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Lemmy.World Announcements @lemmy.world
lwadmin @lemmy.world

Feedback from all moderators

Hello world!

We would like to start by saying thank you ❀, no really πŸ™ THANK YOU to ALL the moderators out there!

Without you folks, we would have no one to help keep our community safe and help build the communities both here on Lemmy.World and on other fine instances. To this end, we want to make sure your voices are heard πŸ“£ loud and clearπŸ“£.

So, in the spirit of transparency, we would like everyone to know that we are looking to help out the folks working on Sublinks. Over the last several months we have grown to be more than just Lemmy.World. We've added platforms such as Pixelfed and Sharkey to help offer our users more diverse options for expressing themselves online. We still are very committed to Mastodon as well.

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time. Any changes in our core services would need to be discussed extensively internally AND externally with our community members. We firmly believe in the growth of the Fediverse and without the users, there would only be software, and that's no fun!

Sooo...

The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.

Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.

πŸ‘‰Moderation Survey HEREπŸ‘ˆ

Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.

We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!

=Sincerely,
Fedihosting Foundation

PS ... also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🀘😜🀘

252 comments

  • I don't see why the moderation tools couldn't just be improved on Lemmy. The new moderator view has been very useful for me as a moderator. We already have Lemmy and Kbin. The Sublinks about page doesn't say how it is going to be different/better than the existing options apart from moderation tools. On top of that it is made in Java instead of Rust? That's just going backwards in my opinion... This post also does not state why you guys are interested in a Lemmy alternative. You could have named some issues you have with it and why something else would be better(just like the Sublinks guys could have done in their about page). I started my communities here and put a lot of effort in them. I can't just switch instances without destroying most of the work done. The language used here really makes it sound like this instance is on borrowed time. Being able to transfer communities to another instance would be nice...

    • I don’t see why the moderation tools couldn’t just be improved on Lemmy.

      There is no reason it couldn't. The main problem seems to be that the Sublinks devs don't like the Lemmy devs and they don't want to bother learning Rust either and would rather rewrite the whole thing in Java.

      They are of course totally free to do that, but it does seem easier to just improve Lemmy instead of building a whole new Fediverse service just to improve mod tools.

      • Honestly though if they need to learn Rust to do that, it might not be a good idea. I'd rather have a very good implementation in Java than a very amateur one in Rust. Depending on the implementing dev, of course.

    • Hi,

      thanks for your ideas, moderation isnt just a community, its the whole instance. The moderation lacks for instance admins the most. For example reports, with the current setup it is impossible to search for one specific report or sort by community,person,reporter,types. The sort order is currently somewhere else where it should be, it sorts on the server by old => new and client side new => old. I dont know if this was wanted but it just creates additionally to the lack of sort or filter options a issue for instance admins, that want to look for urgent reports at the top of the reports.

      The programming language is just a preference, i already said this to mutliple people, this was a choice of convinience and it is still a valid option for a rest api.

  • Hello there! I love lemmy.world - I moderate communities such as /c/Minecraft and /c/Relationship_Advice and will always be onboard for improving our platforms and reaching more people.

    I also do not personally believe in yet another slicing of the communities into different platforms, and if Sublinks aren't integrated into Lemmy - requiring new communities or separate accounts - I will not be following along. Of course, somebody else could always take over my communities in that event, but I just wanted to let out my opinion on this.

    You might not remember specific details during that whole jump in workload, but during the first week of Reddit migration, some moderators from communities that fought really hard to build an user base migrated here - one for menopausal women in particular caught my eye, as the moderator did everything in her power to migrate users who weren't tech savvy to a whole new platform. The reason this effort didn't work and most of these communities reverted back was the extreme fragmentation and confusing nature of the early Fediverse. If, for whatever reason, we add yet another layer we are explicitly saying we only care about esse of use for tech savvy programmers. This is a fine stance to have, but make it clear and explicit if that's the case.

    As a final addendum, the political beliefs of the Lemmy developers never harmed any of the several opposition communities or servers - if that's the root of the matter, I'm even more disappointed.

