A good example is https://lemmy.world/c/documentaries
One of their mods, https://lemmy.world/u/sabbah, currently mods 54 communites despite only being on Lemmy for about a month and has never posted on c/documentaries (except for his post asking for people to join his mod team).
The other mod, https://lemmy.world/u/AradFort, has one post to c/documentaries and moderates 18 communities.
Does Lemmy.World have a plan to remove this kind of cancer before we start getting reddit supermods here too?
Edit: This comment shows how this is even more dangerous than I had thought.
Edit2: Official answer from LW admin is here
Final: Was going to create an issue for this on the Lemmy github, but I browsed for awhile and found that it had already been done. If anyone wants to continue the discussion there, here it is - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3452
Perhap we need another issue for the problem in the original edit (It being impossible currently to remove a ‘founding’ mod without destroying either the community of their account)
I knew this would happen and that’s why I am FOR hardcoded community limits per user unless an admin, in individual cases, allows the user to open additional communities based on past handling of other communities the user has been (or was supposed to be) modding.
Letting a user create 54 communities, especially those that were some of the biggest communities on Reddit is dangerous. Powermodding is a serious problem on online platforms and letting individual users create unlimited communities leads to it. Imagine how much money this person might want to sell their Account(s) for when the platform grows further and interest might accrue?
It is humanely impossible to mod more than a handful of communities alone anyways. The users you mentioned are powermods.
As another good example against freedom of creating unlimited communities is user LMAO whom most of you will probably at least have heard of by now, or even found when searching for a community that has numbers in its name.
I will stand by this position.
Couldn’t someone make alt accounts?
Should we just keep the door open with an advertising sign or should we at least take the advertising sign away?
That’s not an argument not to introduce hardcoded limits, it is a problem for sure, but leaving them the opportunity without at least making it a bit of a hassle is just going to invite opportunity assholes.
Admin owners can see IPs, which will grab most of the abusers who do this.
There are other less direct techniques that major social media platforms use to identify users with multiple accounts even on separate IPs, which Lemmy will certainly need one day.
For now though, simply using IPs is good enough until those more sophisticated algorithms are developed.
They absolutely could. I don’t know if there’s a good technical solution to that. Maybe requiring IP registration or some other identity verification for mods over a certain number of communities.
Residential IPs change on a regular basis, you can’t do anything by IP.
They don’t change fast enough.
You can’t ban by IP, but you can sure tell what accounts are owned by the same person or coming from the same network.
It’s not perfect, but it’s another step that will catch many.
There are millions of people in the same network, lol. IP doesn’t tell you anything.
Then they would use VPNs
Ok, I think you have a point. But where do you draw the line?
IMO, it shouldn’t be a hard limit - that’s asking the dev team to deal with arguments on the topic indefinitely.
I think per-instance limits make more sense in the short term, but that still just mitigates the reason not to do it, it doesn’t solve it.
Ultimately, I think we should experiment with novel strategies, such as various democratic spins on moderation that decentralize authority. The fediverse is all about decentralization and trying stuff without missing out on the larger network after all.
You seem passionate and you have a solid argument - you should post an issue on the GitHub. This shouldn’t be hard to actually implement - the majority of the work on this one is convincing everyone this should be done and what the rules should be
I agree that a global hard-limit is problematic since every instance (admin) will want it to be how they see it, of course.
A per-instance limit was what I had in mind (not originally, this point has come up before because of the user I mentioned in my last paragraph and someone convinced me; There also already is an issue regarding that or something similar as far as I remember and I gave my opinion on it in a reply).
I think in that sense we both agree, it should be per-instance, and as you mentioned, the fediverse is all about decentralization, which is why I think something should be done about it.
And I think unless we have further methods to maintain decentralized moderation, this hardlimit (per-instance) is the first step, or at least a step, in the necessary direction.
Best case scenario, we’ll get other methods of maintaining decentralized moderation and get rid of the softlimit (?) later down the line.Of course democratic spins like subscribers voting mods every now and then would be an interesting solution (that opens up new problems, of course, but that comes with every solution).
