Feedback wanted: Refederation with lemmy.world
Feedback wanted: Refederation with lemmy.world
No decisions have been made and will not unilaterally make one. I am assuming discussion in good faith. If you are not vegan do not add your comments or vote.
Hello,
When we defederated lemmy.world I was not familiar with how to administrate or moderate a lemmy server. Since the defederation this instance has changed a lot. We now have an appointed leader in @Arcanepotato@vegantheoryclub.org to serve as a level head and counterbalance to any unilateral decision making, we have more users, more community with our weekly threads and we have a better sense of an identity for Vegan Theory Club.
The original reason that I blocked lemmy.world is because I do not want to retransmit American fascist propaganda on a server that I host, this will not change. Any communities there that are in violation with our ethos will be blocked from the admin side to prevent caching, so this problem is solved for me. Additionally, we were being heavily downvoted on every thread so when people posted the votes started at -2 making the experience miserable in my opinion. We have since disabled downvotes and will not ever be re-enabling them.
While I do not agree with the politics of the admins and general community there, I also recognize that it is by far the largest lemmy instance with the most users regardless of their political leanings. There are likely many vegans and leftists who use the site who are unaware of other alternatives in the fediverse and I do want to reach them. Ideally to create an account on this instance and join our community here. Also the way defederation works is it creates a situation where we can't see or respond to the activity on threads that we post due to the split. They can still see our posts when they are on other instances communities but we can't see the users replies. Experience wise I think this is poor.
My same hesitations as sh.itjust.works (who revoked their "endorsement" of this instance that I never asked for lol) apply here, they host drama communities with the intent to harass users (tankiejerk), though honestly what really put me off from sh.itjust.works was a thread in NoCredibleDefense where people were supporting the use of chemical weapons against conscripts which is a hard pass from me and I can't believe people support this cruel and inhuman tactic for any reason. To be honest what I have seen from lemmy.world is less extreme in nature so I thought I would gauge the community and what they thought here.
Even though the last thread of this kind went poorly, I am hoping this time no one immediately posts it to a meta community and starts using alts to manipulate the thread. If I detect any of this behavior I will lock this thread immediately.
Please note: My thoughts and my opinions are my own and not representative of a community of friends.
I think the consensus is that we will not be refederating at this time. Thank you everyone for your feedback!
Hestitantly I would suggest we try but the users do increase moderation burden massively.
They are completely unable to just move on, never read community local rules, and just generally fucking suck.
So if we do, I would like a sort of trial period where we evaluate after a couple of weeks whether it's worth it.
This is a hard problem isn't it. It would be good to reach the good people that simply join the popular servers, but it sounds like it could be opening a pandora's box of toxicity.
Would it be hard to undo if it goes badly?
I think this is a good question!
It's easy enough to defed and/or remove content.
What's harder to guage is if damage is done to communities in the medium term.
E.g. suppose there is federation for a few months, then it is undone due to say an increase in combative atmosphere. Nice people may have moved on, or blocked comms from feeds to avoid toxicity. Comms might have shifted to a more inflammatory dunk-centered culture and so on.
Personally, I maintain my original position that lemmy.world is basically unsalvageable. When I briefly had a .world account there were a ton of users who were assholes to me for literally no reason (even on posts that had nothing to do with politics, veganism, or anything else). There are far too many users who treat it like another Reddit. It's sad that there might be some leftist vegans there who might not be aware of this place but in my opinion .world is just too big and too Reddit-like to be worth it.
At the end of the day though it's the admins' decisions and I will respect whichever one they make.
At the end of the day though it’s the admins’ decisions
No way, we're coming to consensus together and we are in alignment.
In that case, I guess I'll vote no, simply because my experience with worlders hasn't been positive in the past.