It absolutely doesn’t, if I own an instance I can easily add ad features and analytics and allow advertisers to make accounts. However, culturally, there is generally a resistance to those things. It’s real and it’s meaningful. Sure, someone can scrape instances for some stats because they’re public websites but it’s not the same as tracking cookies and other technical invasive techniques that are commonplace.
It’s a two-edged sword: if a creator makes money from their art by shoving ads and marketing in my face, I wouldn’t mind them being alienated from most of these communities.
That doesn’t mean they can’t make money from their art, in fact alternate strategies like crowdfunding and donations for supporting artists are increasingly viable online.
I know it requires a cultural adjustment for most people to actually financially support artists and online services as we’re so used to them being supplied gratis, but it’s one that has shown itself to work in communities.
Well, also that they’re looking for a twitter replacement and not a reddit replacement. It’s not that they’re generally annoyed with the mechanics or format of twitter, but they’re looking for an alternative to its current leadership and direction.
But I suppose them being on Mastodon and therefore being exposed more to interoperable Fediverse platforms could give more causal exposure to PixelFed/Lemmy/PeerTube/etc.
I’m not a Mastodon/etc. users but I can sympathize with some other sites. Even here has its own Ongoing September from redditors.
I would recommend reaching out to moderation teams and raising awareness, because they probably have far more ability to put global notifications or sign-up messages, and to give warnings to uncomfortable behaviour.
Make sure to call out twitter carryover, in a constructive way, so that people are aware that Mastodon isn’t ‘twitter but here’.
You were right to call it dubious, I was incorrectly informed. Salt is considered the major suspected culprit. A search for “japan diet stomach cancer” will give a bunch of studies and articles, I of course can’t verify them but it’s definitely a studied phenomenon. One study says: “Mortality ratios [from stomach cancer] are higher in northern Japan, particularly in areas facing the Japan Sea” while many in the south “show low rates”.
User got 3 days for “getting into fights with many users” global modlog/community modlog
They did have a couple of deleted comments that were correctly hit for rule 2 (although it’s still inconsistent moderation, seeing how worthless insults like this stay up) but being banned for arguing with many people? That’s beyond reasonable. This is a political thread, a bunch of users disagreed with a poorly-made but legitimate critique, and the person gets banned for replying to many of them?
Might as well say ‘this is an echo-chamber, controversial opinions are banned’. I agree, very disappointing, and not based in the site or community rules.
It’s a bit disappointing to ask “where did they get the percentage?” before immediately giving some uncited ones of your own: “individual nations, majority of them supports Ukraine (and US/EU etc)” and using an article from a conservative ‘think tank’ (wiki link) when complaining about propaganda.
[I am not Canadian, but have lived for long times in countries with similar governance]
If we ignore moral/ethical arguments (which certainly can matter! but they shouldn’t be relied on, especially in political contexts), why would the government benefit from doing that?
I can only think of reputational reasons, which would be more easily or effectively achieved by doing other things. It’s one of those things which it would be nice to do, but I don’t think they will. The power plant companies have more influence than those that want affordable housing.
Please the report feature to bring up troublesome users (or if really necessary, the lemmy.ml community), this community is for the software called Lemmy.
It’s counterproductive to conflate racism, homophobia and transphobia with fascism.
They’re all disgusting behaviors. Make no mistake, they’re all mindless, anti-social, and dangerous. However lumping them into the term fascism trivializes what makes fascism in particular dangerous or appealing to its audience, it falsely suggests that fascism without those traits, a national fascism rather than a racial fascism (which is indeed what some fascists propose) isn’t reprehensible, and makes people who have seen a defintion of fascism think it’s just an ignorant slur just like calling any queer person a liberal, which will make people just not listen.
You don’t have to be one to be the other. They’re all horrible. Don’t pretend their problem is being a fascist; their problem is being a racist anti-queer idiot.
Well, how do the admins here define ‘leftist’?
That’s actually a major part of my post. We can’t recommend a better idea without knowing your own definition because ‘leftist’ is just so ambiguous. That’s why it’s a problem. If I know how you define it, I can suggest a few alternatives.
Spoiler: The original is this comic.
