Quadruple moderation is killing Lemmy. It’s a gift to Reddit
There’s a rule about online communities I want people here to understand: the 90-9-1 rule.
Roughly 90% lurk, 9% comment, and 1% create.
When I first got to Lemmy, I had trouble finding enough content I was interested in even commenting on. So I figured: why complain about the lack of content when I can start posting it myself?
That’s why I post so much.
If people don’t post, most Lemmy communities simply don’t have enough creators to sustain themselves. You need posts before lurkers can lurk, commenters can comment, and some of those people eventually become creators themselves.
I’m not posting just to flood Lemmy. I’m trying to help solve one of Lemmy’s biggest problems: not enough content creators.
And frankly, doing that has been a nightmare.
Lemmy has a quadruple-moderation problem
Every active content creator has to survive four layers:
- Community moderators can remove your posts or ban you from the community.
- Your home-instance admins can ban your entire account.
- Receiving-instance admins can block/ban you for everyone on their instance, even though you don’t belong to it.
- Public moderation history means those decisions follow you. One moderator’s decision can influence another and snowball into more moderation.
For prolific content creators, that’s brutal.
I’ve had multiple accounts banned over one or two posts that somebody didn’t like. Months of posting, comments, engagement and contributions can effectively disappear from a community because of a couple of moderation decisions.
And the more you contribute, the worse the odds become. If you make hundreds or thousands of posts, eventually you’re going to post something that one moderator somewhere doesn’t like.
You don’t need one moderation team to tolerate you. You need multiple independent moderators and admins, across multiple servers, to remain aligned indefinitely.
There’s almost no cost to deleting a creator
This is another major difference from Reddit.
There is generally no financial investment in a Lemmy community’s content. A volunteer moderator can ban someone who contributed months of posts and comments and lose all of that person’s future contributions without losing revenue, salary or investment.
The creator paid the cost in time.
The community loses the content.
The users lose something to read and discuss.
And the moderator who pushed the button may personally lose essentially nothing.
So who benefits from making prolific content creation this difficult?
Because it certainly isn’t Lemmy.
And this creates an enormous attack surface
I genuinely have trouble believing that everyone complaining about prolific posters simply doesn’t understand this dynamic. At some point I have to question whether some of it is deliberate.
If I were Reddit and wanted to undermine a federated competitor, this is exactly where I’d attack it: its content creators.
You don’t need to hack Lemmy. You don’t need to DDoS instances. You don’t need to take anything offline.
Lemmy already provides the mechanism.
Report prolific contributors. Call their posting “spam.” accuse them of being bots. Point moderators toward their public moderation histories. Get one account banned somewhere, then let that decision influence moderators elsewhere.
Eventually the creator gets tired of fighting and leaves.
I’m not claiming I have proof Reddit is doing this. I’m saying Lemmy’s architecture makes this kind of subversion ridiculously easy, and Reddit would be an obvious beneficiary.
Reddit doesn’t have this same federated quadruple-jeopardy problem. You’re primarily dealing with the moderation of the subreddit you’re contributing to.
Lemmy desperately needs more people creating content, yet its moderation structure makes life progressively harder for the people who create the most of it.
At some point we should be asking:
Who actually benefits from that?
Thanks for sharing!
I think there are three systemic issues that we can see here.
- Centralization
As repeated again and again in many contexts, high level of centralization leads to instance admins having too much power over the whole space.
As things stand, if you are banned from lemmy.world, no matter what instance you are on, you might as well start over, as you’ll never reach the majority of Lemmy audience. Admins protect the instance, as they should, but end up taking Lemmy with them.
This is something we can influence. If you make a new account, don’t open it on lemmy.world. You’ll still have full access to it, but you’ll also help decentralize the space. You can also find instances with moderating policies better fitting your views - from essentially zero moderation (like lemmy.today the OP and me both come from, but there are other such instances too) to strict moderation based on various principles.
