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!”
There is nothing to be solved? Or rather nothing to be solved in regard to silencing voices.
Don’t like someone’s opinion? Get into arguments with strangers online about it. Change their minds. Or don’t. That’s up to you. But structural silencing and obscuring of voices and communities isnt the way.
The real issue here is accountability and that we do need a solution for. And the answer is already in the fediverse, I. That we need to have a democratic approach to moderation and to some extent administration.
Take for example what happened recently with @[email protected]. Real permanent damage was done to our community and there will be no accountability on the parts of the admins who made those decisions.
Can’t believe we lost PugJesus over some stupid vote rationing bullshit.
Their is a self righteousness and petty authoritarianism that comes with a perceived sense of ownership over a community, platform, or project. In many ways we’re reenacting the same motions which ended up destroying reddit as a community platform, one which was built through the organic involvement and voluntary contributions of millions.
I’ve always seen Lemmy as the “2.0” experiment to identify and improvement upon the issues associated with the Reddit type long form threaded discussion platform so many of us prefer. And it’s been extremely useful in that we continue to understand where the real friction points are in growing these kinds of communities. Examples like @[email protected] editorially banning @[email protected] for explicitly political reasons at critical moments during a highly visible political campaign, this shadow ban list, pretty much every moderator action that squid ever took, these secretive matrix chats behind closed doors. The “3.0” version of whatever this has needs far better tools to support moderators, but also to hold moderation and moderators accountable and to give the ability for community to replace them as needed. Also, the ability to merge or fork communities and to migrate communities or accounts from instance to instance. Its simply unacceptable to do some of these activities and many of them while questionable at the time, have in retrospect turned out to be quite nefarious and destructive to the overall project.
Migration is definitely one thing holding us back, I think. While migrating your user to another instance would be nice, community migration is absolutely critical. We absolutely need to be able to move a community to another instance and have all the followers/subscribers automatically carry over. So many small communities have suffered and languished after moves, and it also ultimately drove off PugJesus in a way.
I think a merge/fork/subscribe system would also be critical and could revolutionize somethings.
Say you have a community for dirt biking, but it’s not big and doesn’t have traction, you can merge it into maybe ‘motorcycles’ till a critical mass for ‘dirtbiking’ is met. Its really one of the issues we faced early, and part of it is that the current design is for each instance to be a self contained replacement to reddit.