Well, that’s something that needs to be resolved, sooner is better than later, or it will lead to more drama later. Are you using your staff position to enforce personal opinions/preferences, or are you taking the role of a moderator enforcing site rules?
The 4 site rules here (especially #2) seem clear to me that people shouldn’t be banned merely for their supposed personal opinions, or what they do elsewhere.
I agree, the first mover advantage is huge. These are social sites, merely being a “better” product isn’t enough (but I do think it’s necessary).
I suppose an advantage for us of reddit’s position (that is, bound foremost by venture capital and profit, and therefore to reputation and popularity) is that we will inevitably see more entire communities alienated and cast out, and Lemmy is demonstrably already in a position to catch them, as we’ve seen with /r/GenZedong, /r/ChapoTrapHouse (hexbear) and /r/chodi (bakchodi). Like you said, /r/piracy is basically an inevitability, or even a gateway (if they said something like “If you want to share links, visit /c/piracy”). I wonder if it’s worth keeping a watch-list of places at risk, or places that might want to come for cultural reasons like /r/privacy or /r/foss (EDIT: I also wonder if the gateway strategy could be useful for political subreddits if there are boundaries they can’t cross due to site rules despite the subreddit moderators being fine with it)
In that case, it seems ironing out all the major usability bugs for newcomers is the best strategy rather than adding new features.
the entire first minute is just unfounded petty insults
For real? Come on.
reddit does have major, systemic issues with major moderators, some which are touched upon very well, and some left unsaid such as known political think-tanks inserting moderators into national and political communities, but the video creator’s approach, especially a generalized grouping of ‘reddit moderators’ as a single conspiring group, is just a silly way to start. It encourages people to just dismiss it as ‘moderators are just bad people who are powertripping bullies and wannabe police officers’ instead of realizing that there is an important diversity in who moderators are, on any site, and that systematic issues cause the rise of the worst despite the majority. It’s important to realize this phenomenon isn’t distillable to just ‘reddit moderators’, it can and should be generalized to any sufficiently significant site, especially any with money or a wide influence involved.
As this documentary hints, reddit is and always was a for-profit company, bound by venture capital and shareholders to be the most popular it can be. Aaron’s and even Alexis’s ideals aren’t going to stop that. Reputational damage is bad for popularity. The site dies if popularity dies. They are FORCED to censor to survive, at least when any popular media makes a fuss and scares their shareholders.
And in a way, that’s where Lemmy has a chance to thrive where most (not all, most) reddit-like sites fail. Look at the ‘alt-tech’ platforms that made themselves home for banned reddit communities, then turned out to just be venture-capitalist censorship-happy (politically rather than language) places that died out in years. Lemmy on the other hand allows groups to thrive independently, even despite the views of the developers or any funding. The devs of lemmy.ml couldn’t shut down wolfballs or here even if they wanted to, or more importantly, if they took up funding from someone who wanted to. The software’s operating and funding model effectively eliminates the need to conform to popularity as it grows. Of course, that still leaves other issues like political and social control of mods over instances they volunteer for, but the removal of economic subservience is a major advantage.
Reddit is a private company founded in 2005, valued at $1.8 billion dollars and employing around 350 people. Lemmy was founded two years ago and is run with relatuvely little funding (I would say approximately two paid employees and a dozen or so volunteers, distributed around different instances). That’s not comparable. At all.
Most people aren’t banned from reddit. Your personal experience is rare. If someone isn’t banned from the biggest platform, they need a motivation to leave. Why would they leave? I know why YOU would leave, but why would THEY leave?
Most people coming here, not all but most, are doing it because they were banned from reddit. As a result, they just try to recreate reddit here, instead of making something better, a better culture or a higher quality of community. Lemmy is treated by the majority as a ‘free speech reddit’ and nothing more.
Strong political bias in the popular communities may be distasteful to the majority of people who would use a reddit-like site, who tend to be pro-capitalist liberals.
Since the technical questions have been answered, I’d like to chip in on the social questions:
Where is this stemming from? Who are you quoting? As you can see on their front page, they explicitly have rules against even things as simple as being unfriendly. Which is suitable to their goal as a community, which isn’t being some free speech haven like wolfballs.com attempts to be. They never claimed to value free speech, that contradicts their site purpose.
