- Mod of [email protected] posts a great Greta Thunberg quote, but then tries to use it to justify not voting in the upcoming US election
- Multiple people point out that’s very clearly not what she meant
- Removed by mod Removed by mod Removed by mod Removed by mod
Using your mod powers to decide who is allowed and not allowed to speak is not very anarchist of you, @[email protected]
Saying they don’t have authority because fediverse is a very disingenuous thing to say, they do indeed have some amount of authority because they run and control servers. Everyone who runs a server does and they have the capability to limit reach. Being able to start your own community doesn’t mean that others don’t have authority. The biggest servers have the most authority, if Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml wanted to both silence someone their post history would be wiped off the two largest servers entirely, and completely from all the communities they own, even in servers they don’t, as much as you insist it isn’t the case there absolutely is authority in the Fediverse.
If there wasn’t really, hijacking, comandeering, and then kicking people out of their own admin servers would be fair game. It isn’t though and is highly frowned upon, because they have authority over those servers and the slice of the pie, and that means they can silence you. Don’t try and delude people into thinking that isn’t possible, when it absolutely is and is kind of the reason why federation works the way it does. Since historically uncontrollable spaces were a bad idea that attract criminals and bad faith actors.
So I’m not saying it shouldn’t be the way it is, but I am saying it is disingenuous to frame the Fediverse like it is Nostr, because that’s not what it’s like and we don’t want to attract or welcome people who think it is.
What I don’t understand is how could a mod from a community have authority on someone on another community, let alone on an empty community? Like why would authority matter if no one is your subject?And I understand that making an instance is hard an not for everyone, but my hope is that it becomes easier and easier as time goes on.
If I remember, Lemmy is working on making sure comments and post history is exportable if you want to move instances. Having a backup of your account would definitely give even more power to the user IMO.
I never wanted to claim that the fediverse is like nostr. I just don’t consider it to be authoritarian because of the first paragraph.
More so a mod from an Instance. But a community mod can still have impact if they are close with their instance admin, which can have an impact on visibility and reach in the Fediverse depending on how big the servers are. Fediverse isn’t decentralized in the way most people think it is. In theory it is but in practical function it isn’t. Every server is like a slick of the pie in the Fediverse, and servers with more users are bigger slices. These bigger servers have more authority and if they decide to ban you or silence your communities (and you don’t retaliate by circumventing it with alt-accounts and/or lying on Registration to make them think you’re someone else) you’ll lose out on that chunk, and possibly 90% of the reach and interaction you’ll get. For these servers it’s a tradeoff because if they do it too much or too aggressively like Beehaw.org did they’ll lose their authority (I remember when Beehaw people had huge FOMO blowouts about the Beehaw defederation of Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, now people don’t even care, they killed the authority they had by killing their own reach), however when they haven’t gotten to that state their actions can be devastating to the reach of individuals here. Someone starting their own server or community on another server in these situations won’t really help because the pie slice of those instances is bigger.
Also even in the case of lowly moderators, if they moderate multiple large communities even without administrative abilities they can still squash your reach by banning you from the biggest communities. Similar to the issue of powermods on Reddit. Making your own communities doesn’t help here because your reach will be limited since the people are still over there. And despite what people say getting people to go elsewhere is no trivial task, you basically need admin/divine intervention to even put a dent in Network effect.
I do hope they do that, it wouldn’t solve the issue of servers being big enough to have a noticeable impact on your reach but it would solve the issue of servers being able to axe your account and history from existence entirely. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like they really care that much about doing that, at least not moving post history. Currently it only supports moving subscriptions, description, Display name, and a few other traits which… I don’t really see much benefit in. I didn’t do it when I created an account here, since I knew that if lemmy.world banned me or was angry at me for making an account here (there was a short feude with dbzer0 at the time and they were banning people talking about moving here) it wouldn’t really matter if I could take my subscriptions since 99% of them would be useless. Thankfully that didn’t happen though.
That’s good, though unfortunately I know that there are some… Okay a lot, a worrying amount in fact who do. I don’t think that Lemmy itself is authoritarian. I do think it is considerably better than mainstream social media sites like Reddit or Facebook, but I feel that telling people that admins and mods don’t have any authority on lemmy and the fediverse as a whole is at best naive and at worse reckless and irresponsible, because they ultimately do have power and authority based on popularity and size. And it can have severe negative impacts that simply self-hosting or making your own community can’t solve.
Of course this is also a feature of the Fediverse compared to Nostr because it means that shitty people are kept outside the fence (when they aren’t lying or cheating their way inside) so it’s a double edged sword. It’s important people are aware of that, because actually one of the biggest things we do have against bad actors who are big + powerful and do this is awareness. Because if a big server is silencing people aggressively, action can be taken by other servers to limit their reach, and their authority is greatly diminished. Beehaw did it to themselves but I could see a situation in which another server might have it done to them because they are silencing criticism for objectionable views while promoting and endorsing those objectionable views themselves.
So in that sense, communities like [email protected] or [email protected] are really good since they help develop that awareness and can lead to action being taken to stop abuse, like removing of remote communities from instances, or defederation of hostile instances.
Missing an e in the link
Fixed the typo.
Well put