Context: Admiral Patrick replied and included this gem:
And might I add that not one person complained until db0 went internet Karen with his hissy fit because I took his toy away from him.
“Not one person complained about my explicitly obfuscated blacklists! Damn internet Karens making a big deal!”
You’ve got it backwards. Its the heavy handed administrative approach which stalled out growth in the fediverse. Not users you find personally annoying.
Fediverse growth is stalled for the same reason every alternative stalls: there’s no one here, so there’s no reason to join. Add on that there’s no way for content factories to recoup the costs of content creation, no way to ensure their work reaches maximum eyeballs, and you pretty much guarantee a niche platform.
It’'s the whole reason I’m here. I’m not interested in bullshit engagement-bait or people competing for imaginary internet points. Administration is going to do whatever administration wants, but if they’re open and explicit about it, I can shop around for an instance that fits me. If they obfuscate their heavy handed administration, then I might as well go back to the algorithm.
Who knows, right now the small size may actually be a straight up benefit. Yes, there is almost no content compared to Reddit. But we’re also so small still that it’s not particularly worthwhile to have bots going here compared to Reddit. So there is a much higher percentage of actual human interaction here. The other place is almost all bots now, it’s actually unbelievable.
So what’s your solution? Because we can’t just have less moderation and administration without something to replace it. If you want to move it to the frontend, then at least make it opt in and tell people (except spam)
Like in the bluesky model (atproto) you can pick and choose between appview, clients, moderation lists, etc. You can even bypass your current appview (frontend server) to fetch directly from a user’s host or from another index (appview or relay)
You’re also ignoring that there are many different types of users, and that lurkers drastically outnumber active posters. You lose a few active users from strict moderation, and you lose masses of lurkers from obnoxious users flooding every thread. And you get new active users from lurkers.
Block the users, communities, and instances that cause problems for you. Continue on with your life and enjoy things. Maybe even touch some grass from time to time.
If nobody offers a default filtered experience then most people will refuse to join.
Maybe you should try your own advice.
If people wanted the “experience for adults” they’d be on 4chan already! There’s already places to go for that! And they aren’t going there because they don’t want it!
So when others create moderated spaces, don’t get mad that others want something nicer.
If you want to offer a default filtered experience, you do that at the instance level, not as a frontend dev.
And you absolutely do not do that in secret, deliberately not informing users of the ‘filtered experience’ they’re signing up for and disguising the filtering as technical failures.
If you want to start a Lemmy instance for centrist normies that blocks its users from all the ‘extreme’ stuff (and you are transparent to those users about what you’re blocking and why), that’s perfectly fine. Go ahead. I don’t think your “I’ll decide what should be censored for you” approach will be as popular as you think, but there’s no reason not to try it.
I already do. Regularly. Which is why I recommend it. What, are you suggesting I should block you or something? Honey, you’re not nearly annoying enough to block. Not yet, anyway.