Here’s what I think. Bear with me, I’ll come around to the moderation aspect.
The Old Internet
A social network lives or dies on the social contract between its participants. The technology really isn’t important at all, as long as it’s marginally functional.
The old-school internet had a strong social contract. There are little remnants surviving, that seem hilarious and naive in the modern day, but for the most part the modern internet has been taken over by commercial villains to such an extreme degree that a lot of the norms that held it together during the golden age are just forgotten by now.
- Web robots used to grab robots.txt, parse a file format that wasn’t totally simple, and figure out what rules they needed to obey while crawling the site, and then they would obey them. Against all conceivable logic, this is still mostly true on the modern web.
- People used to type their email addresses in when they logged in over anonymous FTP, not because anything at all would happen if they didn’t, but because it was polite to let the server operator know what was going on when you used their resources.
- April 1st used to be a huge holiday on the internet. Nothing could be trusted to work like normal. Everything was lies, but they were so cunningly crafted that a significant number of people would be taken in. People participated, both users and operators. It was like art. It was great days.
Basically, it was fun, and it was safe. That combination is harder to do than it sounds. It was a creative and comfortable place.
Starting with eternal September, and up until today, it’s different. The modern internet would be unrecognizable and tragic to anyone who was around back then.
Read this:
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and observed and learned the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users. The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year college students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their universities. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year.
Now contrast that, the nature of the September internet and how little everyone could believe how unpleasant it was, and how it got fixed again every year after a short time, with the modern internet. It’s been September for so long that the idea of an internet without annoying people on it, where everyone’s mostly on the same page and just enjoying the interaction, or that we could “fix” the annoying people by them just learning how to behave, is comical. Tragic comedy, but comedy.
I think one core thing that made the difference is: It used to be a privilege to be on the internet. You couldn’t just do it. You either had a tech job which was a rare and exotic thing, or you were a student. If you weren’t one of those things, you weren’t on the internet. End of story.
The great democratization was a great thing. Myspace and Napster were great. It’s good that anybody can be on the internet. And there’s no going back anyway. We’ve got what we’ve got.
But I think a key thing that was lost is that it was ours. In Douglas Adams’s words, "One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
That used to be true, in a time now long gone. Now “they” have come to the internet. Among other roles, “they” run your service, and they don’t give a fuck what you think. They want to make money off you, they want to mine your data, they’re going to choose what you will and won’t experience, and their priorities are not your priorities.
What This Means For Federated Community Internet
I think the federated social media that is coming now is a great thing. It’s fantastic. It’s back to the old architecture, partially. But, I think it has unintentionally imitated some of the design patterns that exist on the current “they” internet. Among them:
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You don’t control your experience. That is designed and curated for you by “they.” You can configure it, but you have to turn in a formal request if you want to make changes outside the parameters, and since you’re requesting someone spend significant effort on you who doesn’t know you from a can of paint, the answer is probably no.
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Anyone can join. It’s free, the more the merrier, and if they turn out to be toxic, then the other peons, or some volunteer moderators if it gets bad beyond a certain point, will have to put up with it.
I think this social-contract-free internet is a vastly reduced experience compared with what could be. One of the features of it being “ours” is that we have a shared responsibility to make it good.
Here’s how I see the social contract on the modern social internet, according to the model that most federated social media has adopted:
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Anyone can join. You can be as big a pain in the ass as you like, to anyone at all.
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The moderators are forced to deal with you. They come to expect rudeness, dishonesty, greed, anger and deliberate destruction. They have to, for no particular reward at all, deal with it all and keep things on an even keel. Anyone they ban gets to make a new account and have another go. Have fun!
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Site admins and developers at least get their $500/month from kofi, or whatever, which I am sure is nice. But, in comparison to the vital nature of their role and how difficult it is to do at scale, they get nothing. They have to be missionaries going into the wilderness and expecting to give of themselves to the world.
It’s understandable to me for that arrangement to produce some social interactions that are chaotic, toxic and pointless.
Most social contracts don’t work that way. Someone in a “moderator” type of role would get respect, sometimes they would get paid, there would be a standard of shared conduct that everyone involved wanted to see from everyone else involved. It’s the difference between the meditator in a social clique who helps when there is trouble, versus HR, who doesn’t really give a fuck what your problems are, and is just there for their 8 hours.
