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  • As a moderator myself, it's a pretty thankless job. It's a bit like being a politician in that no matter what you do, there are lots of people that are going to hate you.

    • Thank you for your service o7

    • It depends on the community. Larger general purpose communities tend towards that, the people who acknowledge you are typically people disputing a ban or who took it personally. On the other hand, for a Lemmy example, look at the admin Ada (and similar examples) who have reasons to regularly communicate their decisions and achievements and are clearly in line with their general community's values – their community won't have as many people crying about censorship because the community doesn't pretend that they will tolerate bigotry.

      Mods who just delete garbage posts (sometimes called "janitors" on other platforms) are typically faceless thankless volunteers, or abusive personalities powertripping. It's a tough job, and someone has to put their hand up for it.

    • I have to ask, then: what motivates people to do it?

      If mods are not financially compensated for it, the only rational explanation is that they are either getting some form of benefit (soft power, access to privileged information) or they are getting some pleasure out of it, i.e, power tripping.

      • I think a lot of people do it because they want to build communities and bring people together. It's easy to underestimate the workload and what kind of problems come up. A big problem is that people start instances, and gradually realize that they're basically stuck running things until they either hand it off to someone else, or shut down.

      • Funny how some people expose their own sad world views by projecting it onto others 😅

        Some people chose to do the right things because they are right, not because they benefit from them.

        • Some people chose to do the right things because they are right

          This is just another way of saying that people do things for moral validation - a.k.a, self-righteouness - and is no at all different from "power tripping".

          • That is a rather toxic way of looking at the world. I get it, I kind of can rationally understand the idea that you can explain all selfless behavior as being selfish because the least you get out of it is dopamine, so you are wired to feel good doing what you think is right.

            Now, can you tell me how this is just not a very shitty and cynical lens to view humans through? I've had my nihilistic phase in my 20's. I hope you also find a way out of the hole of the "arbitrariness" of ethics.

            Because each other is all we have, and ethics is ultimately what makes us human. The ability to reprogram our own pleasure circuit and maybe, just maybe, just use it to be not an asshole, just to start with. And then at some point just do something nice for others. Because if everybody did that, the world would not be the shithole it is.

            I'm thankful to mods who volunteer their free time to tend to the garden of the communities they care about.

          • Nah I get no dopamine from doing the right thing its neutral, some ppl just help build the place they want to see, obviously no one does anything for no reason at all?

          • Yeah, right 🤦 Sorry but I must conclude you have some serious intellectual stunting if you truly believe that. Ayn Rand level of delusion.

            • Hey, any comparison to Ayn Rand or their fans should be an immediate ban. No need to go that low.

              All I've been arguing with you could be summed up as "if we want the Fediverse to be universal, we will need to grow a lot faster and we need to accept the reality that not everyone values the same things as you do" and you responding "No, I don't to make the Fediverse universal because most people are too morally weak to stand for the things I care about".

              (And if you think I am exagerating: don't make me look for the conversation where you said that people should be okay using this crap because the other open source alternatives committed the grave sin of "raising money from investors".)

              • Fine I didn't need to go as low as Ayn Rand.

                But I think you still didn't get my argument last time. Tl;dr: there is no point in doing what you propose as it just results in recreating the same shit we already have. This has nothing to do with moral failings and everything with strategy and not repeating the same mistakes all over again.

                And besides that I agree that Siskin isn't great, and most likely suggested this instead. And that "open-source alternative" is now open-core and can't pay their bloated expenses now that VC funding has run dry. I hope you see the irony in what you just wrote, because that is really a clear example of how unsustainable and ill advised that kind of growth is.

                • it just results in recreating the same shit we already have

                  This is you passing opinion as undisputed truth. I am not proposing "Let's take on the big corporations by building another big corporation", I am saying "we can get rid of the dominance from big corporations if we help foment an economy of small, independent businesses." and I am saying "if we keep this anti-business culture where we are hostile to even some food truck owner trying to connect to their customers, then don't complain when the food truck owner continues using Facebook/Instagram/Twitter".

                  And that “open-source alternative” is now open-core

                  Synapse is still AGPLv3. Their closed parts are for Enterprise. No one is being locked out of crucial features. No one is being locked out of reaching out other users of the network. No one is being forced to "upgrade" after reaching a certain size. To call it open-core is just yet-another display of bias.

                  and most likely suggested this (Monal) instead.

                  Monal does not make video calls! Not having video calls was a non-starter in 2015, let alone today.

                  because that is really a clear example of how unsustainable and ill advised that kind of growth is.

                  Is it? Because so far I managed to talk with a lot more people on Matrix than I ever did on XMPP, and that wouldn't change even if Element closed shop tomorrow. And even if it did, the odds would be highly in favor of some other company like Beeper picking up the pieces to serve its customers and it would still be in their interest to keep things open to have the ecosystem around.

                  So, at the end of the day, yes, I'd rather have this "unsustainable" growth than claiming any moral victory for sticking to the Betamax of chat protocols. This "unsustainable" system gave me and few hundred million people something that is far from perfect, but at least it can make video calls on iOS.

                  • Lets not repeat the entire argument, but you are being extremely naive and literally play lipservice to what Mark Zuckerberg thinks the Fediverse should become.

                    And, no. Vital parts for running a somewhat decently sized Synapse instance are not AGPLv3 licenced, Element requires a CLA so they can easily alter the deal even further, and their own marketing people go around fearmongering about the AGPL, which is a classic play of open-core companies. If it walks like a duck and all that...

