Most people access the Fediverse through one of the large instances: lemmy.world, kbin, or beehaw. New or small instances of Lemmy have no content by default, and can most easily get content by linking to larger Lemmy instances. This is done manually one “Community” at a time (I spent 15 minutes doing this yesterday). Meanwhile, on larger instances, content naturally aggregates as a result of the sheer number of users. Because people generally want a user experience similar to Reddit, I think it’s inevitable that most user activity will be concentrated in one or two instances. It is probable that these instances follow in the footsteps of Reddit- the cycle repeats.
I actually think the Fediverse is in the beginning the process of fragmenting into siloed smaller, centralized instances. Beehaw, which is on the list of top instances, just blacklisted everyone from lemmy.world. Each of the three largest instances now are working to be a standalone replacement for Reddit and are in direct competition with each other. It is possible that this fragmentation and instability? of Lemmy instances will kill the viability of Federated Reddit altogether, but hopefully not.
These are my main takeaways from my three days on the Fediverse. I will stick around to see if the Fediverse can sustain itself after the end of the Reddit blackouts.
I think the issue that beehaw had was one of insufficient moderation tooling. Very solvable, and the admins even say that, but they also said they can’t stand around waiting for mod tools to become available, so they’re using the tool they have for the time being. If Lemmy catches on, I’m sure these issues will be solved in due time.
Beehaw is big on the “safe space” approach, rather than “grow” approach. So makes sense they did what they did.
In their defense, I remember a lot of people bouncing off voat specifically because it was full of trolls, racists, and generally horrible people. We don’t want that happening here, too.
Its a fine line between “safe space” and “too space so no content”. I think Beehaw has managed to achieve that
Exactly. They recognize that defederation is the nuclear option, but it’s the only effective tool they have at the moment.
What moderation tooling do they need? Never did any Reddit modding myself but might be down for making some tools if someone gave me a rundown of what’s needed
Unfortunately, I’m not really equipped to answer your question, but in sure if you reached out to behaws admins they’d point you in the right direction
I’ve understood that the problem with Lemmy’s moderation tooling right now is that if an instance has a lot of problematic users, the only way to handle that is to totally defederate.
Eg. the possibility of blanket blocking all users from instance X from commenting on instance Y without taking away instance Y users’ ability to interact with communities on X would be useful. I’ve understood that Mastodon has something like this nowadays.
Anything besides manually checking each post/comment and defederating an entire instance would help.