PhilipTheBucket

In terms of instances, there simply isn’t any appetite for the type of instances and community culture you want. You are simply in a minority here.

Severely tempted to code it up and see what the interest level is. IDK, I am lazy also, so let’s see. In any case thank you for your constructive input lol.

I feel like we’ve had a debate on this before.

Are we having a debate? I honestly was not aware if so lol

This would just negate the concept of communities built up by moderators.

Correct. Moderators should not “own” the communication that goes on in “their” communities, they definitely shouldn’t look at people as “their” users as I’ve heard some of them say before. We are just people. We are allowed to say things. The fact that letting people say things even if the moderators don’t want them to, would do damage to their concept, is a flaw with their concept.

Also, in many case, instances have rules before communities. How does that system work here?

To a certain extent, it is cultural. At the end of the day, the instance admins can physically control whatever passes through their server. In the old school Usenet sense, someone who was in that role would never modify someone else’s message. It just was this kind of wild fascism that would never be done except in the most dire circumstances (there were actually arguments about it when spam started cropping up, some people felt like even removing spam was going too far). Now, even someone who doesn’t own the server hardware feels empowered to set “rules” as you say for what people are allowed to say to each other, sometimes very arbitrary and clearly self-serving or etc. In my opinion, success lies somewhere between those two extremes: People generally being able to talk to one another (and the architecture being designed where it’s assumed that they’re allowed to) even if someone else doesn’t like it and wants to make rules against it, but still moderation set up for people who want it to the extent that they want it.

There’s obviously still a need for someone to take responsibility for deleting spam, harassment, or abusive content, and there’s going to be a grey area. I feel like, generally, you can let people control their own feeds and moderation that applies to them, and they will probably decide to configure it in a way where the anti-spam protection is applied to their feed and their weird additional arbitrary rules are not. That’s what I was saying.

The creator doesn’t curate it beyond curating what communities are visible in it.

Yes, I’m aware. I was proposing a new way in which it could work, I know that currently it doesn’t work that way. I don’t even know that the thing I spitballed is the way to do it, just someone asked how it could work, so I spitballed one possible way.

People. What a bunch of bastards.

Make it pull instead of push. Each user has way too little control over their own experience in my opinion. To me from an old-school-internet background, it’s very weird that a moderator can override what comments you’re allowed to see or not allowed to see. I much prefer Bluesky’s model, where you pick your moderators, and someone can’t override you and decide that certain comments you’re not allowed to read just because those comments happened to land within that person’s little domain after they were the first to claim the “worldnews” name for their community or whatever.

How to graft that onto Lemmy is a little bit difficult. It’s just a different model. I mean you could have a list of moderators whose decisions you want to block (similar to your list of users you want to block) – if any of those moderators removed a comment, you can still read it, their decisions just don’t affect your feed in any way. That would be a simple hack, sort of a useful check on their “power” if you want to say it that way, although it’s definitely a little bit rough approach. Probably a more holistic way would be to restructure how content even gets shared around. I haven’t looked at how Piefed does “feeds,” but that might be one good approach; let someone create or share a “politics” feed for example, and it can be a modification of someone else’s feed (“!news@lemmy.world but take out the Trump stuff” or “block these specific annoying users” or “ignore decisions by these two moderators”), so that it’s not a monopoly in terms of who gets to curate and control the content. You could subscribe to !betterpolitics@lemmy.world for example, and it’s just the identical posts sourced from !politics@lemmy.world, but with some users that are widely disliked banned, and then also with certain moderators who consistently make bad decisions disabled. That’s a lot harder to implement of course… IDK, this is just me thinking out loud about solutions I could see, but hopefully it makes some kind of sense.

What do you miss from Reddit?

Activity in niche communities, but that’s changing slowly.

Actually, two other things I do miss from Reddit: In the heyday (and even still to some extent now), it was so massive that you could have whole communities of types of real-world people you would never interact with. There is a subreddit for cops, one for air traffic controllers, one for sex workers, one for working historians to answer the general public’s questions, and so on. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ghislaine Maxwell had active Reddit accounts. You could come into contact (in their weird text-box-only way) with people you would never come in contact with, and more to the point you could see what their hivemind looked like and their consensus on public issues. I always liked Reddit’s community model better than the twitter “everything goes on the pile” model, because you could have these for-real communities develop, and it was fascinating sometimes to see what they thought of things or watch them in action.

Edit: Oh, the other thing, AMAs of real public figures, similar idea

heavy-handed moderation and echo chambers where any dissenting opinion gets buried

I have bad news for you lol

It is fine, Lemmy is far superior. But, their baffling decision to copy Reddit’s “lords and peasants” model of moderation has led to a lot of the same moderation rot on Lemmy I am sad to say. It’s just in less of a late stage terminal form as it was on Reddit. At least the echo chambers are separate echo chambers, and they can yell across the void at each other. lemmy.ml is pretty much the only community that is severely balkanized to its own isolated community where politics / geopolitics are concerned.

In general, Lemmy is nice because it is more varied. lemmy.world is the most Reddit-like in terms of having a “hivemind,” then there are particular smaller servers with their own cultures going on. It is more quiet but a lot more human in my opinion.

Enjoy.