(just a few thoughts I wanted to write out)
Don’t get me wrong, I love the local and federated timelines, but after thinking about it I realized that it’s also the cause for a lot of drama.
Email and Xmpp never had such a big problem with cross instance blocks. If you think about it, all federated content is blocked by default and only becomes available if a user searches for it and subscribes to it. Before that, the server has no idea what is out there unless a relay is used. But there’s two exceptions… the local timeline and the federated timeline.
These are great to get stuff started and kickstart the following process, but are forcing people to receive content that they might not want to see.
Where previously a block would only be necessary whenever a malicious user messaged me directly, now we have to deal with the need to curate content of public timelines in order to avoid problems with local or remote users.
The instance admins have full right to decide what is hosted on their instance and what not. This is not about free speech because you are not entitled to using someone’s server in a way they don’t want, but about creating complicated dilemmas and tough moderation choices by forcing together content and users that could be drastically different in beliefs or preferences by using timelines which are understandably very appealing to use.
Maybe all posts should be unlisted by default and both timelines, whether on Lemmy or Mastodon only contain whitelisted user accounts to give your instance’s users and remote users a few recommendations.
Don’t get me wrong, I love those two timelines and I have a thick enough skin that I can simply ignore or block content I don’t like, but as an instance admin both on Mastodon and Lemmy I’ve noticed that this is not the case. Users are often eager to report anything they don’t like to see or disagree with even though they don’t follow that community in question or would never have interacted with it. This could cause a lot of moderation overhead as well as drama as it puts users and remote instance admins on alert about X, Y or Z divisive or distasteful content (especially when it comes to NSFW) potentially being sent out to them.
Well the “federated” feed is similar to /r/all, that’s a useful feature imo. The local feed has no equivalent because it relies on the concept of instance.
Users are empowered to set what they want their default homepage view to be (“Subscribed” , “All”, or “Local”). I am unsure what the default is, but mine is set to “Subscribed” which I think it makes the most sense for most users.
Unless you are on a heavily moderated/defederated server (such as beehaw) whose moderation policies, politics, etc. you are aligned with it is very likely that “All” is going to contain something that someone doesn’t like. I am personally not in favor of over-policing what users do outside the confines of their home instance, it’s a fine line that I haven’t had to define too clearly yet so perhaps my thoughts here will change.
If you don’t like what’s in “Local”, then to me that is a sign that the instance isn’t for you. Local is a reflection of the sort of content that users on that instance want to see more of. The admin allowing such content is not necessarily an endorsement (unless they were the one to actually post it), but is tacit acceptance of that content and the community that content exists in.
I think some way to make a “Curated” feed of posts only from certain approved communities would be a welcome feature and present a useful middle ground allowing for a moderatable discovery experience, like the default subscriptions provided on that other site.
Calckey and at least some Mastodon forks have this ability. The admins set up a timeline that is made up of local and federated content, but only from instances that they have explicitly chosen. It allows for a firehose of content more likely to be relevant to new folk before they follow lots of people
I think some way to make a “Curated” feed of posts only from certain approved communities
We could call it a “front page”.
I will say as well that email is far from perfect federation.
Try running your own mail server. Giants like Google and Microsoft make it hard to impossible to get through their span filter sometimes.
And whats the difference between your public Lemmy home and Reddit’s r/all, or the trending Youtube and Twitter sections? The internet is not only things you want to see.
That’s exactly my point. I myself don’t care but there’s people who get triggered about certain content on their ALL timelines.
I don’t know if the capability is already available but maybe there should be a greater emphasis on “public” vs “private” communities. Public communities could be like e.g. “memes”, whereas private ones could be local chat communities. Public ones would be available to everyone to browse and comment on, whereas private ones would only be available to yiffit.net users (and maybe whitelisting by server e.g. @pawb.social, or by requesting a per-user invite? though per-user invites would take a lot of extra effort to manage. Maybe a way to assign a user a “role” to access a group of communities, so you could give a “verified” role and the user would be able to access current and new local chat channels without further mod intervention.)
I think there’s a lot of value in keeping private communities private and distinct from the larger fediverse. If I understand correctly, this seems to be sort of what beehaw.org is attempting to do. We recently had a bunch of trolls in one of pawb.social’s meta announcement threads - why do random users need to be able to participate in our local announcements?
As a “fediverse” I understand the desire to be a giant meshnet of redundant servers, but maybe we can also have a return to the days of old with distinct local forums as well, running alongside that meshnet. Sometimes I would really like to be able to join a community and have it be a verified community, instead of just a topic that has regulars hanging around.
You said it yourself, what most people want (and seem to think this is) is a forum, not a fediverse. Imo a lot of the users who feel a strong need to control everything for everyone will end up leaving, since this is closer to what reddit used to be (you went to r/all and it showed ALL, not the watered down version that they forced for advertising reasons) and we all know it’s not for everyone.
That’s a bit like comparing a newspaper to private letters.
I think Lemmy is more like a newspaper with comment section. You chose which newspaper to subscribe to based on the overall editorial decisions, but it is better when it includes articles about things you were not previously aware off anyway. These articles usually come from other sources that your newspaper includes via an agreement with a news agency like Reuters.
Sure, sometimes getting to know about something you disagree with can be drama inducing, but ultimately it is a collective learning process that society needs I think.
OK, been looking at this thread and one thing jumps at me: are we reinventing commercial social media algorithms from first principles here?
unless a relay is used
What do you mean by that?
I don’t really know much about how Lemmy works under-the-hood, but from my previous experience with running Akkoma and Mastodon instances, you can have your instance subscribe to a relay to have messages from other instances pushed to yours. They’re only really useful for smaller (<1,000 users) instances.
In this context, since I don’t know if Lemmy instances can be subscribed to a relay (I don’t see why not since it is ActivityPub under-the-hood after all), I’m not entire sure.
thanks a lot!
Perhaps there should be a new default feed that only features posts from communities that ‘x’ number of users have a subscription to, with ‘x’ being scalable with userbase. Also the aggregate user’s community subscription count could be used to influence the sort order for that feed and bring more popular content closer to the top. Of course there will still be diverseness amongst users in even the smallest userbase, but maintaining a blacklist of communities against a feed curated by user subscriptions would surely be easier than maintaining a blacklist against the raw feed from other instances.
One thing I worry about is finding new communities. If I understand correctly the federated feed only shows posts from communities that other users have previously searched for? If so that leaves new community discovery solely up to word of mouth or searching using external websites. Perhaps each lemmy instance could ask it’s peers for a list of their top subscribed communities from their instance by the users on that instance, and then start pulling posts from those top communities and adding them to the ‘all’ version of the federated feed. That should give existing and new users a (hopefully) mostly decent feed of the top communities from other instances to find content and communities from.
Honestly I think the drama is a fundamental outgrowth of the way we think about a “feed”. The setup was devised to give people more reason to stay online exposed to advertising, in expense of an overall positive experience. But that’s sort speculation and I wouldn’t be able to point to specifics.