    Still, as always, I will support the .world family of servers and there's simply nobody quite as good, competent and dedicated as this team in the Fediverse.

    • I also do not personally believe in yet another slicing of the communities into different platforms, and if Sublinks aren’t integrated into Lemmy - requiring new communities or separate accounts - I will not be following along. Of course, somebody else could always take over my communities in that event, but I just wanted to let out my opinion on this.

      Sublinks would work th same way as Mbin does. People on Mbin can currently interact with all the Lemmy content in a similar way Lemmy users do.

      The reason this effort didn’t work and most of these communities reverted back was the extreme fragmentation and confusing nature of the early Fediverse.

      To be fair, when the migration happened, Lemmy wasn't ready. Federation was still flimsy, and LW was under constant DDoS attack. Lemmy is in a much better state now.

    • Thank you so much! We're trying our hardest ❀️

      At the end of the day we want to make sure the whole Fediverse keeps on growing in a safe way.

      Sublinks will be API compatible from Day 1. So you will be able to interact just fine with Lemmy from it (and other activity pub servers, I believe). Also all mobile apps will work with it as well.

    • the political beliefs of the Lemmy developers never harmed any of the several opposition communities or servers

      Hard disagree. Lemmy is full of authoritarian propaganda, and they're quite happy to abuse and harass users. The devs might be on lemmy.ml instead of Hexbear, but they're on the same team spreading their propaganda with a ML facade.

      I've been told I'm "going to get the wall" (i.e. they'll execute me against a wall, a death threat) and had an old account followed around with them downvoting everything I posted until I just abandoned it.

      I still use Lemmy but I won't even admit I use it unless it really cleans up a lot of the misinformation and hate, and I see certain devs as central to this problem.

      I'll happily move to a new platform to avoid them.

      • I’ll happily move to a new platform to avoid them.

        Just to be clear, Sublinks is still a Fediverse application and presumably if lemmy.world switched, it would still federate with the instances it currently federates with, so you would not avoid anyone any more than you currently are.

        If you want to avoid certain instances, go to an instance that has defederated from those instances (or make your own).

  • I want to start by saying I am extremely thankful for Ruud and the team and think that you did an amazing job with lemmy.world and I wish you success in the future.

    That said, I am a monthly 30 dollar donator to Lemmy and I am not interested in Sublinks. I read through the threads and my take is that I think the motivation for the development of it goes against my personal politics and mischaracterizes nutomic and dessalines. While I appreciate the nature of open source to open up avenues for people to act as they think is best, I do not want to leave the Lemmy.

    Ahead of a migration to Sublinks I hope there comes a cleaner way to move communities off lemmy.world. If I had known how the Fediverse worked 11 months ago I would have self hosted an instance and shared my communities that way as to not be defederated from people I want to be federated with. Additionally I think that having a single huge lemmy instance is not great for the architecture of the fediverse as a whole and even if there were no changes planned or being considered. I think that many instances hosting communities is preferable to having large ones like lemmy.ml and lemmy.world.

    Again I totally get that this is provided free and as is and as such you are free to make the decision you think is best. Even though I am a difficult person, I very much appreciate you, your team and what you are trying to accomplish. Thank you.

    • I really hope there will be an option in Lemmy and Sublinks (and bin,mbin etc) to move communities between instances. But I think that's not very easy. I agree that having a few large instances isn't how the fediverse is meant to be. Ideally there would be a separate instance for each community.

      • It does sound very complicated. You'd probably need both instances to agree to the transfer somehow and then you'd need to transfer all the data (old posts from before the two servers federated for instance).

        It would probably need to be built into ActivityPub if it should really work between different Fediverse services too.

    • Additionally I think that having a single huge lemmy instance is not great for the architecture of the fediverse as a whole and even if there were no changes planned or being considered. I think that many instances hosting communities is preferable to having large ones like lemmy.ml and lemmy.world.

      May I ask why you didn't move to another generalist instance? It's a two clicks operation now to export and import settings from the settings menu

  • Apologies for a bit of a negative thought here ...