I think this is the root of the “mods are assholes” issue. It’s not that the mods are power tripping. It’s that they are placed in a role that will lead inevitably to toxic behavior, unless someone turns out to be a solid gold saint, which few of us are.
I think that because there’s no code of conduct from the users above the bare legal minimum, it’s easy for a moderator to get jaded by the absolutely unending stream of assholes they have to deal with, and start to look at the nature of the whole thing as a toxic jungle of racism and lies. Because why would they not? That’s what it is, in part, and they interact with that part every day.
A better arrangement is an understanding which involves the users agreeing to something beyond the minimum in order to participate. Something to make them aware that they are requesting a privilege when they log in, that their participation in the system can make it either better or worse, and they recognize and respect their role in making a nice place.
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Having to write a few sentences about why you want to join, and having the instance admin say yes or no, is actually a nice start. It’s some symbolic reframing, right at the start of the thing, that says, “Hey, this is my place. Do you want to come in?” but holds you at the door until we have a little conversation about it.
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Old-school BBSs used to have an upload/download ratio. They dealt with the same type of problem by having software-enforced limits on what resources you were allowed to consume, and making you give back to earn that privilege. I think that’s great. There’s not an obvious translation of that into the Lemmy interaction model, but if something like that could be achieved, I think it would be really good.
It’s not that we need people to upload files or post a certain level of content. It is that consuming all these volunteered resources, including the eyeballs of others if you want to say something that is self-serving instead of in service to others, is a privilege, and that requirement reframes the entire situation into something which I think is more wholesome and appropriate, and nice to be a part of.
What To Do?
I don’t really have an answer here. I am simply describing the problem, and its impacts on moderation and social interaction, and how similar problems have been dealt with in the past.
Sorry for the abrupt ending, but I really don’t have much more to say.
What do you think?
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The old-school internet had a strong social contract. There are little remnants surviving, that seem hilarious and naive in the modern day, but for the most part the modern internet has been taken over by commercial villains to such an extreme degree that a lot of the norms that held it together during the golden age are just forgotten by now.
So, I’ve been online in some form or another since the late '80s - back in the old BBS, dial-up, and Usenet days. I think there’s actually different factors at play.
To start with, Usenet was often just as toxic as any current social media/forum site. The same percentage of trolls, bad actors, etc. That really hasn’t increased or decreased in my online lifetime. The only real difference was the absolute power wielded by a BBS or server admin, and that power was exercised capriciously for both good and bad. Because keeping these things up and running was a commitment, the people making the decisions were often the ones directly keeping servers online and modem banks up and running. Agree or disagree with the admins, you couldn’t deny they were creating spaces for the rest of us to interact.
Then we started to get the first web based news sites with a social aspect (Slashdot/Fark/Digg/etc). And generally there wasn’t just one person making decisions and if they wanted to make any money they had to not scare off advertisers, so that started making things different (again for good and for bad). It was teams of people keeping things going and moderation was often a separate job. Back in the day I remember on multiple occasions a moderator making one call and then a site owner overruling them. It was at this time the view on moderation really began to change.
Nowadays giant mega corps run the social media sites and manage the advertising themselves so they’re answerable to no one other than psychotic billionaires, faceless stockholders and executive tech bros with a lot of hubris. Moderation is often led by algorithmic detection and then maybe a human. Appeals often just disappear into a void. It has all become an unfeeling, uncaring technocracy where no one is held accountable other than an occasional user, and never the corporation, execs, or owners.
Like yourself, not sure how to fix it, but splitting the tech companies apart from their advertising divisions would be step one. Probably would be helpful to require social media companies to be standalone businesses. Would at least be easier to hold them accountable. And maybe require that they be operated as nonprofits? To help disincentivize the kind of behavior we’ve got now.
To start with, Usenet was often just as toxic as any current social media/forum site.
I definitely don’t think this is true. That’s the whole “eternal September” thing.
I do think trolls existed, definitely they did on BBSes, but the magnitude of the problem was just not even in the same ballpark.
Then we started to get the first web based news sites with a social aspect (Slashdot/Fark/Digg/etc).
I remember very distinctly being around for that first big meltdown on Slashdot, with Jon Katz being put in a special position by the site administrators in a way that the userbase didn’t agree with, a little bit of that impedance mismatch developing from that in what had before then been an all “us” type of place, and then something escalated and there was a big explosion and exodus. I don’t even fully remember the details, but I think I remember one of the site admins getting into a big public spat with some big part of the userbase, and going and tampering with the comments database to make his point, and that was pretty much the beginning of the end. It never recovered and what had been a pretty good thing up until that point just flamed out and became a shell.
