I'm in agreement with her. While I'd like things would be different, I don't see how people can think that the fediverse / #threadiverse as it stands now is a suitable replacement for Reddit. The entire labour strike on Reddit is centered around inadequate community moderation tooling and their API-reliant alternatives threatening to become unavailable.
Lemmy is fediverse's main answer to Reddit. Moderation tooling in lemmy is severely lacking and admins put themselves and the communities they host at risk by using that software in federated mode. I wrote this github issue over a year ago: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2277 very little has changed since.
In it, I give the example of a user account where description avatar are all slurs and hatesymbols. The account is replicated across all Lemmy instances that existed at the time that account was made, and admins can do nothing about it. For fun: try to change the domain name of the account to any lemmy instance that was around at the time.
The way the main devs are handling that issue also does not inspire tremendous confidence. I'd say in a trusted group lemmy is mature enough to use, but definitely don't turn federation on..
Perhaps these weeks are good "more eyeballs" moment for moderation tooling on federated link aggregators but three things:
devs should address these things before they add interoperability to their app imo.
people should stop enthusiastically promoting these tools because, as Emelia points out, they are just not mature enough! This is not Reddit's version "Twitter's mastodon moment" because the software is just not there and it will just hurt the cause long term and possibly directly hurt people in the short term.
funders (Lemmy is funded by NLNet) should really take responsibility for this as well. Make moderation tooling or trust and safety analysis part of the deliverables for funding.
@thisismissem@rra
"The entire labour strike on Reddit is centered around inadequate community moderation tooling and their API-reliant alternatives threatening to become unavailable."
This feels like a bit of a reach. From what I can tell the strike is mainly about the API being monetized in a way that interfaces people prefer to interact with Reddit by (Apollo mainly) are being shut out. The threadiverse directly solves this by putting the API in the hands of communities hosting instances.
"The potential for third-party apps to cease operations is particularly problematic for subreddit moderators, who say they often rely on these tools to manage their communities. “In many cases these apps offer superior mod tools, customization, streamlined interfaces, and other quality of life improvements that the official app does not offer,”
@rra I read your issue and the devs seem to agree with your take and ask for help in filing more issues about specific moderation interfaces. Lemmy does allow instance blocks and that does go a long way to cutting out instances that are straight up hostile. While there are definitely large moderation features that are not yet implemented I feel like its a bit much to say don't turn on federation
@rra I guess it depends on what your threat model is. I feel like Lemmy as is, already has much better moderation abilities then Reddit does in the sense that the values Reddit has are capitalism over anything and you can already run a Lemmy that blocks everything on fediblock if you want to
@liaizon Yeah I gave them detailed suggestions of what to address. Instance blocks won't help in this case because you want to but can't remove a single individual profile.
@liaizon lookig @rra 's suggestions and the progress that has (or more accurately hasn't) been made since it was filed last year, it's a clear indication (at least to me) that moderation tooling isn't a priority for the core dev team.
@rra Was looking in the issue tracker for specific issues related to blocking an individual user and I didn't see any. I see your meta issue https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2277 and I agree with most of your points on it. If I understood what was holding back the various parts these features from being implemented maybe I could help shine some light on this issue.
@celesteh@rra let's not talk about specific people when discussing the software in general (because it doesn't really add to the conversation, and is pretty well known in many circles)
@thisismissem
I think that it's relevant to the conversation simply because the person who controls the repo has a lot of power wrt what gets implemented or not...
@thisismissem
To be 100% honest I'm hoping that it'll get forked sooner or later, and I'm hoping that bringing up the fashy politics of #Lemmy devs will help that happen sooner. I would certainly not use software developed and operated by fash as a matter of principle @celesteh@rra
@rra this example is true on Mastodon as well, but we've working instance blocks (defederation) which removes the previously federated account (and the federated account is clearly marked as being so)
@thisismissem Yeah Mastodon has relatively adequate tooling for this. In Lemmy there is non, you need to ssh in to your server and drop entries from the db. Media are loaded remotely, so you can not actually perform moderation actions on them.
@rra yeah, that's basically a non-starter, and I would highly encourage @nlnetlabs to make a core set of "moderation tools" a requirement for any new fediverse software they support the development of.
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