2d ago

Content curation in the Fediverse is better!

I just had my first experience blocking an instance, and it made my realize now nice the lemmy content curation experience is vs the centralized model.

Recently I started noticing a lot of posts from that I just found annoying. There was nothing inherently wrong with them, they just came from a culture I don't understand and so I found them cringey. Since they all came from one community, realized most of them come from the same instance. I just added that instance to my blocklist and the problem is solved!

Now think about in the centralized model. I would be forced to either just accept that these posts are in my timeline, or block each community and user individually. The instance gave me an easy way to manage my content.

I also appreciate that instances can manage the blocking for their users. So the most horrible stuff I don't even see. But it also preserves free speech, as those users who want to say horrible things can do so in their own instance, and most people will just block it.

Anyway, just impressed again by the fediverse!

59 comments

I think you've just (perhaps independently) discovered the (in my mind very important) idea that moderation is different from censorship. I think the fediverse structure implements that distinction a lot better than most other platforms nowadays do.

Unfortunately it's still a very weak type of blocking, for you on Lemmy.ca unless you are using an app like Sync or Connect. It's basically a "community mute", equivalent to unsubscribing from all the communities there individually, but unlike user blocking, the users from that instance will still show up in other communities, they can still send you replies, which will trigger Notifications, and therefore they can harass you by continually sending you replies for WEEKS and WEEKS at a time (this actually happened to me twice, once with hexbear.net and another time with lemmygrad.ml).
Anyway, it's better than nothing!
You may be interested to read some of the ways that PieFed is advancing democratization of moderation.
- they can harass you by continually sending you replies for WEEKS and WEEKS at a time (this actually happened to me twice, once with hexbear.net and another time with lemmygrad.ml).
  Honestly you really shouldn't be on an instance that federate with those places to start with.
  You may be interested to read some of the ways that PieFed is advancing democratization of moderation.
  Personally I'm not a fan of the way PieFed uses upvotes and downvotes to basically do statistics on users in order to profile "bad actors". That feels like karma from Reddit all over again.
  There can be many legitimate reasons why a user might downvote a lot, and a user being downvoted a lot is not necessarily problematic. They may just not be following the "hive mind", and honestly we could use more of those users.
  
  After kbin.social went defunct the smaller instances I kept moving to (StarTrek.website and discuss.online) had not defederated from those two instances yet at that time. They do now, but a year ago it wasn't as prevalent a choice to protect people from such things happening to their users. The Lemmy community has matured a bit, the word has gotten out, a case built to do so, and admins became receptive to what they had once spurned - e.g. I petitioned discuss.online to defederate hexbear.net after it was revealed that the admins there were caught lying to admins of other instances. But it took a lot of effort and time to get to this point, and still today most instances remain federated with lemmy.ml, which is where a bunch of Hexbear alts (e.g. Cowbee) decided to continue their trolling efforts after so many other places defederated from Hexbear itself.
  I hear what you are saying about PieFed, especially from just what is mentioned on that page regarding tools that community mods would have access to, but in practice what I'm seeing so far really is tons better. For one thing, mods on Lemmy right now have to choose between the binary options of removing content vs. allowing it to remain (similarly at the instance level it can either defederate from another instance vs. not do so), whereas PieFed offers additional options that will allow the content to remain and then place the choice of what to do into the hands of the end users. Some users may e.g. want to avoid controversial content, and so like a spam filter automatically collapse content with a certain ratio of downvotes to upvotes - which preserves the ability to see it, but putting it one step away exactly like a spoiler feature for the post. Or maybe the user will instead choose to have the content removed altogether, with the auto-hide feature? Some of my own content would have gotten removed this way, and I definitely see how things can get misunderstood by downvoters, but at the end of the day, it still gives choices to the user that otherwise would have rested solely in the hands of a moderator. Personally I have both the auto-collapse and especially auto-hide options turned off, but it's worth noting that they are there if people want them.
  There are also other niceties such as keyword filtering - so e.g. if the user wants to remove all posts with the keyword "Musk", then they could. Perhaps they shouldn't, but they can, if they wanted.
  I find that user labelling really is different though, than any of the filtering options above. Examples include new users with accounts newer than let's say a couple of weeks, a user who almost exclusively posts but never comments (likely an unregistered bot?), someone who downvotes 20x more often than upvotes, or receives 50x more downvotes than upvotes - again, their comments aren't removed (currently I am not aware of a method to even make that happen), just labelled with an icon next to their name. These icons can help someone decide whether or not to respond, or how much detail to put into it if so. Essentially these are just measures of a user's "reputation", so this is the numeric version of the type of info that people use anyway? But at each moment the choice lies with the user to either pay attention to or ignore those icons. And yeah the precise formulas to determine these icons are constantly tweaked to improve them, so that's a thing, surely.
  Ultimately though, whether the end-user makes proper usage of the tools given to them or not, either way, I think it's awesome that these tools are given to the regular users, rather than constraining them to work solely when in the hands of a mod. That's "democracy"! I guess whether democracy itself is a good thing or not is a whole other discussion altogether...🤣
  Edit: also the tools are definitely in their infancy - e.g. to avoid karma farming, communities should be able to use community-specific metrics so that actions taken outside of a community do not necessarily affect filtering options inside of one. Which iirc is coming or at least people are aware of this issue. PieFed itself is still mostly in the works:-).

