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.
Then they would use VPNs
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.
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.
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.
I am moderator of the four communities I have created and I am thinking of creating a few more, but once each of these communities has a regular user base, I will make my place available and appoint other moderators.
Same here. I set up a couple of Cs for the things I like to follow but couldn’t find under the local tab. If they ever take off I will hand them over to people who are more suited to moderating large communities. Until then I can handle it, and I prefer having a local option for the things I want to post.
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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
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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.
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.
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: !android@lemmy.world
Edit2: Reworded this mess for clarity
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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 !fire@lemmy.ml 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…)
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.
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.
The LemmyAsk and LemmyExplain names are pretty clever. I hope those communities stick over the reddit-replacement communities like “AskLemmy”.
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.
LemmyShowYouSomething
It could be for cool stuff, or a community dedicated to Fire Marshall Bill.
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
How about a travel one called LemmyPeopleGo?
Fix this problem now before all the Reddit refugees decide that the new boss isn’t any better than the old boss.
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
People trying to be power mods on Lemmy. We saw how well that worked on other sites…
Our stance on squatting made clear using !android@lemmy.world as an example https://lemmy.world/post/1661949
Also this guy: User @peace. https://lemmy.world/post/479990
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?!
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!
Just ban a random user each week to show you’re still active.
You have enough users to make it at least 800 weeks!
Gotta keep them on their toes and show them who’s boss!
I offer myself as tribute 🥺
Goddammit, the only option is to ban myself from one of them…
Are you really banning yourself when you’re SomeoneElse?
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?
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Should do what Reddit did and make a takeover request subreddit. Admins would step in on subs that are clearly abandoned or squatted on and relinquish control to users who requested it. Nothing is lost anyways, since the subreddits were dead to begin with. Same can apply to the Lemmy instances.
But there are options?
- Tag me in a community you think is abandoned.
- Post in !support@lemmy.world or !moderators@lemmy.world
- send an email to info@mastodon.world
We might not always react as fast as you like but this isn’t our job it’s a hobby project and sometimes there are other, more important issues that have to be handled first. But we will get to it! Cheers
Can you comment or is it documented somewhere how “active” you and the other admins are planning on being RE mods? i.e. do you see community management as being more hands off, and if there’s a bad mod then people should make a new community, or would you want to step in and try to fix things? Reddit mostly took the approach of being hands off, which had some nasty side effects and is why a lot of the comments in this thread are wary of powermods. IMO if you and the other admins were to be proactive in modding the mods, that would probably solve a lot of people’s worries.
- There are moderation rules laid out here: https://lemmy.world/post/424735
- There are the Lemmy World rules here: https://mastodon.world/about
We know that that doesn’t cover everything and the instance is only a month old so it’s hard to imagine what comes next and be pro-active.
We try to stay hands off but sometimes there is no other way but to intervene. Like here: https://lemmy.world/post/1661949
I think you guys have done a pretty kickass job. And your team’s responsiveness with the big issues has been enough to impress my cynical ass. Appreciate you guys.
Appreciated… Gonads 😅
Ha! Decided to go with my gamertag on Lemmy, which I created like 17 years ago around the age of 14.
Was inspired by this old (now cringeworthy…) OG flash video from the early days of the internet.
What happened when you posted about this in !support@lemmy.world? If no traction there, you can always email info@lemmy.world
They would likely need to be deleted, unless things have changed since this comment was made.
They would likely need to be deleted, unless things have changed since this comment was made.
Oof, that’s rough. I hadn’t realized that.
Tagging you in this thread too. Sorry if this isn’t the most effective/preferred method
If you’re interested in one of those communities and the mod is still active - pick it up with them first. In cases where the mods have abandoned the community completely we as admins can transfer the community to a new mod/team.
How many communities is it reasonable for 1 person to moderate? I don’t like the idea of someone having control of 50+ communities. That type of unjustified control was abused on reddit. The reason why someone wants to control that many communities is to inflict their bias.
That question keeps coming up as if users can not create multiple accounts to circumvent that. As I said as long as they manage to get teams together and actively moderate those communities following the community guidelines and server rules there’s not much that can be done. And this is NOT reddit 2.0 - there are other instances were the exact same communities can be created and grow.
That question keeps coming up as if users can not create multiple accounts to circumvent that.
If we are taking that approach, does that not make the rest of the rules unenforceable as well?
How would you even know that it is the same person if they use two separate accounts?
Say someone does something against the rules, gets banned. Creates another account and does the same thing. We will ban them again if they violate the server rules but how would we know that it was the same person?
Unless it’s an obvious troll posting the same stuff over and over on different accounts.
I’m sorry but your logic makes no sense.