Everyone sort of assumed it was an “us” place that the nerds were finally in charge of. That’s what made it special. Then that perceived betrayal of trust when the administrators tried to assert that it was “their” place firstly, and the users existed only at their pleasure, was really shocking to a lot of people. Again, on the modern commercial internet, even on moderator-curated Reddit clones like Lemmy, that’s normal, that’s the whole point of what I’m saying here. But back then the template of assumptions was much more innocent.
That’s the central conflict I’m talking about. How we can get back to the days where it’s all an “us” place. Lemmy is a huge step forward, I think.
Like yourself, not sure how to fix it, but splitting the tech companies apart from their advertising divisions would be step one. Probably would be helpful to require social media companies to be standalone businesses. Would at least be easier to hold them accountable. And maybe require that they be operated as nonprofits? To help disincentivize the kind of behavior we’ve got now.
I’m mostly talking about the volunteer internet. I don’t have any active accounts on commercial social media, even for business things. Why would I? It’s horrible, and I don’t see it getting any better for any reason any time soon. I think just outcompeting it from a better direction, and letting it follow along into the new protocols or not, is a better way.
I definitely don’t think this is true. That’s the whole “eternal September” thing.
I mean, it was my literal experience as a user. And it wasn’t just September, the first wave was June when high schoolers started summer break and spent considerable time online, and then the second wave in September with college kids. Honestly the second wave wasn’t as bad, as the college kids were using their university’s connection and they usually had some idea that if they went too far there might be consequences. Whereas the summer break latchkey high school kids were never that worried about any consequences.
I’m mostly talking about the volunteer internet. I don’t have any active accounts on commercial social media, even for business things.
I know, but that’s part of my point. The things that make online places feel safe, welcoming, and worthwhile are the same regardless if volunteer or commercial. I absolutely loved 2007 - 2012 early Twitter - it actually felt like the best of my old BBS/Usenet days but with much better scope. But I haven’t regularly been on there since 2016-ish, and completely left Reddit in July of last year (despite having had an account since 2009). For me the volunteer and federated social media has the best shot at being a “good” place, but I don’t have a philosophical objections to seeing commercial social media become less horrible, and in terms of understood and agreed upon social contract, I think approaching both with the same attitude should be encouraged.
We don’t need the commercial social media to fail for us to succeed, we need to change how people think about how they participate in online spaces and how those spaces should be managed and by whom.
I think we’re talking about different time periods. In the time I’m talking about, before AOL connected with Usenet, the number of high school kids on the actual internet could probably be measured in double digits. There were BBSes, which had their own wonderful culture, but they had trolls and villains in a way that Usenet did not.
Edit: Here’s what I’m talking about: Imagine a network where there was no process for removing spam. The process was that if someone tried to post something obnoxious, which happened occasionally, everyone would yell at them, and they’d stop. Up until January-April 1994, that was sufficient. In the mid-90s, people started occasionally posting spam, since there was nothing built into the system to stop them, and a process arose that was essentially human moderators deleting the messages. There was some amount of controversy about the idea, because being able to have one person delete another person’s messages was seen as censorship, and some people would have rather had the spam, which was still a very occasional problem. But for about 15 years, the network operated without a single person to my knowledge posting commercial spam.
I know, but that’s part of my point. The things that make online places feel safe, welcoming, and worthwhile are the same regardless if volunteer or commercial. I absolutely loved 2007 - 2012 early Twitter - it actually felt like the best of my old BBS/Usenet days but with much better scope.
I completely agree with this. I think most of the factors that make a network a nice place are social. Technological features can destroy or inhibit the social contract that I’m talking about, which I think happens a lot right now, but the main issues are not technological. The pre-dark-forest-internet phase of Twitter is a great example of people making a good place for themselves.
I think we’re talking about different time periods. In the time I’m talking about, before AOL connected with Usenet, the number of high school kids on the actual internet could probably be measured in double digits. There were BBSes, which had their own wonderful culture, but they had trolls and villains in a way that Usenet did not.
