Fediverse

I created my first account there but left for lemmy.world once I realised users couldn't create communities and all the communities were controlled by the same small group of admins.

I had enough of such cabals on Reddit.

No mods, No masters

Sounds like they really need more mods over there

Honestly, this is disappointing, but not particularly surprising. It's a problem that's at least as old as Usenet, in terms of different communities not getting along. It's also not uncommon that people setting up instances are new, inexperienced with moderation, and sometimes even just let people register without any kind of verification because why not?

I think an important point is for admins / mods from various instances to try to get on the same page, in terms of policies. Building that common ground early, and establishing best practices, really helps mitigate a lot of the BS that can happen.

All this talk of defederation and blocklists makes me generally uneasy. I understand how it's easy to fall into. Nobody wants political extremists and criminals and bad actors and stuff on their instance, so it makes sense you might want to ban trollfactory dot xyz, nazihq dot us, and/or uncompromisingmarxist dot boats, or whatever.

But I think the stupidest shit I saw on reddit were the subreddits that would ban you for even posting on an ideologically competing subreddit, with no consideration for the message you'd written. This is worse than that because it's the opposite, and includes even reading the content.

Imagine if when you went to post on /r/RestaurantOwners, and its AutoMod had the power to then immediately ban you from even looking at /r/antiwork and /r/WorkReform. Imagine posting to /r/conservative to correct someone's error only to get permanently banned from viewing any "leftist" subs ever again. This is the vibe I get from this and as much as I want to avoid creating nodules of extremism and hatred, I want less to have people grabbing my head, taping my mouth, and averting my eyes from things they don't like when they don't even know what my thinking is.

I feel like widespread trigger happy banlists are the death of small instances, too. Maybe one small instance doesn't catch some newly registered asshole for a day or two but it's too late. The 16-hour a day lifestyle moderator on a massive instance who has gangstalking delusions over nebulous "trolls" has already blacklisted all 150 of your users permanently and listed your domain for defederation as officially owned by the Nazi party in a massive register shared by the top 100 largest instances. The number of times I've heard this story with small Mastodon instances is more than I care for.

I think one of the problems is communities all being created on the same few big instances that allow anyone to create one.

Ultimately this is because beehaw allowed themselves to become one of the largest instances on the threadiverse with a minimal mod team. Any blame on the other instances/mod tools is deflection. This is poor management at it's core and is bad for the larger community. That said I would love to see more in the way of improved mod tools.

I don't get the issue here.

This is common in de-centralized social media.

Federation allows the admins of a server to decide what kind of servers they want to federate with, but also to defederate from others.

It's only two servers that were creating problems with all the trolling and intolerant comments that came from there. Beehaw didn't isolate itself/blocked everyone else in the fediverse.

That’s fair, buuuuut why are the admins moderating comments? Why shouldn’t the moderators mod their communities and report problematic users to admins so those users can be blocked.

They can’t scale. They will die.

Can I get a ELI5 or a source or something?