Good to hear!

I agree. It also works the other way in terms of censorship.
My original account was on an instance that once censored one of my comments. I don't remember if they deleted my comment or banned me from the community.
On reddit, I had come to just accept that as a fact of life and every few years I would delete my old account and register a new one.
On Lemmy, I just switched to a different instance which is much more tolerant of free speech and I haven't had issues since.
The irony is, my comments on the old instance can still be deleted, but only for users from that instance.
I don't know the full details, but Lemmy definitely has the more 2000-2010 type of culture that allows people to speak their mind freely.

Never had a reason to block an instance, here or in mastodon.
- That is not the point, the point is that you can. You can curate your feed yourself instead of relying solely on an algorithm or a curation team
- I blocked lemmynsfw so that I don’t see straight up porn in my feed but can still see posts labeled nsfw from other instances because a lot of posts that get labeled nsfw are just things like explicit text or the OP labeled it nsfw because it’s not exactly nsfw but also not completely regular either.
  
  You can avoid seeing posts from lemmynsfw by just… not subscribing to any communities on lemmynsfw.
- On mastodon I follow a lot of hashtags and so I will mute foreign language accounts so they don’t show up in my home feed. Thankfully I’ve never had to block an entire instance but I chalk that up to troublesome instances already being defederated from my instance

- What if OP just blocked feddit.org because they don't speak German ?
  
  They have that luxury.
- The least obvious Hexbear's user alt:
  
  Actually……
  If I were a true hexbear user, I’d be glad to be defederated from lemmy.world. But I’m not.
  I think that defederation is a bad idea. That’s why I joined an instance with a relatively hands-off approach to moderation.
  You see, I’m an anarchist. I trust in the power of people to self-organize, self-regulate, and self-police. I am philosophically opposed to whole instances making the call to defederate from another no matter how Nazi or capitalist that instance is.
- No one is entitled to attention, and sometimes people need to take a breather for their own mental health.
  
  So block the communities instead of the ENTIRE INSTANCE.
  Smug libs keep shutting out their own neighbors without realizing the disastrous effects of siloing large swaths pf vulnerable people from reaching ANYONE. Tribalism has had such a terrible effect on the world yet I see smug otherwise very intelligent people climbing over one another to engage in it.
  IMO, the only way to stop ignorance and hate is to actually know people from MANY walks of life and face those differences head on. If you dismiss every last one of them wholesale at the slightest sign of differences, you are intellectually weak and deserve the dystopian future we are all being herded and astroturfed into.
- What? what does this even mean, is there an instance dedicated for victims of fascism or something?
  That seems like a huge leap. Who knows they might just be blocking an instance that only speaks a language they don't understand.

59 comments