It was higher than you think. While an outlier, realize WarGames came out in 1983. I grew up in the suburbs of DC, and by 1986, a number of us had modems and regularly dialed into local BBSes. Basically as soon as we got 2400 bits/s, it started to get more widespread. And honestly since we usually knew the admin running the BBS we dialed into, there were less serious trolling issues. But newsgroups were another matter - usually folks were pretty much anonymous and from all over, and while there could be a sense of community, there were healthy amounts of trolls. What you’re describing is the literal exact opposite of my own lived experience. Nothing wrong with that, and doesn’t mean either of us are wrong, just means different perspectives/experiences.
I think it’s possible you’re thinking of Fidonet or something similar. I’m not trying to argue with you, I’m just saying I was around on Usenet and some of the national BBS culture at the time as well, and well into the mid-90s, they were two separate cultures.
What you’re saying about BBS culture is absolutely true. Usenet was different. I think the first Usenet-to-BBS gateway that even existed was UFGATE, from 1988 or some similar time. 1986 was before even the alt. hierarchy, when the people that put together the system were uncomfortable with the idea of even unregulated newsgroups existing. I don’t know how many nodes there were in the system back then, but I know in 1984, there were less than a thousand sites in the world even connected to Usenet. I don’t think BBSes were in the picture back then. I can’t swear it never happened, from single sites with forward-thinking sysops of some kind, but I would be surprised if you can go back in any kind of Usenet archive and find even a single message from someone pre-1990 who isn’t identified by their full real name, and some tech or research institution as their place of entry. Maybe Kibo.
The influx of people from AOL or Delphi in the mid-90s, and the alarm and despair it caused as it damaged the existing Usenet culture of the time, is very well-documented. I’m not saying you’re wrong. For all I know you were on Usenet and witnessed the occasional troll back then. I’m just trying to say that the type of interactions on Usenet back then were very, very different than on the modern internet, and 1994 was when the old Usenet culture died, as people got widespread access to it.
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100%: anyone complaining that the mods are mean are not old enough to remember when the people in the moderator positions had actual real power.
If you pissed off a BBS sysop, they had the power to ban your ass, block your phone number, and tell you to fuck off and never come back. And if you really pissed them off, they’d call/netmail all their local BBS friends and you’d be tossed out of everywhere.
Shitposting on Usenet? You’d find your usenet provider would tell you to stop it, and if you didn’t, they would revoke your account and that was that.
Doing abusive things on someone’s FTP server with your actual email address? Your email provider would delete your shit and tell you to go fuck yourself.
Doing an abusive thing with your connection? (Winnuke, any sort of hacking, whatever) Your ISP would yank your connection and tell you to go fuck yourself.
And, of course, in a LOT of cases these were things provided by your work and/or school, which means you could have even more actual consequences for being a fuckstain.
There’s no longer any painful enforcement of any norms (oh no, i have to spend 8 seconds making a new account!) because there’s no longer any real gatekeepers with actual enforcement power.
Or, if they have it, they’re too scared to use it, because they’re too fussed with what someone might angry-tweet if they do.
I prefer that old way, to be honest. It seems like the moderators are trying to be “evenhanded” now, which I can understand being necessary as things grow, but what you are saying is part of what I am saying.
There’s a culture on the commercial internet that you can always have a free account just because you want one, and that’s led to entitlement on the part of the users and exploitation on the part of the service providers. That culture carried over into fediverse servers, where really something more like the old BBS model would be more appropriate to me. The sysop took responsibility for the system being good, and yes you can come, but a pretty small amount of douchebaggery meant you could get the hell off my hardware and no apologies.
Agreed: commercialized services want everyone and don’t want to ban anyone for anything unless they absolutely have to because there’s a risk of legal complications if they do not do so. (I worked that shit for a long time, and ugh, did not enjoy having to have arguments over a user’s “value” vs their behavior.)
And as someone who is nominally running “public” fediverse services (though the user base I’ve served has been minimal because I’m not advertising for users and have outright rejected basically everyone who’s just wandered in, lol) I’m 100% on the this-is-mine bandwagon.
I’m paying for it, I’m maintaining it, and thus what I say goes and if you strongly dislike it, then, well, oh no, too bad. Find somewhere else to be.
One outlier of this uh… moderation challenge? has always been Something Awful. $10 for an account, and they will happily ban your ass without thinking too hard about it if you break rules.
