As a moderator of a Lemmy instance, you currently have two options to take: pushing users first to your local content or content from all instances you federate with. These options come with the costs seen in the picture. The moderator of another instance has the same choice. However, in this scenario, they will both always switch to promoting the local-feed. I don’t want to say its wrong - it’s just the most sensible way to act on Lemmy currently. However, if everybody does it, it is bad for the overall discussion quality of the Threadiverse.
Its a classical prisoner’s dilemma from game theory, which sometimes happen in society, for example with supply shortage during lockdowns. A way to solve it is by making action B more positive and option A more negative. This would lead to more moderators choosing Action B over A.
Mastodon solved this with an Explore-Feed, which consolidates the Local- and All-Feed. I think this could also be a solution for Lemmy. It would result in less engagement decrease AND an overall positive effect on discussion quality.
Additionally, a general acknowledgement that instance protectionism is a problem and should be avoided could help to make A more negative. In other words: increasing the pressure by the community. This would put a negative social effect on option A. So: start talking about it with your moderators.
Do you think these two measure would do (additionally to more powerful moderation tools, which would only enable a working explore-feed in the first place)? Is this a problem on other services on the Fediverse too (at least Mastodon seems to have handled it quite well)?
Can you please explain what that means for non-mastodon users. As far as I know about lemmy, which granted isn’t much, local posts are not hidden from all, meaning it already is a consolidated local and all feed.
Personally, I didn’t agree with your previous post and I don’t agree with this. I believe instance owners can run their instance however they wish, they’re the ones paying and maintaining it. If it’s not suited to your tastes, there are other places to look at. If an instance wants to federate with no one or hide all remote posts or anything, that is their choice to run the software that way. People aren’t locked in jail cells making decisions with no information of the outside world. Nor are the defaults they set locked either, I just bookmark “hot” and “sub” and go to those every time, regardless of what the homepage has set.
Its not like I want to force them. It’s just criticism. If they are part of a federated network, they also get some merits out of it (user engagement) and so they should give something back in return. This will become more pressing if Threads joins the Fediverse. It could flood the fediverse with its own posts while putting the posts of their network front and center in their UI eventually draining the Fediverse off its energy (which of course we could prevent by defederating in the worst case …)
I do think your heart is in the right place trying to find and discuss engagement issues in the threadiverse. That’s obviously been a common complaint people have posted about and I can see you believe strongly about this.
I think I just disagree with the issue at hand, or at least that there is a single one and that this solves it. To give an anecdotal example: I make a post around every day on kbin.social that gets 0 likes, 0 dislikes, and 0 comments, in other words no engagement. You might say this is due to it being difficult to find! Well, it actually is! So much so because it doesn’t even federate out to lemmy.world, lemm.ee, fedia.io, etc. I check remote instances and my posts never federate anywhere. If you look at my profile from your instance, lemmy.world, it would seem I barely have any posts, but on my home one I have quite a few.
This is just one example of course, but from my perspective, the major issues we have right now are technical ones, and I’d like to see those fixed before trying to focus on social ones.
Mmh, true, I shows only two posts for me. Thats weird … something similar happened to me with Mastodon, posts never reaching other instances or only very late …
Yeah, thats definitly so. But I think these technical ones are mostly known and I don’t feel like I can contribute much to them … so I think about the social ones.
Right, but you are on lemmy.world I presume, which is the biggest Lemmy instance. Their posts get much attention that’s why they also appear in your all-feed. But let’s say you are on a very small Lemmy instance with only two communities. These posts will almost never appear in your All-feed, which is why the admin will prevarably put the local-feed as default, which makes total sense to me, but is not ideal for the overall network.
On mastodon, you have an explore-feed, on which you have popular posts from federated instances and your local ones (I at least think that it works that way).
No offense, but I think the solution is to start expecting slightly more from the end-user again. Fifteen minutes to look over the options in whatever new software you’re using (in general) and you can determine whether the defaults work for you. It should be as normal as switching to dark theme IMO.
That would also be fine.
Edit: an explore-feed would still be nice though …