Given that instance admins do not run communities on their instances necessarily, and that they don’t control other instances - I don’t know you would expect to do this. Nor appreciate of the negatives of embedding such power into the threadiverse structure.

Why are you doing this to yourself?

So structurally I don’t have an answer other than I know that what reddit became is a cancer. Structurally lemmy should find ways to counter commercialization

By design it already has done this via having no specific singular owner being able to control it.

. One way is to avoid boxes. Communities should be more random and chaotic.

I feel like this up to community owners. You can’t make people run communities how they don’t want to to bring about a specific vibe you want.

I also would push to the mods should take a back seat and give back control to communities to upvote and downvotes content they do not want to see.

This has the potential to make many communities complete rubbish. I will use a Reddit example. Take r/metal. Without any moderation, the community would be nothing but nothing but posts of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Metallica, Slayer, etc forever. Because people just upvote music they already know, all the highly popular artists are always upvoted by people who pass by the subreddit. The moderators, in conjunction with the community implemented a popular artist blacklist (voted on in threads and updated every quarter) to stop that and provide much better coverage for lesser-known bands making it a much more valuable, less low-effort community. That’s just one example I can immediately appeal to here.

Without curation, many communities would degrade over time and become slop.

That’s the problem. You don’t know. To me it is obvious. But to you everything is fine so why change it. Lemmy shouldn’t be a reddit like alternative.

I mean structurally. I’m still not sure what you’re getting at here.

And I never said the Threadiverse is perfect (I’m not using Lemmy by the way).

Are you still on reddit? If you left, what made you leave.

I still use Reddit. It has the audience for many niches topics that the Threadiverse simply doesn’t have.

I don’t really know how a Reddit-like alternative would have to present and function to you in order for you to not consider it compromised in such a way.

I don’t even know precisely what you mean by “boxxed” in this context.

Who is trying to sell a community on here?

!youraislopboresme@lemmy.blahaj.zone

On one hand I’m not sure elaborating would be a good idea, on the other the broad strokes are “spin up a few instances and be a dick in various ways”. People are already blatantly doing that anyway, so it’s not really a secret.

Most overtly deliberately inflammatory instances get federated.

Federation is limited - who even federates, who defederates, any other limitations, community rules and whatever else, a bunch of stuff influences the actual content you see.

Well, yes. I’m not sure what your point is here. I’m focusing on your claim that someone malicious (a corpo) could somehow subvert the Threadiverse.

Random fediverse happenings (good reasons, bad reasons, outright technical failure) have already caused a bit of headache on their own, let alone what a motivated malicious actor could do.

I don’t see what a malicious actor could do just by spinning up an instance.

I argue that many communities fail because most community owners don’t know about federation (using tools like lemmy-federate) and don’t advertise it, and don’t maintain it.

No it doesn’t? It makes it mildly difficult by making sure any corpo, if it cared to, would need to control a significant-ish amount of the instances. There’s no clear reason to do that, which is nice, because it would be pretty hard to defend against.

How do you propose they could do that? Genuinely curious.

A corpo-instance would be defederated by everyone else.

Lemmy/Piefed is more resistant to out-of-control and deranged mods and admins though.

Given the decline in birth rates, I don’t know why you’d think it’d be necessary tbh.

Most instances don’t block other instances of note though. The biggest decision you’ll have to make here realistically is “Do I want to access hexbear and/or lemmygrad” and that’s it.

And Dbzer0 in their current block of feddit.org.

No. That user chooses to use that instead of “th”.

Community moderators can’t instance ban. Only instance owners and appointed staff can do that now.

Won’t pretend I understand this but it reads a lot to me like if a mod decides to ban you because he doesn’t like an opinion or something you get banned from the whole of piefed.

No, it doesn’t. It means that if piefed.social bans you (and you’re based on a piefed instance) you wouldn’t be able to post on any piefed.social community. That previously didn’t happen, and you could still post on communities from instances that you were banned on - they just didn’t federate out. This was a blindspot as trolls could continue to harangue communities on instances they were banned from locally and the community moderators, not being from their instance, would not even know.

It would not affect your ability to post anywhere else on any other instance in those specific circumstances.

Yes yes, I know, it was a very bad instance, but I don’t think it’s a good reason to make this decision in all the other instances.

I think that if someone is banned from an instance, it makes sense that they literally cannot post or comment on any community from that instance. The ban may well be unjust, but I think if an instance is run like that to begin with, and you don’t like it as an instance admin - that you have bigger problems.

Well, in that case, even though I’m ethically opposed to that person’s treatment of animals and don’t want them around any of our users, I believe in the principles of the Fediverse strongly enough that I think they should be able to post their hamburgers to the .world local copy of our food community, and share their burgers with the .world people who like to see hamburgers. Even though I think they’re doing a bad thing, I support the rights that enable them to do it.

I don’t, really. I think this is a hole that is being used for abuse and niche cases don’t really justify the utility of this vector for harassment and annoyance being plugged. There are plenty of other cooking communities banned users could post to.

Maybe, if we get into the meat of this it could become some instance-level setting, but I think this is highly niche.

Well it means that if you were currently banned from lemmy.zip, you would be barred by these changes from posting or replying to any community based from there. You would see the message in the screenshot.

So the Piefed change does impact Piefed users banned from Lemmy instances. It’s just that the reverse is not true.

I’m not familiar with that drama, so I’m going to pretend that user came from .world to make what I’m about to say easier to explain. I think that’s a .world problem. .world users will see it, report it, the report will go to .world admins. Then, the .world admins get a chance to home ban this user, which sounds like it was sorely needed, and if it turns out the .world admins are okay with gore, then they can act according to their own values.

That’s a flagrant example, to be sure, but users can get instance banned for behaviour patterns for less noticeable than that but still be able to comment on communities they are instance banned from. Note that as Lemmy works now, there are already some hard bans associated with being instance banned. When you are banned from a Lemmy instance, you are also automatically banned from communities on that instance that you have interacted in prior. It just doesn’t extend to communities on that instance that you have not posted in.

Also, there are instances that are less moderated than .world that a specific instance banned user operating like that would be a longer problem.

Of course I personally don’t usually agree with gore posting in the way it sounds like it was being done there, and I’ve removed a couple of gore posts from our instance that came from other instances. But some people actually like seeing gore, it doesn’t bother them. The two biggest examples of gore that people might not find offensive are guro porn, and meat. I wouldn’t remove guro porn if it were properly marked as NSFW and had the right content warning. And I know a lot of other instances are okay with posting meat. Hexbear allows meat if it has an appropriate content warning, for example. Oh, and how could I forget, video games. If there’s a c/doom it should definitely allow video game gore!

No, in this case it was directly against the specific communities rules - but because the user doing it was already instance banned, their gore-posting was not visible from the communities home instance perspective. They weren’t posting it in a gore-relevant community.

I’m not sure I agree with this one, actually. If one of our users is banned from a remote instance for reasons I disagree with, I might still want them to be able to talk to our users in the comments on that remote community.

The trouble is that if they’re a problem user, and being realistic, many would be - the community moderators wouldn’t be able to see what’s going on as the comments they post would not federate out. They would effectively be unmoderated.

We had a situation where a user recently banned from lemmy.blahaj.zone was still posting gore to lemmy.blahaj communities on their instance. Obviously it wouldn’t federate out, but people on that same users instance would still see it.

That’s what prompted me to try and deal with this issue, at least from Piefed’s perspective.