It’s basically the last remaining bastion of old-internet-forums that are still useful and worthwhile and I’m 100% convinced it’s because it’s not free, and that your ass will be rapidly ejected if you’re a dick regardless of you paying or not. Put an actual incentive (if small) on not being a complete shithead.
Site admins and developers at least get their $500/month from kofi
Just lol. Someone please arrange for my 500 per month >_<. We have one of the largest instances in the threadiverse and we don’t even get 1/5 of that :D
Personally, I like the idea of a $1/month fee paid to the server operators. Something Awful does something like that, and it works like gangbusters apparently. Right now, the entitlement of free access without even a laughably nominal fee creates a not-ideal set of expectations of both sides, both users and admins.
It’s probably a total nonstarter of an idea, because the user culture on Lemmy right now is so entitled that it would be seen as some kind of grave insult to the users, in their position as free demanders of whatever service level they’ve come to expect and they will yell if they don’t get it. Which is precisely the problem. Community and volunteerism are wonderful things. Even as it is, it’s much better than the commercial model. But it can definitely be improved from here.
Like I said, I thought of a few different ways of trying to redress the balance, but nothing that was convincing. I think, in complete seriousness, that just starting fresh in some other corner of the fediverse might be a better way. I have a whole host of other types of thoughts about that and what this all means, from the point of view of my involvement in the whole operation, which will have to wait for me to have time for a whole separate essay for anyone who wants to hear it.
I like this piece. Well-thought, and well laid out.
I do believe that mods getting weathered, as OP outlined, is part of the issue. I’m not sure on good ways to solve this, but introducing a few barriers of entry here and there might alleviate it. We just need to be sure that those barriers actually sort good newbies in and bad newbies out, instead of simply locking everyone out. Easier said than done.
Another factor is that moderator work grows faster than community size; you get more threads, each with more activity, users spend more time in your community, they’re from more diverse backgrounds so more likely to disagree, forest fires spread faster so goes on. This is relevant here because communities nowadays tend to be considerably bigger than in the past; and, well, when you got more stuff to do, you tend to do things in a sloppier way.
You can recruit more mods, of course; but mod team size is also a problem, as it’s harder to get everyone in the same page and enforce rules consistently. If one mod is rather lax and another is strict, you get some people getting away doing worse than someone else who got banned, and that makes the whole mod team look powertripping and picking favourites, when it isn’t. (I’m not sure on how to solve this problem besides encouraging people to migrate to smaller communities, once they feel like the ones that they are in are too big.)
Completely agreed. If your whole social framework depends on finding someone you can rope into playing “daddy” over the whole operation, thus dealing with a constant stream of unregulated unpleasantness and noise day in and day out to keep things orderly, it’s not going to be surprising if they are sometimes offensive in how they deal with any given user. Honestly, seen in that light, the kind of behavior that leads people to grumble about how the mods are power tripping makes perfect sense. It is the only expectable outcome.
I don’t know how you could start building that social framework, separate from the code framework that defines the system, so that people didn’t feel empowered to come in and be horrible and it be the mods’ job to stop them. I have a couple of ideas, but nothing that is very convincing to me.
I think the federated social media that is coming now is a great thing. It’s fantastic. It’s back to the old architecture, partially. But, I think it has unintentionally imitated some of the design patterns that exist on the current “they” internet. Among them:
You don’t control your experience. That is designed and curated for you by “they.” You can configure it, but you have to turn in a formal request if you want to make changes outside the parameters, and since you’re requesting someone spend significant effort on you who doesn’t know you from a can of paint, the answer is probably no.
Could you clarify what you mean by this? I assume when you say “they” on the Internet you talk about the Internet’s commercialization and commodification by companies. In what way is the Fediverse curated for you by “they”? Is it the news and other external links people post?
“They” meaning developers, administrators, and moderators. There’s quite a lot more hierarchy in the social structure than there used to be.
One example is that some site admins want some moderation features, and they lobby the developers, but the nature of the technology is that it’s difficult for them to just lay out their own features, and the developers’ time is limited, so the developers say no. So people don’t get their moderation features. On the long-ago internet, there were many, many different software options that supported the same protocols, and they were also a lot more configurable generally speaking, so that you weren’t stuck lobbying a single group of developers to implement your thing or get stuck with things not being the way you want.