- Permanent bans
Lemmy is very black-and-white when it comes to bans. Sometimes, a temporary ban or a warning could suffice, without permanently cutting someone out of the community or instance.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of problem that must be solved on the development side, and that’s something I would suggest for !nutomic@lemmy.ml
Lack of proper ways to mark botswhoops, they do exist. But make it more visible!
There must be a good standardized way to mark and filter bot content, so that those who don’t want to see it do not see it (again, a suggestion to !nutomic@lemmy.ml and other Lemmy contributors)Until then, it could be reasonable to move bot content to separate instances and make respective communities there so that users could easily choose whether they want to see bot content or not.That said, bot owners must take full responsibility for their bots and the way they may breach the community rules when posting. Moderating bot posts is a major added burden, and while we have a small amount of posters, we have even less moderators and admins. Let’s respect each other, shall we?The issue is that I’m not a bot and I’m not marking account as a bot because I’m not a bot.
Bans and moderation histories should be private as all they do is used as a justification for further bans
Seems you post a lot of duplicates. No wonder your posts get deleted if you keep spamming exactly the same post multiple times??? And then you violate community rules… After that you seem to be doing ban-evasion… I mean… Seems to me like Lemmy is working exactly as intended?! This isn’t a place to dump random spam posts? You gotta learn what this place is about. If you want to redecorate our place and make it about something else, you’re going to face some backlash.
When I started using federated social media I had to block a lot of people* who just mindlessly churned out posts with links to often dubious news articles etc. It became much better after that.
And often they see themselves as knights in shining armor that “help the fediverse lift off”.
It’s just another version of the terminally online forum regular.
* judging by the usernames, often the same person using accounts on different instances
let’s post moar \o/
TL;DR: Spammer is mad anti-spam measures are working.
Nobody. Unless you had the capability/knowledge/will to maintain your own instance, which makes your content and yourself unbreakable.
im considering that. but I think it would be the fifth jeopardy. they can complain to get your instance defederated
So what? It still exists on the web. People can visit you, enjoy your content. Make a stand.
- Public moderation history means those decisions follow you. One moderator’s decision can influence another and snowball into more moderation.
This has got to be the first time I’ve seen the modlog listed as a negative aspect of lemmy?
Strictly speaking, it’s not the first time. We’ve had issues with the specific way the modlog works, before. But usually that’s edge-cases. Not someone questioning transparency and accountability be part of the platform in itself…
if there is no independent dispute process, and no accountability and removal process for abusive moderators - modlog should not be public in my opinion. Just too easy to exploit and influence
That’s a known issue. There might be some improvements for you with the upcoming version 1.0. I’m not sure if that’s gradual improvement or more fundamental changes… But many parts of the moderation system aren’t perfect and everyone is aware of its limitations. I think you’re invited to help out if you can contribute code, come up with a specification that works smoothly in real-life (including edge-cases), become a mod and do a better job at it than the current ones, or anything like that.
OMG - the modlog functionality is severely lacking.
But it’s infinitely better than reddit’s modlog.
The modlog itself isn’t the problem. A public modlog combined with effectively no simple straightforward appeals process is the problem.
A moderator can ban you, put a reason in the public record, and there is no built-in independent process to challenge it, present evidence, or have the decision reviewed. That entry can then be seen by the next moderator, who may treat the previous ban as evidence that you’re a problem.
So the reality is pretty brutal:
Ban → public record → no meaningful appeal → next moderator sees the ban → increased chance of another ban.
Transparency is good. An irreversible public accusation with no real mechanism to dispute it is not.
I think modlogs should not be accessible to public unless there is a simple dispute process and accountability for abusive moderators also baked in. some jury, something
Did you know all creator posts are wiped out from lemmy after account banned?
I’m dubious of that, because I’ve often seen posts with a red [banned from community] tag right beside the user, which often made me scratch my head - how/why is that post there if the user is banned?
