Hypothesis: Insufficient moderation tools lead to instance protectionism, which leads to a decline in the overall discussion quality on Lemmy

I don't understand this. I cant even name a single community native to the instance I use. I picked one that hadn't defederated from anyone, and I block communities as needed. Also subscriptions are a thing.

"Decline in overall quality" is a subjective metric, though. Does defederation reduce participation? Certainly.

But ya know, there's a reason people defederate certain instances -- usually because those instances have attracted people who are disruptive to discussion on other instances.

It's really been no problem at all for me to keep a foot in lemmy.world, kbin.social, lemmy.ml, and beehaw.org. And a few other instances that appeal to more niche audiences.

And if I really feel like discussion on an instance is offering something and I'm missing out, I can always get an account there.

Not that I'm arguing against better moderation tools, of course. By all means, lemmy devs should prioritize those as soon as scaling/stability issues are dealt with.

I'm an example of a filthy casual reddit user who is really struggling to find value in lemmy. Finding an instance where local is of value is difficult, world may as well be "everything", and "everything" is a nightmarish hodgepodge of memes for teenagers, furry porn, really niche technical discussions, and star Trek memes. I never stay in the app longer than a few minutes and I feel like I spend more time blocking weird porn communities than I do reading interesting articles.

The other major issue is having to sort through the exact same article 60 times because people cross post not only to local communities but then also the same communities are duplicated on every instance. I'm probably going to abandon this soon unless I can find some kind of curated community list to subscribe to or something.

That seems to be the growing consensus on some of the biggest instances. Hopefully they start prioritizing that, or some other nice dev who knows Rust will. Maybe I need to start brushing up on it lol.

????

Why do people not seem to know that the subscribed feed exists?

But I like the all feed

Can't argue with that, hopefully they improve before the biggest instances decide to partly close on themselves

The biggest thing killing Lemmy for me is needing a seperate account on every single instance if I want to participate in anything on an instance.

I thought this wasn't how it was supposed to work.

I saw this post on another instance and tried to reply this exact message but got an error saying I couldn't.

Using Liftoff if it matters.

I respectfully disagree. On our LW Android comm, the discussion quality is generally pretty good, except when a post get on the front page, then the quality just drops like a rock.

Smaller (but not too small) crowd usually lead to higher quality discussions, that's true on reddit(default subreddits are pretty much all terrible) , and that's true here as well. (the turning point for quality decline reddit is at about 20K subscribers). So, I don't think the "instance protectionism lead to lower discussion quality is true at all.)

Also, I think the mod tools here is basic but perfectly adequate. You can check our community's mod log to see how much post removal/bans we actually had to do, and it's not a lot. Also not to brag, but I think our weekly discussions are some of the best threads on Lemmy right now.

It's not hard, I just tell our comm's users that I expect them to act like adults, and most of them act like adults, and we just remove the post of the few who refuses to do so (they are like in the single digits over the last months) and our admins usually handle the trolls that requires site wide bans in literal minutes here.

I don't use bots to mod and still do not see the need for it, because it turns out that if you cultivate a good culture in your community, moderation is pretty easy. That's just my experience here though.

That's what the subscribed feed is for.

Yeah thats the problem - too many comments. /s

How feasible would it be to have levels of federation? Make it possible for instances to partially-federate (if you're from "your-instan.ce" and its partially-federated with lemmy.world, you don't see lemmy.world stuff in your feeds, but allow browsing and interacting with "https://your-instan.ce/c/fediverse@lemmy.world").

Instances shouldn't be first class citizens, they should be more invisible to the users. The fediverse should be more like a cloud. Communities should be the primary focus, and only allow Instances to control how many users/communities they are the primary/secondary source for.

If this is true, it may also cause users on smaller instances to migrate to bigger instances, because there is more activity. Undermining the power and freedom of the decentralized structure of Lemmy and the fediverse.

What kind of moderation tools could help with this?

What I think could help against instance protectionism:

A.) Better moderation tools to protect against SPAM and trash

B.) Better curation algorithm, especially for smaller instances, to smartly curate posts that are relevant to the user

C.) Better default-values for the selected feed (All instead of local), as well as for the discovery of communities (which is also currently local by default)

If B is not realized, smaller instances will have no handle against big instances flooding their user's feeds with their posts and they will switch back to local-default again.

Overall, it can be brought down to making the All-feed more attractive. In my opinion, there should only be the subscribed-feed and an all-feed with curated posts (with different sorting algorithms to chose from in the best case). Or at least these should be the main ones.

Best take

If its possible to create your own instance and federate with any instance of your choice - are there any apps which include the ability to register your own instance with you as the sole user? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the underlying logic

i use the home feed

I don’t like seeing something on the internet. PLEASE CHANGE THE INTERNET FOR ME. kthxbai

No. Moderation tools lead to instance protectionism, which leads to a decline in the overall discussion quality on Lemmy.