Probably a bigger example is that there are constant little impedance mismatches between how people want certain communities to be moderated, and how they are moderated. People do want for the experience to be curated. It’s unwieldy, with the current volume of assholes, to say that it’s each user’s responsibility to encounter a handful of assholes in every comments section and block them individually, so that the overall experience splinters, consistent assholes are free to continue harassing new users until the new users learn to block them, and any given asshole is everyone’s problem. That’s the problem with just blocking the MBFC bot if someone doesn’t like it. It’s fine as an individual solution, sort of, but the fact that it’s even an issue in the first place speaks to a code-enforced hierarchy of control that doesn’t match the hierarchy of respect and consent. That’s why people keep bringing it up instead of just blocking the bot, I think.
I think that this is one thing Bluesky does right, where you can opt for certain people to “moderate” your experience, but there’s not a single grouping which has a monopoly on being able to do that. It’s under your control. That would be an example of what I’m saying, where on Lemmy there is a “they” that is uniquely empowered to ban you from a community, or decide not to ban someone else that you think is objectively being a nuisance, but the “us” that is in the community can’t make that decision. On Bluesky, it’s all one grouping of users, and they can decide how to control that aspect of their own experience, and that’s a good thing.
Hopefully that makes sense. I’m not trying to air any sour grapes, or say that the developers should immediately prioritize any wishlist thing that comes their way. I’m also not trying to say that the moderators need to obey how I want MBFC bot to be handled, or let me post if I want to change the title of an article for clarity, or anything like that. I’m saying that, in terms of system design, the very existence of a unique grouping that I need to be lobbying to do these things is a development that should be worked away from, over time.
IMO copying communities from Reddit as-is was a mistake long-term, but was maybe necessary short-term so that people wouldn’t be confused. If I had my druthers, I’d make a new system where communities are uniquely identified purely as
!UUID@lemmy.instance(though still with a human-friendly display name). You don’t get to create a community that namesquats something like!gaming@lemmy.world. All posts would be made with hashtags like Mastodon, and then each community would just configure “Include all posts with this tag in our community”. The big issue then is who moderates tags? I think a system like Bluesky has would work well, as you mention. People can moderate tags and other people can follow their work, or not.If that was combined with seamless account/community migration, that would solve a lot of moderation issues. If you mod a community and the admins suck, just move it to a new instance. If the mods of a particular community suck, start your own. They won’t be able to monopolize a common name, so it’s much easier to get traction.
On the long-ago internet, there were many, many different software options that supported the same protocols, and they were also a lot more configurable generally speaking
Lemmy is pretty good about that, actually. It’s interoperable with Mastodon via ActivityPub, and there’s other projects like MBin that work nicely with Lemmy.
All posts would be made with hashtags like Mastodon, and then each community would just configure “Include all posts with this tag in our community”. The big issue then is who moderates tags? I think a system like Bluesky has would work well, as you mention. People can moderate tags and other people can follow their work, or not.
You’re describing something like microblogging though. That’s how that works already. We don’t need to duplicate that in theadiverse. However, just a way to see merged comment sections from different communities for the same URL would go a long way to avoid too much splintering of discussions.
The way I’m imagining it, it wouldn’t be microblogging, but I’m probably not describing it well. You’d still have communities with threads, unlike Mastodon. You’d just wouldn’t have people posting “to” those communities (unless maybe you intentionally wanted to).
It’s mostly a way to get at the same thing as merged comment threads, just in a way that feels like it would have fewer edge cases to me.
Yeah. The whole concept of the fediverse is a huge step forward. And even squatting on community names doesn’t really work. If [email protected] sucks, people can move to [email protected].
I do completely agree that the protocols are not really set up fully with these considerations in mind, and they should be, more so.
Oh, now I see. Thank you for clarifying.
I think this is the root of the “mods are assholes” issue. It’s not that the mods are power tripping. It’s that they are placed in a role that will lead inevitably to toxic behavior, unless someone turns out to be a solid gold saint, which few of us are.
While part of it, I think the bigger issue is that the typical male participant has “main character syndrome”, and when a mod doesn’t want to spend a lot of time with them specifically because they have better things to do, these participants turn to whining about unfair treatment, when in reality it is just their overinflated sense of entitlement.
This is absolutely true. The level of entitlement and lack of appreciation that the average toxic user has for the whole effort and kindness that goes into providing a volunteer Lemmy network for them to come and be a part of, and how little regard they have for it, is breathtaking.
