this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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Fedigrow

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I noticed today an occurence of a user complaining about Lemmy being worse then Reddit. The modlogs shows how toxic they are. When this was pointed out, the user deletes their account

https://web.archive.org/web/20241217101003/https://sopuli.xyz/post/20276017?scrollToComments=true

Deleted account: https://kbin.melroy.org/u/Pyrin

This seems to address the question that comes up once in a while "a public modlog is only useful for mods" (https://feddit.org/post/4920887/3235141), while we can see from this example that it can also be useful for toxic users.

As you may know, [email protected] is a community dedicated to calling out power tripping mods.

Should we consider having a similar community for toxic users?

There is already [email protected], but I feel like the "lore" is more about large-scale events (like the cats wave recently) than specific users events.

Edit: Updated the title, and put the emphasis on creating a community to call out toxic users rather than "dunking" on the users that was banned.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

I think yall are way to extreme and maybe need to take a break from the internet every so often. It's not healthy to be This indepth hardcore wanting to almost kinda dox ppl bc you didn't, ahem... appreciate their tone. Pretty pretentious. But anyway

We have an annoying lemmy users community where you can basically call users out, but the main rule is to mark out their username, instance name, all instances showing and community name. But to expose who they are also?

Number one you'd be making enemies and Secondly, you'd be making lemmy even more hostile then it already is. Which disincentivizes activity and engagement.

HC has an ask an admin community, annoying lemmy users community, and mod and admin complaints community. Which i think apply here, but highly doubtful anyone will use for the purposes stated in the post.

In short,

I think just taking a lemmy break, and breaking away from the internet drama is the best way to go here. The more you get involved, you might be fuckin with the wrong person and that'll blow up in your face.

I take breaks from lemmy all the time. I feel it's almost necessary in order to continue to use the platform, bc of how toxic, hostile, and extremist the online community is. I don't have time nor desire to drag my mental health into the mud fighting, arguing, and playing gotcha games on the internet.

I value my time and health more then that

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Calling out mods for what? Not allowing your brand of freeze peach? Personally I think Lemmy needs more strong moderators because right now most instance's "all" feeds are just another stale parade of "memes". There is a lot of junk filler, and very few unique communities that make the Lemmyverse something that stands apart from Reddit.

I would also encourage instance admins to de-federate instances that host your idea of a "community" purpose built to publicly "call out" users. It's toxic.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

How is your instance doing ?

Why I left Startrek.website, created TenForward, and the admin abuse I've suffered from ST.W since then

https://lemmy.world/post/11959030

Also, about the mods, that community already exists, it's [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

That user was literally banned from StarTrek.website instance for harassment of it's users, this is a textbook example of the problem with "call out" communities you are advocating for. They are more about creating drama than any kind of fact finding, let alone justice.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I think its not a great idea.

Mods are like politicians, they need to be held accountable. Users are like the citizens/residents, if someone did something wrong, there should be judgement by the "court system" or in case of an online forum, judged by moderators. A civillian not involved in politics (aka: doing forum moderation) shouldn't face as much scrutiny as a politician.

We protest when politicians do bad things. But we don't form a mob and go to a civillian's house to harass them when they do bad things, that just brings the pitfork mob mentality. A user who isn't doing moderation shouldn't have to face a mob, such a community is just gonna become a place to harass users.

TLDR: Moderators should face more scrutiny than users. Users shouldn't have to face a mob's judgement everytime whenever there's perceived wrongdoing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

The problem is, you only would see the content that was removed. It is also extremely one sided. The modlog isn't what it was, and now they have removed legitimacy from it by removing the names of the mods and admins who did the enforcement, even though it was already relatively easy and straightforward to create a moderation alt. So you don't get the visibility of any moderator abuse either. There's also the fact that moderators and admins do lie.

A community dedicated to calling out power tripping mods exists because it affects everybody and there is no moderator of moderator decisions, save for admins who, if not part of the problem also have other problems to deal with. There is no power tripping user because users basically have no power. The counter to yepowertrippingbastards for users already exists, it's called being a moderator, and they get to "post" about it in a modlog where their and only their word gets posted, where they are allowed to do it anonymously under the cover of seeming but not actual unanimity, and where users don't get a chance to tell their side of the story. Mods also have their own internal groups to address concerns of problem users.

