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Well said. I don’t disagree with a single point you made, and some of it echos concerns I’ve had since day 1. And extra points for calling out .ml as lemmygrad-lite. I think I’ve called it exactly that as well.

The only thing I really have to add is on the topic of toxicity. Like you, I’m an instance admin and have a bird’s eye view of a lot of behavior patterns. I’ve recently started wondering how many people are here because they’re too toxic for regular social media rather than because they want to be here. I won’t guess an actual number, but I would say it’s not insignificant.

I’m firmly the latter case: I want to be here, I want this to succeed, and I’m trying to put in the work toward that result. And I’ve interacted with lots and lots of people in the same boat. But, like you, I’m also growing disillusioned for many of the same reasons.

On the bright side, I’ve gotten much less rusty as a developer after having to write scrips and tools to fill in the massive gaps in moderation features.

There are a lot of good points here, I appreciate the time you put into it.

As an end user of both Lemmy and Mastodon, it’s always an eye opener to see how developers greet user requests and suggestions with curt or snarky replies. Even “Why don’t you open an issue on our source tracker” will often effectively shut down suggestions from less tech savvy newcomers.

My own concerns are more on my own level, though. It resonates with me when you write —

The Fediverse has its own existing cultures that thrive here. And when you enter a space that already exists you need to be mindful of that to prevent issues from occurring.

I’ve seen a few user migration waves, and I think your description of (some) Lemmy users who just want a drop-in Reddit replacement is on point. Mastodon has had its share of Twitterati who surged in trying to recreate their previous circles and tone. Obviously, it’s a generalisation but we do need to face the problem.

The transition from a walled garden environment like Reddit or Twitter — moderated by professionals or enthusiasts, and algorithmically curated — to a federated space with carefully cultivated etiquettes will never be like simply picking up a conversation in another UI.

I’d be interested how a project like Sublinks would/could accommodate the existing fediverse cultures, and hopefully bridge the cognitive gap that seems to exist between threadiverse and fediverse?

Does anyone know of any Sublinks instances? The main page for it speaks in present tense, but I haven’t found any active instances. (aside from the demo, of course)

I apologize for my stupidity:

Many users on Lemmy seem actively hostile to the idea of decentralization in a way that feels self defeating. They don’t want a better alternative to Reddit, they just want Reddit 2.0 and attempts to sway them towards something better feels like pulling teeth.

Yes! I don’t think it bodes well for general adoption when so much of the Lemmyverse is hosted on two essentially “Reddit 2.0” (by that I mean loosely moderated) instances. Assuming half the population of the Lemmyverse are people banned from Reddit for poor socialization, it means new users considering switching are most likely to first encounter a pure concentrated form of the worst aspects of Reddit userbase.

Beehaw is the only “general” instance I know of who’s mods and admins seem to be actually up to the task of keeping their communities from becoming wholly exhausting and it’s because they didn’t allow themselves to balloon up beyond their ability to self-moderate.

Domain blocks are always publicly visible.

Mod logs are always publicly visible in the public mod log.

What? It is crucial for the users, not a bug.

These are some really good points. I’m personally more interested in the development of PieFed than SubLinks due to the focus on making it easy to contribute, the developer cares about usability and mod tools, its in Python, and the developer posts dev blogs and answers questions on mastodon https://join.piefed.social/blog/

Thank you for sharing your experiences. I feel the same way about Lemmy software, instances, and the Fediverse as a whole. Appreciate your post and efforts.

This blog post by a Lemmy user who accidentally uploaded his ID and dealt with the nightmare after describes in great detail the ridiculous steps instance admins need to take to remove images from the backend image server that Lemmy depends on. (as well touches upon the developer behavior aspect I will highlight later.)

You misgendered the author of that post, they use they/them pronouns.

Edit: I was mistaken about who the author of that post was.

I’m relieved to hear you’ll still be running your instance despite these issues! Are you thinking of potentially moving the Literature Cafe forums to Sublinks?

I definitely hear you on the moderation difficulties… with the Fediverse being as far-reaching as it is, good moderation tools are essential and it seems like Lemmy simply doesn’t have these available.

Yes! This blog post is fantastic. I read your article through this archive link (since my phone is being finicky with the direct site) and loved it and I’m glad you wrote it! You totally nailed it on every point and voiced a lot of things I’ve noticed and concerns I’ve had.
On the topic of non-anonymous reports: I’ve definitely already found myself hesitating or declining to make reports I feel should be made purely because they’re not anonymous. Sometimes because the people I want to report are admins. I’ve already had weird situations of people following me around to other posts because they disagree with me and I don’t want to add to that type of thing. Although I can understand that there are some potential upsides to being able to tell who is making reports, like to prevent misuse or spam… I dunno.

Thanks a lot for sharing it with us here! and thank you for the warning at the top about mentioning CSAM - and for calling it CSAM and not the other, worse, seemingly more prevelent term. I appreciate it and I appreciate you! :)

Very interesting post, very long but also interesting. I also agree with most of the points.

But I wonder why there is no mention of /kbin which has been a compatible alternative to Lemmy even during the Reddit exodus. It’s also written in PHP which many people should have a much easier time to contribute to than Lemmy’s Rust.

This post summarizes my thoughts on the issues with lemmy perfectly.

Many users on Lemmy seem actively hostile to the idea of decentralization in a way that feels self defeating. They don’t want a better alternative to Reddit, they just want Reddit 2.0 and attempts to sway them towards something better feels like pulling teeth.

I keep seeing this, and I don’t really understand. Lemmy is a link aggregator that allows users to organize those links into categories/communities/etc, and lets people comment on the links and have discussions about them. From an end-user perspective, that’s exactly what Reddit is. So I’m genuinely curious what’s meant when people say they don’t want Reddit 2.0 from a technical perspective. From a social perspective, the toxicity, brigading, shitposting, etc are definitely not desirable. But with shit moderation tools, those sort of things don’t get sorted, and federation just magnifies all of those problems. Though I think disabling voting definitely helps discourage shitposting and low-effort responses.

But I genuinely do think a lot of problems really come down to the fundamentals of federation. And given how many downsides there are to it, I’m not convinced it’s actually a benefit at all.

Why a new software though? Why not fork lemmy? Might as well call it Kilmister too. I just don’t see why reinvent the wheel, especially since the issue is that of management and not technical.

The link offers a download instead of serving an HTML? I’m on mobile Firefox (I doubt it matters).