2023 was such a wasted opportunity because the moderators chickened out. For about a week, almost every single sizeable community was blacked out. A large chunk of Reddit during that period was genuinely inaccessible. Reddit would have been unprepared for a complete mass-walkout of community moderators during the 2023 Reddit API strikes. But after a few token gestures and a few examples made of some especially rebellious mod-teams, most of the striking moderators returned.

A huge opportunity was missed by people running major communities to functionally degrade Reddit in at least the medium-term as a website. You can’t just hastily promote random people to replace moderators Reddit is either forced to remove or who leave voluntarily. The average person is likely too lazy, too arbitrary and too corrupt to effectively oversee communities of notable sizes.

Something I do wonder is that it was previously stated he wasn’t initially known about, but was discovered some time later. He doesn’t really appear to be in hiding. He’s in a fairly public location. He probably saw a few people at some point over the few days before the hive mind activated, but when they all joined they didn’t notice his absence. So what happened that alerted them?

They may have assumed he was amongst the dead until they discovered him hiding in his building.

I’d also add that the attempt to sue users by the owners of lemmy.ml would likely cause almost every other instance to defederate them (except hexbear and lemmygrad) and rebuild on piefed. It would very likely decapitate lemmy.

Also, many instances aren’t even hosted in the USA. Not sure where the lemmy.ml admins are even from.

VPNs, throwaway emails

It would also help if they actually had a name even if they were rather than just some user account from who-knows-where.

Why? Genuine question. I’m not a lawyer or have any legal training, but what would stop the Lemmy devs sue someone for distorting their statements with the purpose of damaging their reputation and making them lose income, if they wanted to? I don’t believe they’re the type that would do that, but I’m not aware of anything that would stop it. I’m not saying something that would stop them from doing that doesn’t exist, just that I’m not aware of it.

Because the entire fediverse has a net active user pool of 40k users. Moreover, the lemmy devs have no idea who anyone who might be disparaging their instance is. They could literally be anywhere in the world. Do you genuinely think its worth their time at all?

And I think your other point about removing downvotes leading to increased trolling would need to be investigated with better controls. You even said that the forums you’re talking about are “lesser-moderated”, so my mind immediately latches onto that as the reason for more trolls, while you see the differences in voting as the problem. I think moderation is the vehicle to decrease visibility, while votes are the vehicle to increase visibility.

Well, yes - that’s part of it. Blahaj and Beehaw (two examples to my mind) are notably stricter environments than most other instances networked up. Currently, most fediverse instances don’t operate to their level - and I’m not sure that it’d be welcome for them to do so. The downvotes currently, because of them being public - function pretty much as Reddit originally intended - used as a tool to hide malicious/trolling/bad-faith content or even simply off-topic posts (that don’t justify instance intervention) rather than just haterating.

It could also be related to something like the number of users and traffic. Likely trolling is encouraged by many of these factors combined.

Well I can assure you as a local instance staff that there’s a lot of annoying trolling, spam and AI splatter right now that is mostly bought to my attention by downvotes.

I would like a better reaction-system than just up and downvotes though, but it would require Lemmy not being the major instance software.

I was just noting they do have some utility. I’ve also been on lesser-moderated platforms unlike blahaj that do not have downvotes, and trolls can trend and get much engagement because there’s no in-system tool to degrade their post visibility. I imagine if downvotes were removed fediverse-wide, similar problems would take root on the fediverse.

Just a detail, but if rimu changing the logo to different flags every few days for a bit upsets you - you can just jump to another piefed instance rather than dropping piefed entirely.

Piefed.world, piefed.zip etc

They are marginally better on Lemmy than Reddit because they are public, but I think they should be completely gotten rid of. I basically don’t use them except on obvious trolls and for posts that I think should be removed by moderators.

From a moderating perspective, downvotes can act as a way to isolate for potential spam/rule-breaking content that isn’t reported to instance owners or admins. It’s imperfect and better solutions would be preferred, but they do have a janitorial purpose.

I originally chose lemm.ee because I wanted to set up a Television community (that didn’t exist), and it was the largest instance without one.

Then it shut down, but in the interim I became more and more aware of piefed.social, and was doing a lot of feed work on there anyway. So I moved over to piefed.

When no-one needs to drive to and from bullshit bums-at-seat jobs, when there’s effectively no service sector, when no-one drives to see friends or go to school or visit family or whatever, you’d be surprised how much less there would be on the road.

People in necessary roles to keep the lights on would likely just live their entire life at the workplace.

Also, where are all the robot people staying if not in their own homes? Do they sleep?

They’ll sleep wherever. They probably sleep in the nearest bed.

I imagine they’ve set up sleeping hubs all over the place.

She doesn’t need nukes to do that. She can literally dragonborn shout humanity to death.

Piefed was down. Or at least piefed.social.

I subscribed on my lemmy.world account and it seems to be stuck at “pending”. There seems to be a problem here.

What is your community?

Seems like intensely faint praise.

They don’t seem to act like they find anything good about here.

Not really. The user-to-bot metric is way worse on Reddit, I’d imagine.