Having a public community about it both makes those moderators who participate seem even more insecure and would also be a source of drama as they try to create a new version of the modlog in community form while finding out communities are not homogeneous.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

1.) NOWHERE is worse than reddit mods. They can diaf.

B.) I love the modlog. Half the time I have to go "what the hell did I say to get deleted?!" and dredging it up to see what I said and the reason, which is usually "rule 5" or the like. I also like seeing deleted posts responding to mine that got deleted before I read them. Half the time they didn't say anything particularly bad towards me, just used a bad word or went off topic.

LASTLY.) Any changes that keep mods and admins out of dictatorial power is perfect. I got banned on Reddit for "being racist" because I called out criminals and some other jackasses were saying "black people" as the word "criminal" even though the crimes were in a predominantly white area so it was a bad assumption from the start. I have a black GF and my post history has ZERO racist comments or remarks. I asked the mod and they said it was because I was a racist like everyone else getting banned and blocked me and reported me for harassing them. I appealed it to the reddit admins, they did nothing and said the mod was in the right and i started getting banned in other subs for nonsense, only to find out from others they all share a couple mods...of note, this is how it went down, this isn't me editing the story in my favor, it was exactly that absurd and blatant...don't let Lemmy become THAT bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Should we consider having a similar community for toxic users?

I think that it's a bad idea because that community would become a pitchfork emporium. Users posting there would be a textbook example of users that we shouldn't want in the Fediverse: whiny, entitled, assumptive, passive aggressive. It's how the cookie crumbles with this sort of meta-community.

To avoid that, you'd need to restrict the scope and make it objective, like !yepowertrippinbastards does - that comm is only about mods/admins acting as such and abusing their power.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

This idea sounds conceptually similar to something like kiwifarms, which seems like a red flag imo

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Lemmy is worse than reddit though. Especially if you don't block .ml.

Though they have predictably gotten quieter now that the election is over.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I'm not trolling about the elections these days, maybe that's because my frontpage isn't 100% trump-related spam. I don't care about the US, why should I be exposed to you people cultural imperialism? Keep that shit to yourself.

It was hillarious to see dumb americans astro-turfing the lemmyverse with their election bullcrap, only to be exposed to opinion from foreigners and then whining that everybody you don't like is a russian spy. Follow the western neo-lib line or get called Igor (yeah coz they're also racists).

But hey, count on the idiots to passively eat cold-war era propaganda.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Which is worse depends a lot on how much you weight each of their flaws. Personally I think that Lemmy still behaves better than Reddit, even considering that Lemmy behaviour is getting worse over time.

So, focusing solely on aspects where Lemmy is worse than Reddit, IMO:

  • witch hunting
  • intrusive soapboxing
  • bossing others around with uncalled advice
[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

intrusive soapboxing

Wut dis

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

TL;DR: to repetitively talk about certain really common topics outside their place, specially political ones, so all popular threads end being about the same subjects.

NTL;R: Soapboxing is when someone keeps voicing their opinion on something, to gather support. It's fine on itself, or it would if lemmings didn't do it all the bloody time, even outside the place for that discussion. It becomes intrusive.

So for example. There are 99 threads talking about Musk/USA/Trump stuff, and 1 to share cat pictures. Then someone mentions that the orange cat has the same colour as Trump's hair. Vooooooosh! Now the thread is infested with "Trump is evil! Trump is nazi! I HAET TRUMP!". They are intrusively soapboxing their hate against Trump. And now we got 100 threads about Musk/USA/Trump stuff and zero to share cat pictures.

When this happens you'll sometimes see people reacting. "Can we post cat pics here? Could you please keep politics out of this thread? Pleeeease?" style. Then you're bound to get some braindead trash vomiting "ackshyually everything is politics". That is technically correct but utterly idiotic in that context, and effectively conveys "I'm entitled to ruin your thread with this repetitive subject, suck it up".

This happens fairly often in Reddit. But since Lemmy has a more political userbase (not a bad thing per se), here it's all the time. And it usually takes mod intervention to not happen.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Okay, so now I have a word for this behavior, thanks.