    But I went through the survey, mainly curious to see what SL are thinking about in terms of moderation tooling, and was somewhat disappointed to see mostly broad and open ended questions. While these can be very valuable in surveys for picking up on as much information as possible, I was hoping to see more specific ideas about moderation tooling for people to provide feedback on, instead of "what do you find difficult" etc style questions.

    To be harsh for a moment, it almost feels like the SL team decided they'd work on moderation tooling, then realised they don't quite know what to do and so are looking for ideas on what should be done. Now I know that's likely untrue, given that some admins and the SL teams have already had conversations. But still, I was hoping to see some manifestation of those motives and conversations in this survey. Maybe that's unreasonable of me ... I'm not sure.

    All of that being said, a complaint I've made in this space before (to other platform devs), which I'll share here again ...

    platform specific moderation work is a bit of a shame on the fediverse. It may not be tractable, but some form of platform generic plugin style moderation tooling really seems like where things should be headed. It would be cool if something like that was what was being worked on here rather than reinventing the wheel for a ~50,000 MAU userbase.

    It could be in whatever language or stack you want. APIs are there and if new ones are needed they'd be worth working on too. You could make whatever frontend for it you like. And there is likely some interesting protocol involved too. I know there's talk about such things over on the mastodon side.

    But generally, IMO, plugins, rather than whole new platforms (with blackjack and hookers) is likely what the fediverse needs at the moment given its scale (and lack of major growth in the near future).

  • Are you planning on sharing the results of the survey? I think the Lemmy folks would be interested in it too.

  • After mulling this post over for awhile:

    • .world has many instances in the fediverse and existed long before Lemmy.world. Ruud has never, to my knowledge, posed anything like this post about another potential fedi service. The other fediverse services have coexisted without need to position them against each other. This difference in approach implies intentions, if not outright actions with the illusion of user input.
    • The prevalence of Linux users on this platform is common knowledge. So much so, it is a common complaint from users that feel excluded or uninterested in Linux. The use of Linux implies a distrust for Microsoft, and for the most part megacorporations. While the survey creator (sublinks) may receive anonymous data, Microsoft is absolutely correlating information that comes across their server and selling that data. In my opinion, this should have been an obvious thing most of the Linux community will not participate in, (myself included as one of the most active users and a mod). And it reflects poorly on the FOSS nature of sublinks. A FOSS survey system is needed badly for effective engagement.
    • As many of us in the social sciences background know... Please explain the intention of this statement. I don't mean to be cynical, but to me, this implies I have been part of some science experiment of unknown intentions and implications; at the extreme end of possible meanings. I thought we were a FOSS community, many with a self hosting interest. A social sciences interest and background has entirely different motivations and raises concern for me.

    • .world has many instances in the fediverse and existed long before Lemmy.world. Ruud has never, to my knowledge, posed anything like this post about another potential fedi service. The other fediverse services have coexisted without need to position them against each other. This difference in approach implies intentions, if not outright actions with the illusion of user input.

      I see my name mentioned here, but I don't understand the remark. Positioning fediverse services against each other? The team has posted this to get input to assist the Sublinks development team in getting moderation tools in their software. I think it's good there's many options in software to choose from. Lemmy, Kbin, Main, Piefed, Sublinks. I also run mastodon, but also similar platforms like firefish, sharkey, akkoma etc. Users can choose. Nothing is positioned against each other. They all work together as 1 large Fediverse. And, the more instances, the better. The fediverse ideally should exist of many instances instead of a few large ones. (Yes, I agree that having 1 big Lemmy server isn't ideal. But that's another discussion.)

      • Hey Ruud. Overall the post comes across as if it has odd intentions. It does not clearly state the purpose of the post but it explains a bunch of what it is not. In corporate America and American politics we are constantly getting these kinds of messages. It almost always means everything that is addressed in the message is about to happen. The person that wrote the information is trying to tell the reader how to think instead of providing information and allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.

        You have mentioned your other servers in the fediverse in the past, and it was always in this type of informative, "draw your own conclusions" type of post. I appreciate that, and can respect it.

