Lemmyverse is not decentralised. It’s neutral at best. - Infosec.Pub
infosec.pub
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24727683 [https://slrpnk.net/post/24727683] > The fediverse w/the activitypub API sell itself as being decentralised, but it’s actually just neutral. It merely enables decentralised forums to coexist with centralised venues. The Lemmy implementation in particular does nothing to proactively promote decentralisation or counter concentrations of power. > > When the software is not designed to steer toward decentralisation, centralisation persists because the network effect is left uncountered. The current stats prove that a mass majority of users and their activity are subject to the concentrated power of a few, which ultimately singularly falls under the power, oversight, and competency of the biggest walled garden in the world: Cloudflare Inc, in the US. > > Calling Lemmy “neutral” is overly generous, in fact. When the stock Lemmy web client is queried for communities, it prioritises the giant centralised communities in top rankings of the search results. It’s no better than Google, where Cloudflare also dominates the top slots in web search results. This exacerbates the network effect by cattle-herding people toward increased centralisation. > > Lemmy ranks decentralised communities at the bottom. And in some cases the ranking is so low that it’s out of reach when cross-posting. The cross-post mechanism forces a search for the target community, and that search does not support entry of the address of the community that includes the domain. When the list is so long it exceeds the pulldown window length, it’s out of reach. > > Yes, we know centralisation is not their deliberate goal. Lemmy developers fear that newcoming novices would unwittingly post in a ghost town without strategically cross-posting and then become immediately discouraged by minimal engagement, and from there bounce back to Twitter or wherever they came from. But it must be realised that the mass nannied steering they have resorted to has cultivated centralisation that defeats the founding purpose of the fedi. >

Just like with Reddit, there is always some jackass who cannot resist the urge to post threadcrap, as we see in the linked thread.

Sometimes we don’t want a thread of clowns. We want sophisticated intellectuals, not children, to generate an insightful and thought-provoking comments.

So how can the tools be made to accommodate?

comment removal is tyrannical

Lemmy has a blunt Elon-style chainsaw: comment removal. WTF… can’t we be more intelligent than this? It’s exreme, yet exclusively reserved for the moderator. It serves a good purpose, but it’s not a good way to deal with clowns whose content does not qualify as spam.

Let the clowns have their say, but it should not clutter or detract from articulate chatter.

voting does not work

No, voting is not the fix. It’s shitty at making that separation b/c votes reflect emotion, not articulation. Intelligent discussion is relatively boring to most people and does not trigger emotion, so it gets buried under garbage.

Give me a thread-splitting option

The OP tags comments that don’t have a shred of intelligence (like those in the linked thread). But let’s not censor them. Let the clowns have their fun. Those tagged comments get put into a separate branch, accessible to everyone by clicking on a clown head. The default thread remains unpolluted with trash.

  • remoteloveEnglish
    11·
    6 days ago

    Mods still catch quite a bit of spam, which needs to be removed. Mods should also be able to manage their communities as they see fit unless they break the instance rules. It’s not ideal to have comment removal, but it’s what we got. (TBH, it seems you underestimate the dedication to shit posting that some trolls have.)

    • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      12·
      6 days ago

      Mods should also be able to manage their communities as they see fit unless they break the instance rules.

      That’s already the case. And it would not change. Mods would not lose any power.

      (TBH, it seems you underestimate the dedication to shit posting that some trolls have.)

      Can you elaborate? The underestimation you speak of supports the status quo. I’ve seen how rampant it is. Which is exactly why the job is unsurmountable for just the mod.

      What would you have the mod do in the thread I linked to solve the problem? Do you expect mods to read every post, work out the thesis, and determine whether each comment is conducive to the purpose of the thread?

      I moderate a dozen communities just on this instance; not to mention other instances. I don’t have time for that. I rely heavily on someone to send me an alert. And when I get an alert about something relatively minor, I’m annoyed by my time being wasted. The OPs are bigger stakeholders in their own threads than I am. The OPs care more about getting the feedback they are after in their own thread than I do as a mod.

      It’s not my job as moderator to care whether OPs get the feedback they are after, given the tools as they are. I care abstractly at a high level (hence the purpose of this thread), but certainly not enough to read every comment, only to face an overly blunt corrective tool.