                    And Matrix had never even close to a few hundred million users. By their own admission during the presentation at the last FOSDEM, their MAU is barely above 300k. That's what IRC had before Matrix started canibalizing them 🙄

                    • Matrix had never even close to a few hundred million users.

                      Yeah, completely typo'ed here. I wanted to change from "hundred of thousands" to "a few million" and ended up with the worst combination. Too late to edit, now.

                      what Mark Zuckerberg thinks the Fediverse should become.

                      If you ask me, I think Zuckerberg wants to commoditize the social graph and position his company to become the AWS of social web applications. It would be the best way to skirt all regulations (because he would claim that he is only providing infrastructure and is not liable for the content) and it would let he profit from the others by providing service and by snooping on the data they get through their servers.

                      And you know what? I'd be absolutely fine with him trying to do it. I actually would like to see how this would play out. I'd rather have a world where Zuckerberg has the "AWS of social media' than a world where he has "Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram and whatever competition he manages to kill by buying them off".

                      A world where Zuckerberg owns the AWS of social media implies a world where others like Hetzner, OVH and all the gajillion VPS low-end boxes can exist. As horrible and morally bankrupt Zuckerberg is, letting him make this move would be an improvement over the status quo.

                      Even if some compromises have to be made, a world where Zuckerberg controls 30-40% of the social web leaves us all some room to work and maintain a healthier alternative to our friends and family. And this is a better world than the one where we pretend to pass ideological purity test but inevitably need to install and use WhatsApp to talk with a friend or to send a picture to my parents.

                      Vital parts for running a somewhat decently sized Synapse instance are not AGPLv3 licenced.

                      Define "vital" and define "decently sized". What point does AGPL Synapse becomes impossible to use? Are we talking about an instance for an university with a few thousand students and faculty? A company with a few hundred employees?

                      Couldn't that issue be solved by simply breaking a larger instance into smaller subgroups? Couldn't this "soft-ceiling" on instance size be actually a positive thing, as it would encourage better distribution of the user base among different service providers?

                      But more importantly, why should I care so much about theoretical, technical limitations that affect virtually no one and give preference to an alternative ecosystem that does not even have an decent client that people can use to make video calls?

                      • Fine, if you want to be the useful fool for Mark Zuckerberg you can do that, but I rather be not. The improvement in that setup is mainly on the side of Mark Zuckerberg as you write yourself. The rest would be some maganged opposition only existing because Mark lets them. But we had that argument before.

                        You are finding excuses for shitty business practises of Element. Synapse is already bad enough software as is, even for smaller instances, and this adds direct monetary incentives for Element to keep it bad, so that people are forced to upgrade to Synapse Pro or pay an even higher amount of money to upgrade the hardware to run this extremely inefficient shit software. This is all typical of open-core software vendors and you are having Stockholm syndrome if you think otherwise.

                        And please don't be silly. XMPP had video calls long before Matrix. It works perfectly fine and there are many clients that support it. Just on one very small and developer hostile platform that outside of the US and Japan hardly anyone uses, it is work in progress and only partially supported.

      • Let’s please not forget that some people donate time and money because it gives them personal satisfaction to help out with something that is meaningful to them.

      • You can do things because you want to make a difference. A good difference. Not everything has to have an ulterior motive.

        • What "difference" is someone doing by being a mod of 50-odd subreddits, like the case of the mod in question?

      • I moderate a privacy community because they were looking for mods. I just delete spam from time to time

      • Well I only moderate 1 community and there is a compensation component to it.

        But for others, I'm sure they just enjoy having a community. Some of them might also just not care what the naysayers say.

        • Well I only moderate 1 community and there is a compensation component to it.

          So many questions... :)

          • What community?
          • From this account, or some other? You profile page doesn't show you as moderator for anything.
          • What form of compensation are you talking about?

          • Don't really want to get too deep into it but its a Facebook community and its relevant to my business and I use the community to promote my business. It's become a large source of my business. It's the only reason I can't delete my Facebook profile.

            • Ah, I thought you were talking about something here on the Fediverse.

              In any case, I wish people didn't feel afraid to talk about business here. Maybe more people would realize that behind the majority of "business" there are genuine people and not just the cartoon capitalist pigs.

              • I have a Ghost blog for my business. It'll be in the fedi as soon as they make that available for self-hosters. For now, it's just crossposting via MastoFeed. I've also contacted them about posting them to Lemmy, as it seems like a much more fitting platform.

      • I like high quality communities, which cannot maintain quality without staff, and which would probably struggle to maintain any funding.

        One example of a community I became a moderator for often had trolls occasionally show up and post obviously malicious content, and commercial ad spam. Due to timezone differences, these often took hours to be deleted by existing staff.

        So it wasn't about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.

        Edit: in a comment chain, you mentioned people who clearly moderate for other motives. They exist, I've seen them and helped get some removed in one particular community. Like you said, there are other motivators. Sometimes a community is so desperate for volunteers that they keep junk ones on-board, sometimes the admin personally likes them and enables their abuse, or sometimes the admin is too absent and no-one can kick the abusive staff out. And worse, if a staff team is toxic, it's harder to bring good volunteers in.

      • I get the pleasure of hanging out in well moderated communities where I feel like I am doing my part. Doesn't need to be more complicated than that.

      • Some people volunteer and contribute out of their own good will for the betterment of society. Especially people who believe in FOSS which is a reasonable expectation out of someone who admins FOSStodon

77 comments