        The proper way to introduce sublinks would be in a similar vain, to simply state that it exists and what its merits are versus Lemmy. If change may be coming to Lemmy.world, simply explain the reasoning behind those decisions. It is great if you can involve the community, but the involvement should be following the principals and alignment of the community to engage with them. Microsoft as a service for providing my personal details is not aligned with my values. Perhaps if I lived in the EU I would feel differently, but in the USA I have little choice but to avoid these companies entirely.

        A survey is often a tool used to gauge how to administer a change that will be unpopular, and this usually means the change in direction addressed in the survey has already been decided.

        My concern could be completely misplaced. I have not punched a hole in my firewall for Microsoft or agreed to their terms of service to see the content of the survey. The only information I have is what is posted here.

        My concern has nothing to do with the obvious joke. I am concerned that this post does not describe its purpose clearly, it implies major changes are coming, and it promotes feedback in a way that does not align with my principals as a very active user here. On a separate note, the comment about sociology is curious for its unsolicited randomness. Do you run any scientific experiments in the background or allow other to do so?

        I default to a skeptical line of questioning , but I am not trying to be negative or accusatory. It is mostly a desire to learn and understand what is happening under the surface.

      • Aaah, so the plan is to run sublinks on, say, sublinks.world and keep lemmy.world running with lemmy? Like you do with the mastodon alternatives?

    • .world has many instances in the fediverse and existed long before Lemmy.world. Ruud has never, to my knowledge, posed anything like this post about another potential fedi service. The other fediverse services have coexisted without need to position them against each other.

      Seems to me that's because (with the possible exception of Lemmy vs. Kbin) this is the first time there have been two Fediverse services of the same type. (After writing that I fact-checked myself: it turns out there are two Twitter-equivalents in addition to Mastodon, Misskey and Pleroma, but they're not noteworthy enough to have their own Wikipedia pages, so...)

      Anyway, it seems to me (given that Sublinks is intended to be API-compatible with Lemmy) this is less of a "position them against each other" (as in competing for users in a walled-garden sort of way) issue and more of a "choose among several equivalent implementations the one you like best" issue.

    • EDIT: I am sorry for the previous text, i was a little too moody there, so the downvotes are probably justified ;)

      The prevalence of Linux users on this platform is common knowledge.

      Yes we all knew that, but because of convenience and we didnt wanted any issues with accusations that we correlate ips that accessed the self hosted form with lemmy user ips, so we chose to use Microsoft Forms

  • Whoa. Some of us moderators are just average users who escaped from Reddit. I moderate two small niche support groups. (Stopdrinking and bipolar) I know the other moderator in bipolar is about the same tech level as me. (NOT coders!).

    This sounds like we need to rehome our groups???

    • Why would you need to?

      • I don’t want to! I love it here and the small yet personal communities we have. My peeps check in daily or weekly. I try really hard to contribute to the overall instance. What I’m reading here in this thread sounds ominous from some people.

  • The survey form eats more RAM the longer it's open until it becomes unusable.

  • Can you help me understand what the first 6 questions have to do with the survey subject of moderation? They seem to collect personal information without direct bearing on anything.

  • A lot of people here seem to think that Java code is awful and disgusting and no projects should ever use it. The thing about popular languages is that more code existing in a language inevitably means a lot of it ends up being bad. The same thing will likely happen to rust as it gets popular, but that isn't exactly a problem. It's possible to have a well-maintained Java codebase.

    Debate between functionality of the actual programming languages at this point is pretty meaningless, if they have good development standards then a Java program could end up just as well maintained as rust. Any time saved by compiler enforcement of specific standards (like no using null) would be lost by the fact that the devs don't know rust tooling. You could just have a requirement in PRs that null isn't used. Both Java and Rust have usable frameworks for REST API development, so using one or the other comes down to familiarity.

    The idea that programming languages make code suddenly good or bad is pretty silly. Different languages have different language-level guarantees which can help produce good or working code. That being said, it's not like it's impossible to write good Java code, just like it's not impossible to write bad rust code. Most people seem to be conflating guaranteed functionality and safety with maintainability, stability, and readability. Rust is still a new language, so although it's great, Java will probably be the better choice for the latter 3 qualities.