Banning people because you don’t like what they do on COMPLETELY DIFFERENT websites?
This makes sense in federation, where your users are interacting with content on those different websites. Not every site’s users wants to see the same things, and if one serious site (similar to gtio.io ) is full of people who think a joker is derailing a community with insults and poor arguments, and another is a comedy site and doesn’t see that low effort stuff as an issue and enjoys it, they can both moderate that user the way that their community expects. Serious people don’t flood the joker with complaints or get annoyed, the comedy site get to enjoy their posts. It allows different sites to collaboratively use a community despite having different values and different moderation policies. If your answer is ‘just don’t federate’, then we’ll end up with far more unnecessary copies of communities over moderation differences and a huge lack of content and interaction.
I think I understand and recognize your point about how blocking you for what you said in a different context (a site with different rules and people!) is unfair, because that blocks you from Beehaw communities where you would have acted in line with their rules, because it’s on their site and not the other less strict site. And I agree. That said, I think the situation of you or me being forced to register a new Beehaw account to participate in Beehaw communities is a more usable solution than Beehaw having to just not federate with most communities because they want to ban some people that the other communities can tolerate. When you’re here, other communities’ users are still seeing your comments, and they should be able to say ‘our users kept reporting you, we don’t want to see your lemmy.ml account’s posts’.
Yeah, I hesitated to mention Mastodon and Pleroma as I don’t know the policies on character limits (I suspect it can change per site???)
Link aggregators (like Lemmy and reddit) are weird in that they’re literally invented for the purpose of linking to other sites, like you suggested you would do on Mastodon, but it’s become normal in the past 10 years to make text posts and start uploading media directly on the site. It’s an interesting shift. I guess that’s why I wasn’t sure to recommend it for blogging: you totally can and have a connected community available, it just feels like an unintended purpose. But it seems like it would work, I say go for it.
The wording he chose was specifically “[misquote]” which comes with the implicit “but I voted blue no matter who because I’m a fucking liberal that supports capital”.
No, it doesn’t come with that. Any of it. You invented an enemy that doesn’t exist.
Someone said: “I think Biden is doing a terrible job and I’m an anarchist.”
The rest is all you making assumptions that most likely aren’t true. It’s as nonsensical as me saying that you just said a communist would have voted in a US federal election, so you’re clearly a social democrat reformist with faith in the bourgeois system and therefore an anti-communist. The extrapolation is tenuous, inflammatory and probably completely wrong.
lemmy.ml has a no-porn rule, I don’t know about the other ones but I haven’t seen a porn community yet.
I completely disagree. In fact, ‘freedom of speech’ is not why I use Lemmy instances as opposed to other sites. I haven’t been banned from any reddit-like site. It’s also not why I use PeerTube. And based on what I’ve seen, 'free speech ’ isn’t the main reason why people use Pixelfed/Mastodon/Pleroma. Most of the millions moving to Mastodon aren’t doing it because they or their friends were banned or censored. The following points apply just as much to those platforms as they do Lemmy:
Even your implicit argument of different rules/moderation isn’t the main reason I use Lemmy’s federation. Federation allows small communities with different communities, different moderation and different softwares to cross-pollinate. This is extremely useful for social media platforms where popularity is (let’s generalize) necessary, and we don’t have the first mover advantage like reddit.
In small communities this helps them stay alive. I’ve been on sites that have died. It’s not fun! That’s one thing federation solves for me.
Having been a moderator for many highly-liberal (as in liberty, like ‘freedom of speech’) communities, you’ll understand what I mean when I say not all speech is worth reading, even if there is value in letting people be allowed to say it. So, you are right in that federation has an appeal for ‘freeze peach’ idealists. Wolfballs exists and federates, despite their users being banned from the most popular instances. Lemmygrad didn’t want to listen to the neo-nazis who were taking advantage of Wolfballs’s freedoms. So due to federation, Wolfballs still have a platform and community, and Lemmygrad don’t have to waste their time scrolling through it, while both communities have access to other less-political federated instances. That’s a real scenario that happened. Not some idealistic what-if.