I've managed to avoid seeing it too often but that's also through probably getting lucky with tiny, focused communities and only looking at Subscribed (sometimes Local on certain instances—ani.social has been "safe" for avoiding politics in my opinion). And outright refusing meme communities not because I have an issue with memes but because there's usually a depressing "relatable" one where unfortunately yammering about the cause behind that depressing thing is on-topic, and usually attributed to something political.

I do content discovery through trawling through the community list on an instance and picking something cool and following [email protected]. For people who don't want to mostly take a "my interests only, everything else can be safely ignored" attitude, or whose interests involve topics that frequently intersect with politics (imagine being into tech, seeing on-topic tech news that… also has political implications or directly talks politics), I'm just really sorry for you right now.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

They do as the CCP demands.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 4 days ago

Worldists are neoliberals genocide apologists, they censor as much shit as any "tankie" instance and if there was any justice the mods would be in jail.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

A community dedicated to getting mad at people will quickly become just as toxic, if not more so.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (3 children)

No

I don't think we need that kinda community anymore, pretty sure we already have similar community

I agree that some Lemmy users are annoying and as bad as Reddit. But, man, if you behave like that, you're no better lol, in fact worse.

I agree with @[email protected], I started using recently PieFed and even contributed to the code, and PieFed seems to have a good feature specific to this case, like reputation points (though I have a feeling this could also be abused?)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

even contributed to the code

NOICE! Thank you for your service to this community:-).

PieFed seems to have a good feature specific to this case

Yeah, it's odd b/c on the one hand it has SO VERY MANY features that Lemmy lacks - such as categories of communities, hashtags in posts, YouTube video embedding, showing the community sidebar area for every post (not just on the community page), even on a mobile, and using radically (~25-fold) less mobile data to load 5x more posts at a time than Lemmy. Also, I just subscribed to a new community created last week, and like 2 seconds later it had already pulled in all the old posts.

On the other hand, PieFed lacks many of the more "foundational" feature sets, e.g. user tagging (so I just happened to see this, but the @[email protected] will not alert me to the tagging as you would expect & hope), and a good fraction of the time I get a Notification to something that I have no idea what it is - sometimes I cannot click it at all, sometimes it is from users that I've blocked, sometimes it is buried in the "continue thread" or whatever that is called where instead of showing the content on the page you have to click to go to some other page entirely (yet the Notifications refuses to follow that), or inside an auto-collapsed or even an auto-removed comment (but at the time that I replied to it, it had not yet been auto-removed, which is why I just turned that entire feature off). I am glad that you are helping bring it up to feature parity with Lemmy though!:-) It is such a fantastic project that I think will radically transform people's experiences on the Fediverse, by offering them tools that at this point I doubt that Lemmy ever will.

reputation points (though I have a feeling this could also be abused?)

And yes I do share that same worry. OTOH, people can already do it now, it's just that it takes far more effort, and for the most part the existing options are "block the account" or "nothing", or in certain Lemmy apps (I don't know which ones, maybe Connect or Sync b/c they seem more full-featured?) you can add your own custom label to the account like "hey this person is fun to talk to but don't ever bring up Hamas or YOU WILL BE SORRY". Probably more than one person has added "long-winded" to describe me:-). The beauty of that is that it allows people the CHOICE to do something other than the binary remove vs. retain, like they could read but not reply, or reply but not go into as much depth as they usually would, or like for a new account the content of their reply might be more explanatory than it would if they knew that someone had had an account here for more than a year. Knowledge is power:-). As such, it might be abused:-(. Then again, it might not?:-D

Since we are talking about merely placing labels next to a username - not like automatically blocking or hiding content from people (that capability does not exist... yet) - I don't worry so much about its potential for abuse at the current stage. But even if the stage were to be advanced - which it seems NOT ready yet atm, imho, but if it were more fully developed - then I should add: even the trolls might have more fun on the Fediverse that way, if the people most likely to respond negatively to them have hidden their content? Thereby leaving only those most likely to respond favorably to their antics.

So for me, it's not that it's a 100% bad thing, just that care must be taken in its further development. If the actual restrictions were quite narrow, and the mere labelling wider, that does not sound like a bad trade-off to me?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (3 children)

Gonna go out-of-topic from the post but I need this to get this off my chest:

Do you know what prompted me to contribute to PieFed's code?

Recently, a developer of Lemmy straight up posted a link to a website to a China propaganda in a community in my Lemmy instance. Yes, a propaganda.

