this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
647 points (97.6% liked)
Fediverse
41976 readers
1121 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
People complain about Lemmy having limited content and engagement. Not in this article so much. I’m sure there were fewer posts in the past too. But what I found is that there are real people on here and you don’t have to wade through bots and shills which makes this community feel much more whole to me.
Maybe I would have thought this at one point? I remember when you could get to the bottom of the All feed in one session.
Lemmy is probably the fastest paced social I go on now. I've got my people I follow on masto and a handful of forums. So coming to lemmy from those feels downright metropolitan.
I actually like the slower pace. There's no constant stream of content but I find that helps me to moderate my usage. It also helps me take a more active role because I don't just see what I'm subscribed to. I'll hop over to the top posts over the last 6 hours and find something that's really hot elsewhere, or I'll hop on to scaled and find something obscure. It's slower and cranky but it embodies a lot of the old elements of scrolling that I miss.
While that's true, I don't believe it to be a fundamental property of the medium or federation in general. I think what we are experiencing is the result of lack of mainstream attention and traffic.
The people here are much less demographically diverse than the public at large, and have intentionally sought out this space and others like it, so they have more of a sense of ownership and community about it. The more attention it gets, the more the demographics will change to reflect the broader public, and the more it will become like a public space, complete with all the ills that come with that, like advertisers vying for attention, shills posing as enthusiasts, and influencers saying what will get them the most followers, rather than what they think.
I believe it would take extensive moderation and amazing tools to keep places like this the same as they gain users. I haven't ever seen a community survive that kind of growth and retain its original spirit, but I also haven't seen one with no profit motive. If we can get the moderation tools where they need to be, there could be hope!
Also, there is no central power that has to make the line go up. I remember reddit like before 2014 and that was much like here in many ways (in an older kind of way, more racism and smut), but they just had to shoehorn in moar users more and more and more, and forbid any troublesome subs (while leaving other troublesome ones ofc.).
So IMO there is a real difference, we cannot grow too big or we'd just split off into new entities.
This is how I see it. If fedi proper becomes mainstream then us old heads will just recreate the old fedi and guard who we federate with very closely.
Most people aren't here for commerce, so I think it makes sense to keep some areas aggressively social only.
Malls versus parks or libraries kind of thing.
While Lemmy lacks those, PieFed already has both advanced automated mod tools plus other features that dramatically increases the democratization of moderation itself.
e.g. if someone wants to see less Trump and Musk content, keyword filters allow someone to personally set that up, without having to rely upon a moderator to make that decision for the entire community.
Another example along those lines is the automated collapsing or even hiding of content that falls below a certain score threshold - personally I have that turned off, but if someone wants that then again, they don't have to rely solely upon the efforts of a moderation team, and can rely instead upon the community engagement. Again: if they want.
Still another example is showing icons next to usernames - e.g. one shows new users that are <2 weeks old, another shows someone who receives ~10x more downvotes than upvotes, and so on. These are not "filters", just helpful indicators so that you know more about someone's reputation prior to responding. Most conservatives for example have warning labels next to their usernames, in these more leftist spaces.
Also - and I cannot emphasize enough how crucial this is - PieFed moderator reports actually federate. This has been a source of huge pain in Lemmy, and tbf I think a future Lemmy release is planned that will do that... but meanwhile as with so exceedingly very many other features, PieFed has had them for months.
PieFed thereby helps avoid some of the major issues that cause community fragmentation. Which ironically PieFed also helps solves that issue too, by collapsing comments (old example of this phenomena), and with the Categories of Communities suite of features, including the user-customizeable and shareable Feeds.
Also PieFed is easier to install, requires less maintenance, uses fewer resources (even sending 25-fold less data to end-users), and so on. So yeah, I don't think Lemmy is capable of scaling up, despite its reliance upon its sourcecode being in the hyper stable Rust programming language, because of all the other issues with it (database issues requiring constant restarts, and especially lack of moderation capabilities), so I am putting all of my hopes into PieFed. Sorry if this reads like an advertisement - I feel like PieFed is to Lemmy what Lemmy is to Reddit, except that analogy does not begin to come close since PieFed has added features that even Reddit never bothered to, plus some others that it continually tried to take away from people by not retaining it in new-reddit despite how it was present in old.
True, Lemmy feels this way almost exclusively because it's small and hasn't been noticed by mainstream media enough. The second that changes this place will become what reddit was pre-ipo.
My hope is that it will always be a little too disjointed to hold that kind of attention for long.
There is no effective way to ban a person. As long as that remains true, moderation tools don't really matter.
Israel alone is putting $760 million into propaganda. Lemmy may not be big, but it's worth 0.2% of that budget.
And that's just Israel.
I think that's trying to solve the wrong problem.
If I had awesome moderating tools, identifying and deleting comments that violate the policy would be effortless. I would not need to ban a person, which as you aptly point out, can reappear forever. But, I can ban all of his violating comments, which are, after all, the true target and violation, not the commenter.
israel is pretty new on the scene, only after '23 they significantly increased thier propaganda funding, russia still beats them with billions per year on propaganda, of course its not limited to just social media.
I think even if shills, bots and influencers gain traction in the fediverse, it's still better than reddit or Instagram because of federation. There won't be one corporation algorithmically feeding you ads. You can curate your experience more than you can on another platform.
I think the community is a good size right now. Popular enough that we guarantee getting any content of relevance I care about, but not popular enough to have all the problems you mentioned. I hope the community stays this size and off the radar indefinitely.
I do. And that's also why if you consciously choose Lemmy as your first line of internet discussion, I encourage you to help build a critical mass to sustain your particular niche or topic.
I’m going to keep posting my insect and spider pictures then! :)
i see people going back to reddit, assuming they dint get shadowbanned, if content disappears.
unless you enter .ml environment...
Or hexbear, Lemmygrad.ml, hilariouschaos, and [edit: false stuff removed] maga.place.
Lemmy definitely has its dark corners.
lemmytoday isnt conservative, i havnt even noticed one, most of the actual conservatives have largely been defederate long time ago. also they wouldnt survive on a small platform anyways, because of how little interactions they get.
Thank you for correcting me. I edited my comment to indicate that it was maga.place.
Yeah, there's definitely still some bullshit and editorialized clickbaity headlines to sift through, but it's not nearly as much and overall the content here feels much more human.
There's just not much incentive to generate engagement for the sake of it (unless you're funhole), and far fewer bots and bad-faith trolls in general. Not to say there's none though.
As soon as there is "unlimited" content, the vast majority of said content is shit