    That being said, something like Kotlin would probably have been a better starting point since it can interact with Java (and works like Java in most cases) but also has some nice improvements like stricter null checking (Kotlin nulls are treated similarly to rust's Option<T>, it's just described as T? instead and the syntax is generally a lot more concise). There's also the benefit of being able to write some code in Kotlin and some in Java since they are mostly cross-compatible.

    • The idea that programming languages make code suddenly good or bad is pretty silly.

      I generally agree, you can write good and bad code in any language.

      However, I also think it is equally naive to think that the tool you use has no influence on the end result. It does have an influence. In my experience, exception-based error handling like that used by Java and many other older languages just doesn't work that well. It's too easy to forget to catch them and make mistakes. And there's a host of other stuff that Rust improves on.

      This really shouldn't be surprising. Rust is a newer language, of course it would try to improve the status quo with the experience we've gained from previous languages like Java. It even went and invented whole new concepts like ownership and the borrow checker to make it work. I imagine that future languages will have similar concepts, just like many languages today have garbage collectors or other common functionality.

      So yes, programming language choice is a tenuous thing... But I don't think it's correct to say it doesn't matter.

      Also if we do entertain the notion that it doesn't matter, the reasoning for Sublinks get even weirder, as the argument that Java is a better choice falls out the window.

      • Sorry for being unclear, I wasn't trying to say language doesn't make a difference (e.g. static vs. dynamic typing would make a big difference). I also personally like the error handling of rust a lot more, even if it does take a bit getting used to when my education has mostly been in languages with Java-style exception handling.

        I mostly meant that the language-level performance and features aren't necessarily holding the codebase back in a debate between Java and Rust for a lemmy-like REST API. As long as the developers are aware of the pitfalls of Java (null, mutation, error-handling, etc.), it's possible to have good code.

        I just think that from a maintainability standpoint, a Java-style codebase is much easier for most people to read, understand, and maintain because that's what most people are familiar with. Especially when many of the developers are volunteer contributors, that type of thing could make a big difference.

        The main problem with Rust is that it's only starting to get adoption now, it isn't taught in most education curriculums, and it's industry use is pretty small at the moment. It's kind of a catch-22, because rust adoption won't increase unless large projects like lemmy exist. But that's also why I think having more options is also fine. Sublinks might get more developers short term because of its language, but that also doesn't mean it'll completely replace Lemmy. Both projects can exist at the same time, and hopefully benefit from each other's development.

  • Whelp, I've spent enough time here to make a decision. As of right now, I love it here, and I don't see that changing. I've decided to go premium, in an effort to support things. I will withdraw that so fast though if I see any reason to do so.

  • So if someone has a community on lemmy.world, would they need to move to sublinks at some point? Where and how would one do that? Asking for myself.

    Thanks for all your work here.

    • This will be done automatically, with a migration script. The user doesnt need to do anything.

      Nothing should be lost, we will have a announcement up when it comes up. But this will be still at least few months to that day.

      • Alright, neat! Always happy to go for some FOSS experiments :)

      • This is the first comment I’ve scrolled to where someone has asked about what moving to Sublinks means in terms of practicality, so I’ll hitch my question here too.

        To be sure I understand, are you saying that any existing community will be automatically migrated to Sublinks? Would I need to also create a new user account with Sublinks or would this also be migrated? Posts, comments, up/downvotes? Are those all migrated?

        I’m just having trouble understanding what a move to Sublinks means in a very practical sense for users and communities. Is this just a backend change that Iβ€”as a user, as a modβ€”would likely not notice? Thanks for any clarification you can provide.

  • Why are .world admins always so hostile? First Antik and now you?

    Why does this instance continuously bleed admins? This is why we had an abrupt change on the piracy change

    Why was that post shamefully hidden in your community while every donation post and survey pinned for days?

    Why do you continuously make up lies about the lemmy developers and spread negativity about them when they promoted this instance at the start of the reddit exodus?

    Rookie has a horrible track record with privacy concerns and user-data respect, first with the .world scraper discord bot and now with a microsoft survey?!?

