I made a blog post discussing my biggest issues with Lemmy and why I am kind of done with it as a software.

  • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
    1·
    10 months ago

    Many users on Lemmy seem actively hostile to the idea of decentralization in a way that feels self defeating. They don’t want a better alternative to Reddit, they just want Reddit 2.0 and attempts to sway them towards something better feels like pulling teeth.

    I keep seeing this, and I don’t really understand. Lemmy is a link aggregator that allows users to organize those links into categories/communities/etc, and lets people comment on the links and have discussions about them. From an end-user perspective, that’s exactly what Reddit is. So I’m genuinely curious what’s meant when people say they don’t want Reddit 2.0 from a technical perspective. From a social perspective, the toxicity, brigading, shitposting, etc are definitely not desirable. But with shit moderation tools, those sort of things don’t get sorted, and federation just magnifies all of those problems. Though I think disabling voting definitely helps discourage shitposting and low-effort responses.

    But I genuinely do think a lot of problems really come down to the fundamentals of federation. And given how many downsides there are to it, I’m not convinced it’s actually a benefit at all.

      • Exocrinous@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        On Blahaj reports are the only way to express disapproval of content. So you could for example spread fascist dogwhistles about not liking politics, and if Ada doesn’t understand the dogwhistle then your content doesn’t get removed. That gives cryptofascists free reign

        • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
          0·
          10 months ago

          I’ve seen quotes directly lifted from fascist works upvoted by hundreds on Beehaw. The problem with only-positive user feedback is that as long as it seems like a positive statement that others support people will often grant it further support without thinking about what is actually being said.

          Or at least that’s what I hope was happening.

            • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
              0·
              10 months ago

              Would that actually violate the guidelines? This was around all the time of the defederation drama, so ages ago in internet time, and I recall looking at the guidelines and thinking “Well this isn’t a bad faith argument, and it’s not technically hateful unless you know where it leads.”