I’m saying that the two sides of that coin, users who behave in not ideal ways and mods that behave in not ideal ways, are of a piece and feed into one another. By inviting the first and making an unspoken promise that nothing in particular is required of anybody to come in and use the network in any way that they feel like, whether it adds to the community or is destructive to it, we’re welcoming a type of behavior that is not reasonable to ask a volunteer moderator to deal with indefinitely, which is part of what over time leads to the second. I think fixing the first problem is absolutely necessary in order for the network, in the long run, to be a nice community.
I don’t think these people are necessarily “toxic users”, but rather just deluded ones. It’s a bit like that saying about privilege… you only think about it when someone is threatening to take it away.
The asymmetry of effort between moderators and regular participants is what forces this hidden sense of entitlement into the open.
I really appreciate you taking the time to write out your thoughts and share what you think made the old internet different from what we have today.
I’m 25, and never experienced any of what people talk about as “the old internet”. I didn’t even get to Reddit until it was already on the decline.
With many of the ways the world is changing, I think it’s important to consider not just what we want of our future, but also what we wish to keep of our past. And because you experienced a chapter of the internet’s history that I haven’t, you fundamentally have a perspective that I don’t, and that I really value you sharing a little bit of with me.
This post gave me a lot to reflect on, regarding what I agree with and whatnot, and I really hope this conversation regarding the Fediverse continues. We can build something that looks forward while learning from what was special about the past, and that starts with trying to understand what made it that way.
I appreciate your time, hope you have a lovely day today
Hey, thank you! I appreciate it. I like to put down these thoughts, I have been thinking about it since tinkering around with my own little corner of the operation.
You’re so very welcome my friend, your voice and perspective are appreciated!
Take care 😊
“little”
Cross post to [email protected]
A conversation I had over there was the inspiration for me to finally polish this writing up and post it here.
The point is not that the mods are power tripping, but that the whole structure which allows toxic users to flood the zone in uncontrolled numbers, and depends on volunteer moderators to deal with them all in order to keep things vaguely on the rails, is the fundamental problem. If that deeper issue could get fixed, I think any complaints anyone might have about mod behavior would instantly evaporate.
Mods are assholes is interesting, because its similar (but not the same as) all cops are bastards. Sure, a place where you dont need cops sounds great, but it also smells a lot like mass survailance or total anarchism (Mass survailance is walled garden internet and total anarchism is the fedi-pact).
Civility has become a cult.
Mods on modern websites (including Reddit and Lemmy.world) are forced to maintain courtly behavior instead of deciding who’s the asshole. They will protect any cautious troll who can politely phrase ‘you’re subhuman and also secretly agree with me’ but jump on the obvious reasonable response: “Fuck off.” Even when that curt dismissal is followed by an explanation of how a comment was dishonest and manipulative, you said the no-no word, so only you get the boot.
And that boot will tend to be as heavy as possible, sometimes instantly permanent, because god forbid anyone learn anything. You keep permanently banning these trolls, when they can get a new account in minutes, and they keep coming back within minutes? Wow, it’s almost like you’ve given them no reason whatsoever to stick out their ban and keep that username. Spritzing them in the face with a three-day time-out works better. This is basic Skinnerian conditioning - immediate reliable feedback is internalized and shapes future behavior.
I posted this to [email protected].
I’m not sure I agree with the ending part. I don’t know what the best solution to this behavior is. I do agree that often permabans, and emphasizing lack of “civility” as the chief metric of toxicity, are stupid and ineffective ways.
deleted by creator
I think I made a mistake by bringing in the concept of power tripping mods. I do think that exists, although as @[email protected] says, it’s often an invention of someone who is being moderated for good reason.
The whole point I was trying to make was that because there is no strong social contract, anyone who is a moderator is getting put in an unreasonable position. They have to keep coming back to herd 500 feral cats in their free time for no paycheck, and that’s not a fair thing to ask a whole contingent of people to do, as the backbone of a good social network. It’s fine that they want to do it and have signed up to do so, so that things can work and we can have this nice thing, but it’s not the way.
It is true that sometimes they become unreasonable as a result of being in that position, but that wasn’t the point. It is that we need to fix the users, instead of trying to have volunteer mods always backstopping the user behavior once it passes a certain absurdly toxic threshold.
