Compassion >~ Thought

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2024

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  • Well, there truly is a trickle down effect there: there is only one Reddit, but there are many instances running Reddit 2.0 Lemmy, and several running Mbin or PieFed instead. So as a user, if you do not like Reddit, there aren’t really any good alternatives (read a book, Twitter/X or like Bluesky or Mastodon or GameFAQs or such, maybe touch grass, etc.:-), but if you do not enjoy a Lemmy, you can shuffle over to another one, or even start your own.

    What I said above is just the beauty of any generic Free and Open Source Software to run or be a user on a forum, but beyond that, the Federation model of sharing content via the ActivityPub protocol allows you to work with the identically same data from the new place as you would have from the old - more or less. e.g. if you get booted from Lemmy.ml and make a lemmy.world account then you could access the same communities on lemmy.ml, with the new account (although being careful this time not to cross the unwritten rules, including for ban evasion). Moving from Reddit to X doesn’t allow that, but moving from a Lemmy instance to another Lemmy, or Mbin or PieFed, does.

    So there is that tiny amount of freedom, which nonetheless still sets it apart from corporate non-FOSS Reddit, by virtue of the Federation model:-). The Fediverse software is quite resource intensive, depending on amount of network utilization, but widely considered to be better than isolated forum software for this reason of its interconnectedness:-).


  • You cannot. You never could. The difference that the Fediverse makes is that you can make your own instance.

    In fact, in many ways Lemmy is even more authoritarian than Reddit, this is basically a Reddit 2.0. Here there is a modlog, but no modmail, no notification of a moderation action, no ability to ask questions as to why (if only so that you can avoid doing so again?), especially when the modlog merely says that the action was done by a “mod” (so even if there were a moderator chat somewhere, usually on Discord or Matrix since they don’t bother discussing on Lemmy itself, or you wanted to send a DM, who would you send it to, unless you send it to literally all, thereby risking getting yourself getting banned from the entire instance for legitimately spamming DMs, bc no other means are provided to you!?).

    Edit; I’ve been waiting since the Rexodus nearly two years ago for any of this to be fixed. Do you want to know what all has happened during that time? I’ll warn you: it’s actually worse than nothing, and instead it has actively taken steps backwards. Previously the mod account name was reported in the modlog, so you could DM the one who took the action against your content, whereas now that information has been hidden from you. This is the opposite of “transparency”, a hallmark of democratic features of governance.

    On lemmy.ml, people routinely get instance-wide banned from communities that they’ve literally never even so much as heard of!? More importantly, for a rule that is never written down anywhere or explained to new users - don’t ever criticize the authoritarian regimes of Russia, China, or North Korea (perhaps soon the USA will be added to that list). On midwest.social numerous people have been banned merely for downvoting posts or comments offered by the instance admin, or for submitting reports (not spamming, just one) literally calling out cries for (not against) murder - ideological purity testing is real there. Meanwhile back on lemmy.ml, I can point you (if interested) to an actual conversation where a moderator tells a user that he wants to kill him - but ofc he is protected by the instance admins so nothing will ever be done about such occurrences, which for that mod I believe are somewhat well-known.

    Now you understand, the “freedom” that the Fediverse offers is not extended to the users, but rather to the instance owners - i.e. the landlords rather than renters. If you want that freedom, you have to start your own server.

    Or join one that offers it downwards to its users. PieFed offers MANY features facilitating democratization of moderation. Discuss.Online, a Lemmy instance, is quite well-known for allowing freedom to its userbase (though being located in the USA… for how much longer?). There are others - these are just ones that I definitely know about and recommend.

    TLDR: you cannot and never could, that’s a misunderstanding of the concept of the Fediverse, though there is potential to make freedom happen here, unlike Reddit where it’s a lost cause from the start.



  • It’s better than Reddit, badumtis!

    (Yeah, a very low bar indeed) When was the last time you tried it? It gets better literally weekly.

    Genuinely there are elements that I prefer using in Lemmy, and other elements I prefer PieFed, with the balance overall being 90:10 PieFed to Lemmy. And PieFed is growing by leaps and bounds. Lemmy is growing too but more slowly (it also might end up being more stable at larger scales - I dunno, though PieFed also sends like 25x less data per post iirc so the reverse could rather be true).

    Still, use whichever you prefer - the Fediverse is fantastic in offering us so many choices, all for free! Much respect to the dev teams of both, and Mbin too, as well as instance admins and most mods who donate their time to keep it all going!








  • PieFed has not merely several but MANY concepts along these lines.

    Lemmy, for ah… “reasons”, seems to have none. In fact, having a modlog but no modmail, nor any type of active notification of a moderation event occuring (e.g. content removal, locking, or banning), nor any method of asking whoever removed the content why (worse: the modlog used to say the account name that did so, but now merely says “mod”), there is a very compelling argument to say that Lemmy is more authoritian than even Reddit is, at least at the end-user level (though not for instance admins or mods).

    Edit: At which point PieFed’s efforts to provide democratization of moderation are like a breath of fresh air!:-) No longer must a mod+admin team be the sole arbitraters of content - users can themselves do things like filter out all, or just a little, or none of content matching certain keywords such as “Musk” or “Trump”. And icons next to usernames help alleviate the need to always block trolls - seeing that someone has an account less than two weeks old, or posts far more than they comment (unregistered bot?), or receives many more downvotes than upvotes (contentious user!) helps inform whether or how you may want to respond, while still allowing you to read their content if you should so desire. Such tools as these (and several others) put the choice of whether to see many varieties of content or not into the hands of individual users, unlike the Lemmy + Reddit model where only a mod+admin gets to decide for everyone in the community all at once. Okay so here’s another one: if you wish, you can have PieFed automatically collapse, or even hide outright (two different settings, with different filter thresholds) content that receives many downvotes. Personally I don’t like these so I turn them both off - but they still offer me that choice, which I greatly appreciate.:-)