcentralization
My gut feeling is that most of the people on LW are comfortable there, and wouldn’t see the point in decentralization. That happened in the past with the removal of privacy communities, or the fact that LW is still federated with Threads, still they have 18k MAU
and that’s absolutely fair. i think another group though are uncomfortable and are simply unaware that they can move.
for example, i saw a conversation where some folks were expressing uncomfortability that .world is federated with .ml. someone else brought up switching to an instance that was defederated with .ml (happened to be mine, shoutout .cafe) and they were all like “yo! dope let me do that”
so it’s almost a matter of education/spreading awareness for some at least
Are there bad moderators on LW? Do you have examples? I feel like they're maybe a little stretched thin on trying to keep up with things, and so sometimes make snap decisions, but lemmy.ml is the only place I've actually seen moderation that I would describe as deliberately bad.
they are certainly stretched thin, which i would categorize more as an attackable problem than an excuse for poor performance.
i do have a few examples off the top of my head tho
!unpopularopinion was left uterly unmoderated for months. rage bait and even some downright nazi shit was almost constant on there. any community in that situation should have been immediately shut down by admins but was not.
!world mods have a nasty habit of butting in with mod flared comments on user reports without taking action. they defend this as “adding context” when the “context” involved is highly subjective, partisan, and verging on defense of harrassment, and not at all fitting the diversity of content that constitutes a “world news” community.
this might be more of a general lemmy problem but there doesn’t seem to be auto-flagging going on for common sense harrasment language? like i see slurs against races, ethnicities, and the mentally disabled almost daily and they don’t get removed for hours until a user reports it sometimes.
Every time I want to post a politics article, I have to decide whether to post @lemmy.world (and exclude the Beehaw people and include the trolls and reach more people) or @beehaw.org (and exclude the World people and help the growth of a community that seems better, but reach a lot less people).
I am usually trying to encourage people to host communities on other instances (recently moved !casualconversation to !casualconversation, but sometimes it feels like fighting against the current.
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