I think I made a mistake by bringing in the concept of power tripping mods.
you’re right to: a huge majority of the lemmyverse’s current userbase has self sorted themselves into a few instances that makes power tripping mods a real problem.
if they had embraced the lemmyverse in it’s original tankie spirit this would not be is a problem at all because the fediverse is designed to keep the discourse going despite any block/ban/defederation; taking those actions only serves to remove yourself from the main group chat that everyone else can see. a power tripping mod has no power when you can easily side step them to continue participating in the discourse.
By the same logic however, mods would have no power to actually moderate. Their moderation ability is directly proportional to their potential for abuse. And I think we can all agree we’ve long passed the point where communities are able to survive without moderation, at least in their current form (which is what OP is discussing).
a bigger dominant group will always encounter issues when trying to gentrify a neighborhood away from it’s original inhabitants and this digital lemmy neigborhood; its original tankie inhabitants; and it’s reddit enshitification induced gentrifiers are no different.
several features of lemmyverse sustain its intended tankie audience and work against you like anti-homeless architecture if you try to dominate the discourse through banning/blocking/defederation. it’s sort of like a digital equivalent of anti-homeless-spikes or anti-homeless split public benches; but for people who try to power trip when enforcing moderate only views like most of these moderators and admins do.
martin luther king jr believed that moderates have “shallow understanding” and the reddit refugee’s desire to maintain that shallow understanding has shepherded them to self sorted, into mostly inactive echo chambers and the few active ones have censorship problems since those refugees have; effectively; cut themselves off from a majority of the discourse on the lemmyverse.
i likewise have shallow understanding of the lemmyverse’s issues from a moderate’s perspective. i think i’m more tolerant of people with THOROUGHLY uninformed political views due to having immediate maga family members and i think that’s served me well in accepting that i’m in a tankie safe space and adapting myself to thrive in it instead of trying to force the environment to suite me. those same family members have also taught me to accept when someone’s world views are so delicate that they simply can’t handle anything to the contrary, so i can accept that reddit liberals don’t want to talk to tankies and i hope that they can find something about this place to stay.
if they leave they’ll discover that no reddit diaspora has ever survived and the lemmyverse is in the best situation to survive if it can capitalize enough on the relatively huge user base bump and the political disposition of this particular diaspora. leaving also means either going back to reddit or signing up with bluesky where future enshitification is already guaranteed and they’ll eventually go back looking for a new social media platform again as they are now.
I use to use old forums, i don’t think the fediverse is worst then those old systems.
I think you could just ask a one time fee when registering or a monthly fee if you want to reduce moderators burnout or increase professionalization (in the best possible sense). maybe even just have the money used and publicly donated to some non profit (or stuff like funding lemmy development). maybe having a place where people know everyone donated to achieve some worthy goal will increase the trust between people.
An idea i had that i imagine would turn out pretty well is Japanese speaking forums for westerners specifically. It’d have a buy in that no one interested in only trolling would go in for (learning a language, especially one far from English).
Some pirate coves protect themselves by requiring an invite from someone already in the community, that could work really well too.
Generally, just requiring a little work to get someplace would make communities a lot nicer.
What To Do?
Regulation. Vote and support things like net neutrality, days ownership, privacy, and breaking up tech monopolies.
I’m mostly talking here about Lemmy and its design, and to a certain extent the other platforms on the volunteer social internet. Having the government break up the Lemmy monopoly doesn’t sound like a step in the right direction.
I’m not sure that even Lemmy has a monopoly on the fediverse anyways. But outside of the fediverse, breaking up the tech monopolies and enforcing net neutrality are steps in the right direction.
For the fediverse specifically, I’m not sure. One thing that might help is to make user accounts and magazines (communities) more portable. So if one signs up on the wrong instance, it’s easier to move to a friendlier instance. Currently, some folks seem to set up their own instance specifically for a community that they have planned explicitly to avoid this problem (but that makes it even harder to get a new owner if the mod-admin abandons the instance).
Of course, the technical bar to setting up and running your own instance is a bit higher than just signing up to, for example, fedia.io (And that’s just if you want to run vanilla - you generally have to be an actual software dev if you want to customize the software that your instance runs.)
But coding software, and moderating a community, or an entire instance, are all different things and I suspect that there’s not much overlap with the first one and the other two. So I don’t have any good solutions either, just suggesting that if the fediverse required everyone to set up their own instance to join, we’d likely be in a pre-Eternal September phase.
The ship is sinking, flex tape isn’t enough
