I see two issues here:

• more “dunking”
• awful takes getting more attention

Agreed 100%.

As someone with some unpopular opinions that I think are backed by good data, I get down votes on a number of my comments. I find that changing the way I present ideas goes a long way toward changing perception. My natural way of presenting things is to give the TLDR at the start and justify it after, but a lot of people don’t read past the TLDR. So when presenting something controversial, I’ll change my tactic to reference something popular and demonstrate some tweaks I’d make to arrive at my idea.

For example, I’m a fan of a Negative Income Tax. Most people don’t know what that is, and I used to start by saying it could replace welfare, which is unpopular (I have good reasons to want that end goal). Instead, I pitch it as UBI, but not going to wealthy people, and that’s a lot more popular, amd then down the thread I can show how it could make welfare more accessible (i.e. replace it) by eliminating the complex application process.

If I didn’t see downvotes, I wouldn’t be able to make that correction.

And we should take it a step further and have posts be digitally signed by the author. That way we can detect any db-level tampering.

And then there’s my instance:

• sh.itjust.works - pretty chill, and things tend to work pretty well

I’m not sure what else to say about the culture.

Yup, just slap it in the sidebar as a “related community.”

Yup, it’s easy to make a more specific community if the interest is there.

the fact everyone basically have a fully copy of everything does have some considerable privacy implications

And I assume some cost concerns as well as posts start to pile up, especially images and whatnot. But the benefit is that it distributes the read load across instances, since you only need to send new content and serve content for your direct users (people on your instance). It’s a tradeoff, and I guess we’ll see how that works out over the next few years.

Did they remove down votes from Jerboa? I haven’t used it in months and just use my phone browser.

I’m talking about a mastodon user referencing a Lemmy community vs a Lemmy user. Mastodon apparently uses the same syntax for both.

No worries!

I’m talking about mastodon interacting with Lemmy, not Lemmy interacting with itself.

That’s not the question though. The question is what if I make a user called “@Lemmy@lemmy.ml” (i.e. this community)? That’s probably allowed on Lemmy, but since Mastodon doesn’t have the concept of communities in nearly the same way, what would happen?

That’s generally how I found Reddit to be. Avoid the largest communities and find some with a decent amount of activity.

It’s the same way it worked on Reddit, so nothing new here.

Yeah.

I really don’t want to see text like this.

It would make things a lot more annoying to read.

I much prefer combining sentences by default. It’s natural to put a blank line between paragraphs, and Markdown was designed to make the natural thing render decently. You can put things on separate lines if you want, and it’ll always read nicely.

But definitely break things up into paragraphs if it makes sense.

Sure, and I think most moderators would choose to not subscribe to hashtags at all, because hashtags don’t fit well with the community-based system. If you want hashtags, use Mastodon. If you don’t, use Lemmy.

Not all parts of a topic belong in a community. For example, let’s say I have a community about car mechanic advice. The relevant topics are probably #cars #auto_repair and #mechanics. However, #cars can also apply to new cars, deals on used cars, or the movie cars, none of which are directly relevant to auto repair. Likewise, #mechanics can apply to airplane mechanics or even video game mechanics. Trying to match communities to sets of hashtags is going to be noisy, so you’ll get a lot of false positives and false negatives.

Likewise, not all individuals in a community are worth following, and individuals often post about different topics than the ones in a community. If you’re interested in cars and I post about cars, you may want to follow me. But I may also post about cryptocurrencies and lawn care, and you may not care about those at all.

Trying to mix Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook style posts doesn’t particularly work. It’s better, IMO, to use services that do each of those well separately, and cross-post from one to another when you think it’s relevant. Treat them as islands, and build bridges between them, don’t try to mash them together into one SM soup.

Not a fan.

If you want to follow:

• topics - use something like Twitter
• groups - use something like Reddit
• individuals - use something like Facebook

If you think a post is relevant from one of those in another, link it.

I’ve considered it, yeah. There aren’t many posts, and I’ve been thinking of posting a bunch there to get it more popular.

Or maybe I’ll make a new, related community with a little broader appeal, idk. I find avoiding lemmy.ml is usually more enjoyable.

Here’s what I do:

• occasionally post stuff and comment

I really haven’t had any issues on the two I mod, but they’re pretty small communities. And honestly, at Lemmy’s scale, if you’re feeling the need to use tools, you’re probably moderating too strictly, or you’re moderating a massive community.