TLDR: 3 people working together can gatekeep content on the “active” and “hot” feeds on smaller servers/communities.

After some playing around, I noticed posts disappear after reaching a threshold. A quick search later and I’m in the Lemmy docs reading about how this all works.

In plain English, any three people working together (or one person with three accounts) can stop posts from appearing on the default feed. Once a post reaches -2 it will only appear to people who browse “new.” Edit: Of course, it reappears after it climbs above -2, but it’s a race against the clock.

As a smaller server, we’re vulnerable to this. But we also have some extra mitigations - namely, @[email protected] has to approve everyone who joins, and that might weed out bad actors.

So what can you do? Upvote content liberally, downvote sparingly.

  • @tallwookieEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    sure!

    https://sub.rehab/ <— Communities list (lemmy versions of subreddits from reddit) - just keep scrolling down

    https://browse.feddit.de/ <— same sort of idea with a different kind of interface

    https://lemmyverse.net/communities <— again, but different interface

    https://fedidb.org/software/Lemmy <— a list of instances, what version of lemmy they’re running, and links to those instances. visit each instance & look in the “Communities” tab to see what groups are hosted on that instance.

    https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map <— same sort of idea except you can see where the instances (aka servers) are physically located

    https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ <— federation map - you can see which instance federates with what other instances (or has explicitly defederated/blocked them & which ones).

    https://fba.ryona.agency/ <— defederation log - see what instance has defederated and the rationale provided, with searchable terms

    I’m sure there are other methods

    now, when you find a community that you want to join (assuming it’s federated with your home instance), on that page there should be a block of text saying something like “you’re not logged in blah blah blah, our community is called [email protected]”

    so then you copy the text “[email protected]” and go back to your home instance & search for that - it will return a link, click on that link, then click on the Subscribe button.

    rinse & repeat as necessary