Hope my ADHD didn’t hurt the readability.
Haha no worries, I too think in webs, I found it pretty clear. Talking to other people with ADHD is so much more straightforward
I’m convinced on your approach (at least until someone comes out with a more elegant way to handle it), I’m focusing on the client side for now, but if this is still an open issue in a month or two I’ll consider writing it myself. It’d be a good ticket to shake off the rust in Rust
My thoughts on democratization go further than that - when Reddit made their disingenuous democracy pitch, I started to think what that would actually mean
My thought is something like, everyone is invited to be a mod, or random members are asked to do an hour of mod work. They go through and do mod work, but everything requires corroboration
In my approach, you’d have to look at every mod action, then decide if it defaults to action or inaction. Then you use some basic statistics to come up with numbers to pass or reject an action based on how many mod actions your community clears per Capita.
I plan to look at it down the road…I don’t know nearly enough about modding to say I’ve got a fully formed approach, but I think there’s something there. I plan to ask some admins if I can do a short stint as a mod in order to better understand what it’s like, and then I want to look at this.
I also have this idea of a “mitosis” operation to split a community when the mods feel it’s grown beyond them and they’re losing control… Fomo makes the idea controversial, but i generally find small communities better than large ones in every way. Maybe by pairing this with some version of the “multi” idea a lot of people are pushing we might find a happy middle ground
I’ve been trying to get an active mod to take over on the lemmy.world battlestations community, but despite my efforts posting in the lemmy.world support community which the admins have suggested doing for this exact issue there has been no change. https://lemmy.world/u/mandlar
In general I find it pointless for there to exist a million empty communities even when the creators have good intentions. Most of them are sub communities of a broader category which only serves to unnecessarily split a community while there is barely traffic in the broader topic. You shouldn’t make a more specific topiced community unless the subject you want to discuss is getting burried in overwhelming traffic of the broader community.
But there’s people out there who want to be “top mod” and do zero work. It’s like opening a lemonade stand but the only employee is a CEO that works from home.
They think since a community on reddit existed with that name, all they have to do is make a Lemmy community with the same name.
One of the worst things about Reddit was that you could make a subreddit for anything but peeling away any amount of users from the “main” sub was next to impossible and forget about new user traffic without having the “default” name. Therefore the mods of that sub become the defacto admins of that topic on reddit until they piss off enough people to really get an alternative moving. Many different subreddits were actively fucked up by bad moderation but users kept dog piling in because it had the basic name you would think to search for, i.e. “television” or “videos” or “movies” or what have you. That name is real estate on reddit because no one else can have it, and that keeps horrible mods entrenched.
I think we should encourage several hubs and stop worrying about “splitting” communities. We have the benefit here of letting different communities grow under the same name to avoid that situation where a shitty mod team gets unchallenged ownership. No one else could make a /r/sandiego, so they never shook that real estate free from its horrible mod. Here? That’s not an issue.
For example, one of Lemmy.world’s biggest communities was locked by the head mod and forced to a different instance to join with another community. Without input from the lemmy.world users. It’s still sitting there in the communities list, locked, but high up on subscribers. Meanwhile the instance it was moved to is moderated much more strictly. Admins over there heavily “curate”; remove any post they don’t think are worthy enough to be posted.
I think that community should be unlocked and a new moderator should be allowed to take over, so there’s a different version of that community on a different instance, then people can have a choice between what type of moderation they want to exist under.
Edit: [email protected]
Edit2: Reworded this mess for clarity
Pruning is an important step.
It would be insane for admins to say that sub that lasted a month gets to just stay locked forever
Federation directly addresses this. If there’s a locked community, or a fake community on some instance, make another elsewhere. There will be some growing pains, but eventually people should migrate to the community that best suits their interests and attitudes. It’s messy and more work than just taking the big corporate sponsored option, but that’s the nature of organic communities.
There was another thread recently asking, “Do I need to subscribe to [community] on all these different instances?” Sure, that’s a great way to find the ‘best’ one for you. Or just sub the biggest, or the one on the biggest instance, and hope for the best.
