this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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I get the impression that one of the main goals of Lemmy World admins is simply to assert control over its users. Whether they realize this or not and are just doing habitually. There was a post awhile back about the feature of users being able to do instance blocking themselves and they were pretty against the idea of an instance that federates with everything in order for users to do their own moderation. As this would obviously take away their ability to control users.
In my opinion they are just bullies who have convinced themselves they are in the right.
This is pretty much what happened to Reddit, no?
Lemmy is going to have worse mod issues than reddit, and this is an example of how and why.
The difference is that this is federated and you can ignore any instance you like. With reddit, your only choice is to make a copycat sub and hope people join you.
Which sounds good, until you start to notice that most instances have functionally dead communities, and the majority of traffic comes happens on a small number of instances.
Lemmy doesnt have the population to have mass community movement, so mods abusing power in any of the larger instances means you shut up and put up with it or abandon the instance with 1/3 of the site content on it.
Power modding is going to be a much much larger issue here, while the community is still small. Maybe if there were enough users, federation might resist mod abuse. But as it is now (and will be for a while at least,) you basically are making a copycat instance or community and hoping people join you.
This is key right here, but users need to be using a diverse set of instances. Lemmy.world needs to stop being "the default". There shouldn't be "a default". Maybe for when you first sign up, but people need to be moving to self-hosted and/or niche interest instances. That's the best way to prioritize diversity in the ecosystem.
Frankly, anyone who's on a
lemmy.whateverdomain orkbin.whatevershould be finding smaller, more manageable instances to move to as they discover the fediverse. This will be aided when 0.19.0 comes out in a few weeks and enables the export/import for accounts.One thing I appreciate about how the incentives of the platform are set up is that, since there's no global account counter of up/downvotes, there's really no loss in migrating. As long as I can keep my communities, subscriptions, blocks, and saved posts, I'll have lost nothing.