Another thing to keep in mind, we don’t need to be reddit in terms of content volume. Yeah, a lot of us expect that, but it’s better for us, as humans in the long term, to be slower here
community ban dont remove conent.
instance ban in addition - removes all content. I’ve had thousnds of posts wiped out that way.Its optional, you can ban and remove, or just ban. Up to the admin.
I’ve always wondered, because sometimes it looked like that, despite being banned, a certain account still made new posts to the community they were banned from
You very obviously used Gen AI to write this. People are here to interact with people, not bots. Otherwise we’d be on Reddit.
I’m a human using a tool. The argument is mine, the opinion is mine, and I’m right here responding to you.
Then use your own words and not words generated by a machine.
I dont have that might time to spend - its the same on and on and on.
If you’re going to repost someone’s picture from Reddit that they tagged as “OC” (Original Content), at least don’t copy the title verbatim and mislead people into thinking your repost is OC…
https://ani.social/post/35620231
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1vn59fb/shark_fin_eclipse_sunset_mallorca_es_oc/
in my opinion - lemmy is just trying to be defederated reddit. I think it would be mistake to think of it any other way.
from that perspective - I see no problem with reposting highly upvoted reddit content, absolutely every major social network recycles content from other network. Only lemmy seems to be pointing that out as a problem for some reason.I mostly agree with your post, but come on. If it’s OC, it should be credited appropriately.
I pull some stuff from Reddit to repost, but I always pull from the source and not Reddit itself. Lemmy doesn’t need to be an exact clone of Reddit to succeed. We should be crediting creators where possible.
If it’s OC, it should be credited appropriately.
see Velma- problem is people complain if I put links back to reddit. (I used to do that)
many communities dont want to credit reddit thats why I stopped doing that.lemmy has double identity issue - nobody can agree on one pattern.
It would probably help if your AI can check if a post is labeled as OC (I guess a simple local language model should be enough for something this trivial, maybe some edge case detection for manual review) and re-label it as a repost.
This is literally the first time anyone has raised the OC labeling issue with me. And yes, that’s easy to fix. I can add a check for OC labels and either reject those posts or correctly mark them as reposts.
This is exactly the kind of feedback I’d rather get: identify a concrete problem and I’ll fix the tooling, instead of jumping straight to “ban the account.”
I agree. That said, I’d imagine it would be easier to start new communities - and probably a new instance to host said communities - than to change things by complaining here. That’s the part of what makes the Fediverse great, after all.
Ignore people complaining is the best advice I can give on Lemmy after being here for a while.
Instead of trying to post in communities with shit-ass mods (looking at you JonsJava), find communities that have more reasonable mods and build up there. You have to find the people that appreciate your posts which is frustrating sometimes, but so much better than trying to deal with mods that love the smell of their own farts.
I think it should be done per community. if community wants to credit reddit with a link - I will absolutely comply.
Putting my thought on your original point at the top: “A plea to admins: protect your creators ban reddit agents instead”
All I can say is: Admins are already doing this to the best of their ability, for better or worse. Some admins moderate proportionally, some others don’t. It’s really a question of whether they appreciate your methods or not.
I also crosspost from Reddit, but specifically those that I would have posted/shared myself if I found it anywhere else.
A few other bots crosspost everything that goes in a subreddit in their own community. What do I see? Only the bots can post i.e. it’s a subreddit mirror. No one comments in it. In other words, it’s glorified spam that no one looks at. At best, it occupies space in lemmy instances. The reader is even required to go to Reddit to read the post itself. Knowing Lemmy, no one wants to bother doing that. Example: !pcmasterrace@zerobytes.monster. I see the new posts as a literal digital deluge that I can’t keep up with. I have better things to do.
I’m assuming here you want to populate Lemmy with a genuine desire to see it as a sustainable ecosystem. For general communities like the top communities you see in lemmy.world, the critical mass has already been reached. Force-increasing its monthly users will only do harm than good. Look up Eternal September to better understand where I’m coming from here.