I am not sure I understand. If I create a community on a different instance with the same name as a community somewhere else, how do those communities relate to each other?
They don’t really but if you search for a community, let’s say “drumandbass” you will see all of those communities on all instances and subscribe to all of those. And if you don’t agree with how one is being run you can either help grow another one or star one on another instance from scratch.
Is it the android community you’re referring to? As I believe that is run by the same moderators as was on the original subreddit, which is a shame.
I don’t feel like transplanting the exact same leadership / moderator teams as was on Reddit is always the best idea and some element of choice is important.
Generic communities as I call them. They shouldn’t be allowed.
Bro we just got this space where no corporate overlords are dictating what we do. Can you not ask for corporate overlords to dictate what we do wtf is wrong with you?
There is no global authority to decide whether they are “allowed” or not. By design.
Mandler has not been active in a month. If you want any of the communities make a post there, tag me and I will add you as a moderator.
Dude was on Lemmy for 1 day and snagged 8 different pokemon subs…
He was really trying to catch them all
I requested !fire (Financial Independence/Retire Early, for those who don’t know.)
Done
Thanks!
Now that I’m committed, I started looking around for inspiration to improve the community… and I’ve just realized that [email protected] exists and seems like it has effort being put into it, too. Womp, womp.
I haven’t entirely decided where I stand on the whole “splitting communities is better/worse than having one canonical community for each topic” issue, but at the moment I’m at least leaning towards wanting to cooperate or complement, rather than compete. If anybody has advice about how to mod in such a way as to produce the best outcome for everybody interested in the topic instead of just trying to steal that community’s thunder, I’m all ears!
(Alternatively, if folks want a place to talk about actual combustion instead of personal finance, I guess that option could be on the table too…)
fortunately the fediverse is much more liquid than reddit so no one really knows honestly what it will look like in a year. Right now it’s going through rapid change, and I think there will be a sort of equalization that will happen eventually.
I was a mod early on in reddit’s creation and several subreddits used to group together and list each other each others sidebars to create an index of sorts. I think maybe having multiple communities across different servers, by the same name, but with different topics of interest could possibly serve to aid in more in depth discussions.
Hey, I guess the admins removed u/sabbah from top mod of c/worldnews because they permabanned people for disagreeing with their personal opinions…
Figured you might want to know the new mods added them back already because they think sabbah is good at “conflict resolution”
Lol is he legit running an alt with chatGPT?
Christ.
Are we still doing old memes?
Sadly I don’t think we’ll outlive the usefulness of that meme…
Best of luck! It’s going to be a lot of work being an Admin on here, so I definitely appreciate you willing to be involved.
The splitting the content comment is fair, I’ve seen heaps of random subreddits created when the main one still doesn’t have lots of content. Why fragment the experience, articles posted will now probably have less engagement and not be as exciting.
I have nothing meaningful to add to help prevent this from happening but I just gotta say… I physically cannot even imagine the level of goober you must be to squat a bunch of communities. Is it a desperation of power? The hope to monetize? You’re a fool if you think that’ll work out for you in the fediverse.
Maybe they just wanted to create the spaces and hoped to pass it on to someone who was interested but for now have the space where people could find, hopefully
We can hope but I think that’s idealistic. Just look at u/sabbah and his Reddit account under the same name to know he’s trying to powermod. Sad that someone can feel so empty IRL they grasp at the chance to dictate discourse online.
Most of those subreddits follow the same theme/niche. Seems to be a pro-Palestinian user who probably tried to jump start Lemmy.world
Right. Someone will just go and make the same community on a difference instance.
The LemmyAsk and LemmyExplain names are pretty clever. I hope those communities stick over the reddit-replacement communities like “AskLemmy”.
How about a travel one called LemmyPeopleGo?
Gold. Absolute gold.
Definitely a welcome change over the “porn” modifier on reddit. r/FoodPorn, r/AbandonedPorn, r/AnimalPorn… Hoping more clever/mature community names will take hold here.