Tbf, slrpnk.net receives a lot of China-related posts, and that's due to China out-competing other countries in many sectors (EV, for example), and in those post OP usually critical enough to acknowledge that while China achievement is good, the crimes Chinese government has done shouldn't be ignored.

But the post is different. From the domain name, the "About Us" section of the website, the bias in the article. Clearly this was posted with an ill intention. A developer of a platform uses the platform to spread propaganda. Disgusting

I downvoted said post, but I hesitated to call it out. Because, I'm gonna be honest--I'm genuinely scared of interacting with those kind of people. And I don't want to have a deep discussion about politics or propaganda anyway. I'm not that kind of person.

This made me realize, I also don't tell people I use fediverse or don't reach out to other forums to open a community in Lemmy. This is because the fediverse, or at least Lemmy have a bad reputation: tankie.

There is a saying in my country that says "One person ate jackfruit, everyone got the sap". The genocide deniers ate the jackfruit, and everyone got the sap. The genocide deniers ruined fediverse's name and everyone else got the consequence. I don't wanna recommend people to use softwares made by those terrible people, and I doubt most people want to use softwares that has a reputation of being a genocide deniers playgrounds.

Honestly OP from the link in the post (https://feddit.org/post/4920887) kind of made a good point.

At this point, I would prefer just quitting Lemmy altogether.

But I remembered, the fediverse is an open source effort. I use open source software a lot. I feel like I need to give back something. And I have a community that still needed moderating.

And recently I found PieFed that is still in early days but show some great promise. I happen to understand HTMX (I use it in my personal projects) and Python (I learned it way back in junior high). Seems perfect to me, so I contributed one.


Honestly, it feels kinda unfair to me that software made by a genocide deniers gets the funding, meanwhile a software made by a good person (PieFed) has to be a hobby project.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Why not mbin? Is it because PieFed is more reddit like?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I actually liked kbin/mbin. I used it before moving to Lemmy. I just can't code in PHP (and I have had some trauma using it while doing internship)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

A developer of a platform uses the platform to spread propaganda. Disgusting

Welcome to Lemmy. Now you know why a lot of people are hoping for Piefed to reach feature-parity with Lemmy.

Thank you for contributing to the codebase by the way

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago

Isn't slrpnk.net an anarchist instance? Or at least db0 seemed to think that it was, and I would believe that he would know more about such than I. So if it is not merely allowing but advocating for fewer restrictions about what can or cannot be posted, leaving the end-users to have to make their own decisions about valuation judgements, then that would not surprise me so much? As in, it's not that the design of the places desires such content, so much as it makes it feel welcomed alongside everything else.

100% of the times I've told peple that I use Lemmy I have come to later regret it. A Nazi bar - or in this case the leftist equivalent - is not something that generally speaking, one should advertise as desiring to go to. And it would seem that we very much spread the messages of the Alt-Left here, giving such content a pass b/c while "Alt-Right = bad, surely the opposite cannot also be bad?", i.e. "I sure hope that these leopards don't eat my face off?!"

Yet as you say, what is the alternative - Reddit? PieFed isn't ready for the masses, though I am so happy that you are helping to get it closer to being thus:-). In the meantime, there is also dubvee.org to consider, even though it's marketed for a specific region inside the USA, it does a helluvalot to kick out tankies. Or, while I need to switch over to a standard Lemmy instance for so many things (to search for content, or find specific comments in a post that I just can't easily do on PieFed), PieFed is getting halfway usable already on a daily basis (again, not fully, but for many tasks).

It makes sense to me why Lemmy got that funding: it was first. The early bird gets the worm, that's just how it is. Lemmy.World admins expressed a muted desire to potentially switch to another non-Lemmy software - Sublinks, although that project hasn't seen many updates in the last half a year? - and they may consider switching to PieFed as well. Or considering how many people seem to want to leave it, an exodus may happen naturally. In any case, it's simply not time for that yet, b/c there are so very many problems with the implementation atm - indeed it is earlier in its development cycle than Lemmy, with fewer resources to help speed it along too.