    From your reply below it is clear that .world is going to move to sublinks (you are all developing it right?) you mention a script that will automatically move communities there. What about those people that don't want to move, will you allow them to move their community away before you forcefully transfer it?

    Will .world federate with Meta on Sublinks or with lemmy?

    Will you commit to having a town-hall with the users? This is by far the worst instance for user communication and we deserve to know if that will continue.

    • What the HECK man?

      There's an underlying problem IMO with all Fediverse software and instances, in that because it's made available for free, people get entitled, moderators and admins are obligated to sort of do volunteer work on behalf of people who haven't earned it in order for any of the thing to work, which naturally leads to a inexhaustible wellspring of negative energy because the whole thing isn't right.

      I saw the posts of Ruud asking for people to basically interview for a part time admin position and do a job which for skills and time investment is worth from $50k/yr-$200k/yr (calibrating for the fact that it's "only" 5-10 hours per week), and all I could think was whoa no no no this isn't the way. Not saying there's anything wrong with people volunteering their time to make available this great thing, but I think undervaluing them when they decide to do that is almost inevitable, which has follow-on effects that manifest in all kinds of ways and lead to things not being the way they should be. Occasional prickly or unfair behavior by mods or admins represent one example of that; comments like this one represent another.

      What on earth is hostile about the OP post in any way?

    • This is by far the worst instance for user communication and we deserve to know if that will continue.

      Just want to point out that the lemmy.world admins don't owe you anything (unless perhaps you are an active donator, but even then it is a donation, not payment for anything) so you don't "deserve" anything from them.

      If you are unhappy with your admins, move to another instance. With 0.19.3, you can export your user settings and import them elsewhere, so moving is quite easy and thankfully there are plenty of other instances.

    • I am also feeling a bit uneasy with how the world team seems to throw their weight against the lemmy devs. I don't know any deeper reasoning other than what was discussed openly on lemmy, so who knows if it may be rewarded.

      Seeing sunaurus chime in on the supposedly toxic development environment etc. made me feel a lot more sympathetic to the lemmy devs and gave me a different view other than (some of) .world's obvious animosity. The discussion between the beehaw guys and the lemmy devs only reinforced that tbh, although of course here i also might have not all the knowledge to come to a fair conclusion.

      All in all i found sunaurus to be the most transparent and sober in his takes, i will take SorteKanin's advice and start using my lemm.ee account more now.

      the .world scraper discord bot

      What was that all about, i saw it mentioned before but have no idea what happened?

      • The .world scrapper discord bot he means the discord verification bot. It simply uses the lemmy api to dm you to verify you are the real AchtungDrempels on discord as on lemmy. To reduce trolls and spammers.

      1. We are only hostile if you are hostile to us
      2. This was again, sry for this a misscommunication, but to be fair in a legal way, first act then announce it is a common approach.
      3. They just wanted a (indirect) test dummy to test their software on a big scale, and we are sick of it, we are always the first that goes head first into their untested, experimental features, that they probably even didnt started in their test environment and not even mark it as experimental.
      4. The .world "scraper" bot?! is a verificiaton bot for our discord server to reduce trolls, that just uses simple api calls to verify through a dm that it is you and btw, this isnt created by me it is created by someone on the sublinks team.
      5. This will be discussed, so no idea.
      6. Probably, if the users toxicity reduces here, probably yes, we are sorry for that, we hope to improve.

      I am sorry but the FHF / Lemmy instance admins are just humans. And yeah there is a feature now to export your blocks, community subscriptions and we are not blocking you to use it if you are really sick of us.

      • I think that people are so used to being consumers of social media that we really don't have the context to behave as guests/partners. This is not a Starbucks - It's a community garden. By the way, someone is still paying for all of the seeds and the water. Someone is showing up to do the gardening. Yeah, the fruits are there for everyone to enjoy, but have a little sense about it.

  • thanks to instance-wide mod efforts. take the drudgery out of chasing most spammy types. out here getting fat.

    • The mod team here works very hard to filter spam out, it's actually really bad if you don't have automation and a large team.

252 comments