What I suggest you can do is curate a small number of a subreddit’s best posts for the past 24 hours, copy its content, and crosspost them in an existing federated community. Consent from the community’s mods is important. Transparency (which includes posting as a bot account if this is automated) is also important. If your approach is unwanted by them, move on. That’s just how reality works. Also, respecting their decisions will do your reputation a favor and build trust in the long run.
Having read the thread i do understand where you’re coming from. I’m sure some people like you’re posts but people are allowed to dislike them too.
It’s a tricky one. I have seen moderators and admins be heavy handed which can indeed damage the fediverse. But giving a repost account free reign to flood communtites isn’t ideal either.
If you are getting annoyed by admins and moderators i think it’s logical to run your own instance. You’ll never be able to stop people blocking/defederating but at least you’ll have more control.
I want to thank you for the effort you’re putting in. I believe you’re doing it for the right reasons but some people are not happy with the results. Perhaps you could reach out to the admins/mods who blocked you and come to an agreement about number of posts per week? Perhaps a dedicated reddit mirror instance would help more people to switch over?
Perhaps a dedicated reddit mirror instance would help more people to switch over?
It’s been tried, and guess what, it didn’t work. All the posts were dead. Any responses like “this is cool! how did you do it?” went unanswered because the real author never even knew the Lemmy post existed. No one wanted to engage with bot mirror posts. Several instances defederated because of the volume of posts and no engagement.
The lemmit.online instance already exists that hosts a single user, bot@lemmit.online, that mirrors reddit posts for a subset of sub-reddits.
I was looking into why this instance was blocked on some lemmy instances and was trying to get a discussion going about unblocking it for lemmy.ca. It turns out of the top 10 lemmy instances only 4 did not block either the instance or the bot@lemmit.online user:
https://lemmy.ca/post/69414850/24851333
It’s moot now since reddit locked down their old.reddit.com access which lemmit.online relied on:
https://lemmit.online/post/8716662
Before this blockage I did create a new user on lemmy.dbzer0.com and subscribed to some bot communities mirrored from reddit via lemmit.online. It turned out to not be a great user experience but did lessen my need to use the reddit app for discovery as I would just visit reddit for posts of interest.
Honestly this would be the expected effect if one understand what Reddit even is in the first place: an aggregator.
The “correct” (or “more correct”) thing to do would be to mirror reddit’s links to the author’s/creator’s webpage / service in the post, so that the people who can respond to the creator can, and the people who want to just talk about the thing linked, also can.
And, given that Reddit now restricts visiting without being logged in, the only “practical” way to even get some of the links there is for someone else to mirror them into the Fediverse anyway.
It may be dead for a commenter perspective but what about lurkers? I can understand some instances would defederate but would a reddit mirror help divert traffic from reddit to the fediverse?
Probably. But the Lemmy servers/admins/mods can’t handle the volume of traffic, either on a technical level (pure quantity of posts federating slowing down the server) or human level (something is misconfigured and now they have to clean it up).
Yeah that’s fair. If the reddit mirror was it’s own instance i think that would help to avoid those issues. Then admins can defederate if it’s breaking things.
If you do think a bot like this could divert traffic away from corpos then why not give it it’s own space? The fediverse is for everyone! Even bots lol
Well, I don’t think we should contribute to the dead Internet, but if someone wants to set up a standalone Lemmy instance that just lists Reddit posts, I can’t really stop them.
(Reddit is blocking the clients used to do this sort of thing, so it’s kind of a nonstarter anyway.)
i think it’s logical to run your own instance
basically forced to do this. this is unfortunately something I might not have time to do. and because of that I might just abandon entire thing as im sure many people trying lemmy before
Indeed. Running an instance is a lot of effort. I can’t say if it would be worth it. I really hope you don’t abandon fedi. We need people like you. Those who are willing to put in the work to try and make things better.
You clearly have talent. I’m sure you can help the fediverse grow. Maybe your effort would be better focused elsewhere. I know the sports communities are looking for automation help. A recreation of the match threadder bot could be very useful. If that’s at all of interest to you of course!
