Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

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Spam is one factor, but biases is another that I don't see mentioned often enough. I'm on mastodon.social, see zero spam, and reading through discussions of past bans it looks as if smaller admins banned it because of tiny vocal minorities that might as well be individually dealt with.

I also signed up to another instance (which I am not going to mention) and to hachyderm.io (which nominally caters more to techies, and where I'm essentially lurking) and the local timeline is full of self-promotion and activism. Better cat pics, but I'm struggling to find good discussions. The former instance was just full of idealistic randos chanting as Twitter went belly-up, and although it was all "positive", it was very much the Clockwork Orange kind of positive...

Regarding Lemmy, right now I'm on the fence.

The defederation of Lemmy.world means I can't follow the 3D Printing community there (as well as a couple of others catering to makers and electronics), and Mastodon integration isn't working, so I'm really tempted to just subscribe via RSS or set up a private Lemmy/Kbin instance just to follow the things I'm interested in (which seems wasteful and overly complex).

Anyway, my opinion right now is that the bubble syndrome is really strong in the Fediverse.

> and the local timeline is full of

To me this highlights my top issue with fediverse replacements for sites like Twitter & Reddit.

I always want to be able to see everything. I do not care a single bit about the "local timeline" of my Mastodon instance (also hachyderm.io here). I have no desire to choose a Lemmy server based on its population. The thing I like most about sites like Reddit & Twitter is that they provide me with boundless one stop shopping, and I can choose to ignore things I don't want to see at any particular point of time.

I think a better model might be that there is one central raw feed, that is universal but that instances just prefilter it for you. That way you can have the raw sewage with spam, or you can view a sensitized version that filters for content, or trigger warnings, or even just users. So it's like a single DB table with many views. So EdgeLord420_69 can see and even respond to comments by PrincessSnowflake... but PrincessSnowflake won't see EdgeLord420_69 comments because PrincessSnowflake is using a view that uses a user whitelist of known safe respectful commentators.

Yeah this is a solution that would remove my own complaint as then I could choose an instance that either has no filter or is only applying something like standard spam filtering. I don't really care if other people don't have the ability to see what *I* have to say, I just want the ability to see what *they* say.

I understand that this is the approach being taken by bluesky social.

Same here. I was immediately turned off from Mastodon and even more from Lemmy by my initial interaction with them. As soon as I tried to get involved, I was required to pick from a list of instances with weird-looking descriptions and make myself a member of one of them. That's a lot more commitment than Reddit or Twitter asks me for, and it was enough to stop me from proceeding.

> reading through discussions of past bans it looks as if smaller admins banned it because of tiny vocal minorities that might as well be individually dealt with.

I’ve ceased looking at the local feed (instead of people I follow), because it always seemed to be defederation drama.

This mostly seemed to be “This other large instance has one person we don’t like and won’t impose _our_ moderation standards, so we are defederating”. Or, poor you if you wanted to follow Doctors Without Borders because a news organisation your instance doesn’t like joined it.

Running your own instance seems to be the only way to avoid this, but Mastodon doesn’t seem to be lightweight and I don’t know how sustainable it is for e.g. _everyone_ to do that.

I am actually running a Takahe instance, and it is the lightest, easiest to maintain thing I've found. Doesn't seem to like Lemmy though:

https://github.com/jointakahe/takahe/issues/588

Looks like it's being worked on, so that's great.

> Running your own instance seems to be the only way to avoid this

The problem with this is that running your own instance is also seen as inherently suspicious by the same communities, see the comments about Pleroma by the admins of many medium size instances - because it's easy to set up it's often set up by people avoiding bans, but they miss that easy to set up is a factor that helps everyone.

Wasn't this the expected outcome of federated social media? More echo chambers for ideologues. It happens within Reddit too. You'd have two sub-reddits of the same kind with one having another word to differentiate it from the other. Often times, split through politics.

I'm running reddthat.com if you want a general instance that is federating with every instance :)

The only spam I ever get on Mastodon is crypto DMs from mastodon.social; my instance hasn't defederated it (actually, I don't believe defederating .social is very common; it's too big to fail to an extent) but you can see the temptation.

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