I’ve seen a few posts today mulling over possible solutions to some of the issues caused by Lemmy’s explosive growth in the past few weeks. I’d like to walk through the situation as I see it, point out a few differences I’ve noticed in the federated model vs. what users of other social media may be used to, and offer a suggestion for the way forward.

As I see it now -

• Most of us who have setup an account in the last couple of weeks are refugees of various corporate run sites where planning and decision making took a very top down approach. An individual, or small group would survey their domain and, by executive fiat, declare “A will now be B, and C will now be D! This is the best way, because I have seen it is so.”

• Those of us who quiet liked A being A, and C being C, ruminated, fumed, posted about the disadvantages of B and D, lamented the loss of A and C, commented on the shortsightedness and perhaps stupidity of any leadership that would try to implement B and D, packed our things, and left.

• Trolls beneath a bridge over which billygoats seldom pass, go hungry. And so like rats in the age of sail, it seems we may have brought some of our trolls with us. Whether they are ban evading by setting up accounts on different instances, spamming new community setups, or just refusing to shed the toxic mentalities previous communities fostered, these trolls are scrambling beneath the bridge we are trying to build between what we once had, and what Lemmy could be.

A different world -

• Lemmy, and the Fediverse as a whole, lack the top down structure of our previous abodes. There is no executive, let alone fiat. There is no ruling council, no C*Os, no board of directors, no share holders, no employees, and no customers. Anyone with a few free weekends to learn can spin up a small instance for friends or family, those with the calling to lean into it have given us all what you see here. No gods, no kings, just people, people like you and me.

• People, by their imperfect nature, make beautifully imperfect things. The Fediverse sells you nothing, reaps from you nothing, asks only for what you care to give, and in return provides only what you ask of it. It is, of course, far from perfect. From both a technical and organizational point of view there are rough edges and sharp corners. It lacks the commercial “polish” we’ve come to expect because, well, it’s not commercial.

• Lemmy and the Fediverse were born from the FOSS movement. For the uninitiated, FOSS stands for Free and Open Source Software, one of the founding ideals of which was “the economy of abundance”, the idea that usable and valuable software can be produced in such quantities and of such a quality currently, that the effort and costs for maintaining it could be met using only volunteers and donations.

• Carrying this ideal in their very DNA, Lemmy and the Fediverse discard the idea of catering to or capturing a large audience, providing content to the “least common denominator”, or the idea the metrics are numbers to be run up on some imaginary scoreboard. The Fediverse, it seems to me, aims for “deep” at the expense of “wide”. This ideal isn’t just reflected in the technical side, but also how its systems are organized. There is not one group of admins, but many. Each instance is free to decide on its own rules and best practices without a half dozen marketing MBAs fretting in front of a white board over how this will affect things with the 19-25 male demographic. Perhaps more salient to current events, there is also no overarching authority vested solely in an individual whose singular decisions can significantly impact a user base of millions.

My suggestion is this -

Embrace what makes the Lemmy and the Fediverse different. This is a brave new world. For once we all here have the freedom to lean into it. There are issues, but these issues are being addressed not by some stuffy room full of suits sweating how they will pull their numbers out of the red by the end of Q3, but by regular, beautiful people like you and me. They will make beautiful mistakes and we may yet witness spectacular failures. Give them the freedom to do so, in the same way you have been given the freedom to be part of something bigger and brighter than what has come before.

Throughout the fediverse, there are many dedicated and hardworking folks whose part time hobby has exploded nearly overnight into almost a second job. The beauty of the FOSS framework is that they are free, with little restriction, to address their community’s growing pains as they see fit. Like a live action Monte Carlo simulation, scores of instance admins are applying themselves to the problem of “How?” As the community reaches for and shares the solutions they find the system will improve upon itself. This process my involve stumbles, and may take more time than many you anticipate (nine women can’t make a baby in a month), but it will come. When it does, each instance will have at hand the tools they require tailored for its particular communities. Most beautifully of all, we will do it together.

We are all in this together, across instances and communities. I suppose all I’m suggesting is we have the same strength of faith in the folks who built this place as they had in us when they opened their doors to us when we needed a place to shelter from the cold.

If you made it this far, thank you for your time, this carried on longer than I intended, but that is something I am prone to and one of the reasons I was not a frequent poster elsewhere. For the Fediverse grognards who made it this far, thank you especially for sharing your home with us, I hope we’ll try and collectively keep our feet off the furniture.