Otoh, PieFed is in a language that more people know, and so if more people contribute as you have, it could easily catch up and even surpass Lemmy! (that uses Rust, which is reputedly significantly harder to learn even for people who already know C++)

In any case, kudos for choosing to be a contributor - we all like to hear that!:-) There is no reason for Lemmy to disappear entirely, and rather it's fantastic to have additional choices for a user to consider when we can see both of them fully functional side-by-side and pick what we think will work best for our own needs:-).

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

pretty sure we already have similar community

Which one is it?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You know what, disregard my previous comments and try creating the community. I'm willing to give some benefit of the doubt.

What I'm kinda worried is the exact same kind of user mention in the post will post on the community. And I also have visited subreddit that calls out bad users in reddit in the past (like r/redditmoment for example) and I kinda don't like it, because to me it's kind of a waste of time. Probably a personal preference.

But if it calls out/exposes bad users in the community, probably good. Probably

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Okay. Let's give this thread a bit more time for other people to tell how they feel about it, and then we'll see.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

I don't think people liked the idea lol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Maybe instead of spending times creating community like that, how about we contribute on making high-quality content on the threadiverse?

That's what I attempt to do on [email protected] anyway

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago
[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 days ago (2 children)

This I disagree with, b/c BOTH activities are necessary to help the Fediverse thrive. As Blaze pointed out, there are many niche communities starting to form here, already a year and a half past the Rexodus, and yet even ONE (or two) toxic interactions is more likely to send someone away from here than the presence of one (or two) additional communities is likely to entice them to remain.

You are not wrong in that we DO need additional content and communities like that - so kudos on that one!:-) - but we ALSO need to decrease the toxicity level significantly, if we want to entice the less thick-skinned mainstream normal people (who don't use Arch Linux btw) to join us here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You don't have to ask, you can just create this community, as long as it abides by the instance's community guidelines, and see how it goes. But you will also have to live with the drama it creates, and that may far outlast the community well after it closes. I can already tell you, the moment this community begins getting tracking is the moment you will also see those problem users creating their own versions of it to dispel your claims with their own point of view. This will polarize instances even more by those that allow these types of communities and those that don't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

If it's worth doing it may be worth some effort? But I suppose you are saying that the cost to effort ratio is too high? That does seem a good point: what is all that effort really gaining for anyone? If the goal is to educate people how to make use of the modlog, perhaps using accounts that have already deleted themselves so as to not call out anyone still active here, there are already communities for such generic Fediverse content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I 100% agree with you that making the tone here a little more positive would be a huge benefit. But unfortunately, I think the proposed community would be likely to do the opposite. The reality seems to be that toxicity and social media go together to some extent, at least as they exist today. The only proven solution I’ve seen is heavy-handed moderation which is labor intensive and can have other downsides.

But I like the brainstorming nonetheless. Keep the ideas flowing.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 days ago

It definitely could go either way.

The toxicity needs to be discussed in order to deal, but what is the real benefit of doing that at the per-user level? To make a cross-instance blacklist? The affected users would just create an alt, plus what is "toxic" to some ("I want women to not be treated as people" is the epitome of grace and class to others - someFUCKINGhow?!).

A complicating factor is that currently, moderator reports aren't even federated across instances, and that won't be added until at least 0.20 as Nutomic put onto the Lemmy Roadmap. Not that it should either hinder or accelerate the need for such a community, just that it seems tangentially related?

I keep coming back to the idea of porn: should it not exist (no, I mean yes, I mean it should not be entirely banned, studies show that banning it at least correlates if not actually contributes to causing actual irl physical violence), or can it simply be labeled properly? The problem being that while the Fediverse does an excellent job of labeling NSFW content (and PieFed even adds a new category, on top of NSFW, for "gore"), it fails miserably at labeling most other things - e.g. you cannot criticize Russia, China, or North Korea on the infamous "community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers", which how would the latter have in any way implied the former, in its wording?

Making porn be "opt-in" makes it safe to visit the Fediverse even at work, without fear of being part of the company's "cost savings plan" (at least due to such a reason as this, assuming they even need a reason at all). Failing to label toxic users as toxic allows them to mix in amongst all the other users, with no distinction offered except to allow or deny, at which point the moderation requires effort to perform that task. Unless we try other ways?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Ooh, imaginary looks lovely!

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm kind of upset that this 'toxic' person came from the same instance as I'm using. Most people I encounter on the local pages aren't bad folks.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 days ago

Usually kbin.melroy.org users are nice indeed

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