The ask_____ format is good because it’s easy to find and jump to it’s sister communities like ask historians and ask electricians, etc
LemmyShowYouSomething
It could be for cool stuff, or a community dedicated to Fire Marshall Bill.
I mod a bunch. Only because I joined when Lemmy got it’s big first wave, and the site was literally dead. My contribution was making communities for people to start posting in, because a ton of people simply don’t want to moderate, or don’t know how to create communities.
Within the first week I got a bunch of DMs from people asking to be mods, and I added all of them. I am not making communities to horde them. I am making them so people have places to post. To get the ball rolling.
Same here. Once a community is big, I may just pass it on.
Me too, I created 3 communities to help onboard new members, haven’t gotten the time to upload a logo yet.
There is a current initiative to get new mods for communities that are being used, but have inactive mods. Whether that covers any of these and what exactly the criteria are for “inactive”, I do not know.
I mod 3 very small communities (less than 800 subscribers total) but other than creating the communities and posting some content to get the ball rolling I haven’t actually done any modding. I’m not sure what there is to do. No one has tagged or messaged me, no ones reported anything… am I inactive, redundant or just a terrible mod?!
Just ban a random user each week to show you’re still active.
You have enough users to make it at least 800 weeks!
Goddammit, the only option is to ban myself from one of them…
Are you really banning yourself when you’re SomeoneElse?
I offer myself as tribute 🥺
You have been permanently banned from [email protected] I bet you’re gutted… 😂
I’m not happy about. But I did what must be done. They will remember me.
Hey man, I just put it to a vote and the community (me) have decided to honour your sacrifice by making a new header/banner thing dedicated to you. Something real classy in MS paint maybe?
You’re too kind. The knowledge that I’ll be in the hearts and mind of the community (you), is honor enough, new friend.
Lemmy is still small enough that you may just be getting lucky with everyone behaving themselves. If no one is reporting anything, just try to stay in-the-loop with the general goings on in the community so you can jump in if something does happen.
I run a small community of under 100 users. Everyone’s been following the rules so far, and there hasn’t been very much that has needed my attention. I still try to make an occasional post and interact with posts that other users make (favorite, boost, comment).
I think that if you’re at least interacting with your communities in some way, you should be good!
I just experienced my first actual report. 🙃
I thought I was going to have to sticky a “friendly reminder; no transphobia” post earlier. It was touch and go but I think it came down on the right side of the discussion/argument divide.
What was your report? Did you get ban-happy?!
is this him on Reddit too? If so, he’s trying to claim his subs from Reddit, which I personally think is bullshit
39 subs, jfc
Is this a phenomenon where power mods from Reddit are making these fallout shelters to establish their status quo here in case Reddit really dies?
deleted by creator
No, we don’t need to use their communities if we don’t want to.
Currently the way communities work is a “homesteading” model: whoever gets there first gets complete control, unless the instance admin decides otherwise and takes it away.
This is not the only way that things could work.
The admins have started releasing some subs, but the world isn’t the limit of the fedeverse. If I was to start a new community, I probably wouldn’t host it here.
I figure I’ll eventually setup my own instance to go with my Mastodon
Our stance on squatting made clear using [email protected] as an example https://lemmy.world/post/1661949
You can report them on https://lemmy.world/c/support
Doesn’t resolve the issue if no admins are active there.
They have been DDoSed twice in the last few days, I guess they are working on that as a top priority
Oddly I found today that the lemmy.world IP had ended up on a ‘bad IPs’ list amd was blocked off at my edge. Not sure how the inteligence picked that up unless someone manually submitted them just the lulz.
Specifically they ended up here: https://cinsarmy.com/list/ci-badguys.txt
Non-authoritative answer: Name: lemmy.world Address: 135.181.143.230
One of the admins has commented in this very thread, so I’m not overly worried about them lacking activity.
People trying to be power mods on Lemmy. We saw how well that worked on other sites…
How would you stop this in a fair, repeatable way? Especially since alts are so easy to create.
It makes me think this type of behavior is inevitable in any community where users can create their own subs. There might not be any easy way to deter this.
Good admins and moderation are the cornerstones of any community. Always have been, always will be.