I do run some bot accounts already. problem with bots - most communities just ban them outright even if there is no human content anyways. which I found hilarious, they would rather die.
but I indeed found that some communities well receive them.I do run one bot accounts already. problem with bots - most communities just ban them outright even if there is no human content anyways. which I find hilarious that they would rather die.
but I indeed found 1 community that accepted bot and not banned and I had to create 3 communities myself. but generally people would rather ban bots than allow bots.btw sanitation is not a bot account, im not talking about sanitation.
Fuck the haters! If you think this will bring more people to the fediverse and you enjoy doing it, i encourage you to keep going! I do think you’ll have to be ok with blocks and bans but it sounds like you are finding places that want it which is promising. You just gotta find your space!
It’s really just that easy.
You can reply to replies. You don’t need multiple top-level comments.
After blocking I didn’t have access to any of the leaf discussion nodes. I suppose I could have replied to myself. Terribly sorry.
feeling is mutual
Good post. Very true.
The answer is for new instances with set moderation rules promised to be equally enforced, with a set of appeals ending in a jury trial of members of that instance for a moderation decision.
The current feudal nature of lemmy makes it just as policed as reddit, just instead of protecting the rich oligarchs it’s often bad faith arguments trying to misunderstand on purpose to get someone banned. Or just for going against majority opinion. In a couple cases because world news related instances hire zionist moderators.
Any post formatted like that comes straight out of an LLM. No user, no matter how dedicated or how mad, would take the time to format headers and bullet points.
Reposting stuff from reddit and posting whatever the LLM spat out. As far as I’m concerned, you are a contributing factor to a stagnant user base here.
Yeah, look at the difference between the main post and the edit. Oops, OP suddenly forgot how to use dashes.
Hey hey hey hey hey there. This person’s post is LLM, and self-admitted LLM at that, but don’t you insult my headers and bullet points.
I’ve been both dedicated, and angry enough to properly format them, and I’ll do it again!
Hey, there’s at least two of us that use lemmy formatting for
emphasis
without relying on a
LLM. Sometimes I even resort to emojis❗Seriously, I would stop doing that if I were you. Not for the esthetic or because there is inherently anything wrong with doing that. You’re going to become bycatch when people look to catch bots and sloppers in a wide net.
If you let the rich claim space (ways of communicating) without fighting for it, your communication will end up controlled.
Those who have the energy to throw hands (culturally), should.
There’s nothing wrong with those who don’t have that energy to fight, but no need to worry about others’ approach, everyone does what they know they can.
If someone rejects what you’re saying in bad faith just because of the aesthetics of how you’re saying it, they’re not worth changing your habits and ways of expression, for.
Flooding “Lemmy” with reposts from Reddit will make “Lemmy” look like a “tardy clone of Reddit with less discussion”. Why stick with a repost platform if you can get the same content but more and earlier with Reddit? New Reddit frontend still remains browsable without login (maybe with some irritation, but anyway).
One has to act differently. To get to the sources first (or, at least before Reddit, at least sometimes). RSS feeds of publications (already worked on in PieFed), microblogging support: compatibility with Mastodon (available on MBin and now on PieFed), already existing bot comms reposting from Hacker News and Lobste.rs (both these sites have no subs and crossposting to a comm may have sense…), reposting e.g. art from Mastodon, Bluesky, cara.app…
I actually agree with most of that. Those are good ideas. Do all of them.
Pull from RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, Hacker News, Lobsters, original sources, and Reddit. These aren’t mutually exclusive.
Where I disagree is treating Reddit as uniquely contaminated. If Reddit happens to surface a great article, meme, video, or discussion before we find it elsewhere, I don’t see why Lemmy should refuse it on principle.
And the goal isn’t to permanently make Lemmy a delayed Reddit feed. It’s to bootstrap communities while building exactly the ecosystem you’re describing.
Eventually I’d love for the flow to reverse: interesting stuff originates on Lemmy and gets reposted to Reddit.
