Not to mention, this is a gross misrepresentation of what’s actually going on.

To all you folks who’re downvoting this comment: Are you basing your opinion on OP’s biased, slanted account of this policy, or did you read the actual post from the Feddit admins? You don’t have to answer me, but if it’s the former, maybe self-reflect that you’re here complaining about censorship and propaganda, yet you’re doing so in response to a very propaganda-laden post that misrepresents the actual situation.

The admins are also German, though, and seem to suggest that they feel at risk by this, as well. Maybe it’s just time for another European instance to start up, with admins not in Germany, who feel comfortable hosting this discourse?

That’s a fair concern; maybe the recourse is just to move the community to a different instance? If the community as a whole is largely in agreement, this shouldn’t be a difficult task. Even less of one if the mods agree.

This kind of seems… reasonable? Like, they have and convey a compelling legal reason for needing to do this. There’s plenty of other Lemmy instances where these opinions and statements can be freely expressed. Further, they’re explicitly allowing discourse that conveys similar sentiment but doesn’t go against German law.

I guess my question is, what’s the objection here?

It does, though, because not every instance federates with every other instance. If someone is coming from Reddit, and they interact with a set of specific subs there, and they want to interact with the analogue communities here, they don’t want to join an instance like, for example Beehaw, that has very strict federation policies, or (probably) .ml or lemmygrad, where they’ll be exposed to stigma they weren’t aware of going in and which might not apply to them.

A list of servers with very open federation could solve this problem in theory, assuming new users knew to reference it, but that might not be what they want, either.

The invite code idea is actually solid, I think, assuming they’re handed out to people who have things in common with the target userbase of the instance, and not arbitrarily.

There’s also some instances that hold united views on specific topics, for example blahaj with trans rights, and someone arbitrarily choosing that instance that doesn’t hold those same views might feel that they don’t fit in.

Obviously anyone can just choose a new instance and move, but for a new user coming in, that’s a ‘quit moment’ in many cases. Giving an invite code to someone that leads them to an instance that at least broadly fits what they’re interested in could help solve for this.

Edit: I think having more instances that have specific themes and topics, like slrpnk or programming.dev (or pawb, for that matter) would help, too. Someone looking in from the outside might not understand federation, but if they see an instance geared towards a topic they’re interested in, they might be inclined to join it even if they incorrectly think that’s all they’ll be able to interact with.

Something like many Reddit subs do with the snoo, where they took a common, recognizable icon and customized it for their instance would have worked well if there was a similar icon for instances to latch onto, but we’re past that point now.

I really hate that that writer capitalizes every instance of ‘Me’, ‘My’, ‘Mine’, etc… it changes my internal inflection when reading, and really fucks up the flow of the text.

if you have a more effective metric in mind, I’d love to hear it instead of just pointing out flaws

I mean, isn’t the whole point of this comment section to discuss the merits and flaws of the proposal you’ve made? If we’re not discussing the downsides, too, what’s even the point?

That said, an ideal system would be a measure of the quality of content, not the quantity of content so, as another user has suggested, some measure involving net upvotes might be more effective. Yes, obviously a user can create multiple accounts to upvote everything and fuck with that metric, but I kind of doubt many folks would go to the trouble.

Maybe some combination of PCM and the average number of votes divided by the number of active users could generate some sort of quality metric. At the very least it might be a measure of engagement.

Spam Resistance: Creating multiple accounts to inflate MAU is easy. Generating meaningful posts and comments is harder.

Isn’t this actually just spam encouragement? A community with a bot that posts 50 low-value posts every day will have a much higher PCM as a result, and that behavior is more obnoxious to users and moderators who have to see it and deal with it, vs. someone creating a bunch of accounts, which is largely invisible to everyone else.

This is kind of up to the individual community, not the instance as a whole. An instance theoretically could make a general ‘No memes on any community on this instance’ rule but it would be awful to enforce, and it’d be easier to leave it up to communities.

That said, I think Lemmy is a long way off from having the userbase or popularity to create that problem, and the absence of karma or any analogue really narrows the impact. Personally, I’ve seen significantly less low-effort content here than on Reddit, with the exception of a few specific communities that exist for that purpose specifically.

Also all books you lend from the library should be public knowledge.

Terrible analogy. You can consume the post without anyone knowing. Voting is more akin to signing the guestbook.

As long as the advertisers and corporate bullshit stays on the for-profit solutions and doesn’t start bleeding into everything else, this is fine. Hopefully they’ll act as a wick and draw the corporate interests to themselves.

Cross-posts on Lemmy show links to the other posts on each of them, so you wouldn’t be missing out on anything - you’d just have to click through to the other posts from the one you could see, rather than seeing multiple copies of it.

Their suggestion addresses this:

The UI could detect sibling cross-posts and suppress multiple mentions of the same post if you’re subscribed to multiple sibling communities, maybe with a “cross-sibling post” designation. That way it only shows up once in your feed.

A fair point, and I don’t think the people coming to Lemmy or Mastodon are the people who are happy with the status quo on Reddit or Twitter… it’s the folks who dislike those services for whatever reason, and are looking for an alternative. Lemmy and Mastodon just provide the smoothest point of transition.

In some respects it feels like many federated platforms have approached things backwards, trying to rework a centralized structure to be distributed/decentralized, creating some of the awkward UX folks experience.

I think you’re right, but that this is also promoting faster adoption of the fediverse version of the apps. It’s a lot easier to say to someone, “Hey, here’s a FOSS alternative to this corporate app you already use, it functions the way you’re used to” than “Here’s a FOSS app that does something completely new.”

Once folks are interested in the fediverse through adoption of Lemmy, Mastodon, etc., it’ll be easier to get them interested in completely novel applications.

Click your username in the upper right corner -> Settings -> Delete Account

The real problem (IMO) with it being automatic based on the URL is that it’d be impossible to isolate communities with radically different views or posting guidelines - for example, a conservative community and a liberal community sharing a comment section about a political article would be awful… neither group wants that, and it creates moderation problems - who would ultimately be responsible for moderation on the article’s comments? The content source itself? (That seems incredibly unlikely to end well.)

I think it’s an interesting idea, but there’s some major implementation hurdles and I’m not sure what an ideal solution would be…

This effect could be achieved if cross-posted links simply all fed back into the comment section of the first community it was posted to.

To maybe better explain that, let’s say I cross-posted a link to [email protected], and [email protected], [email protected]. Under such a system, all 3 of these posts (despite being to separate communities) would share a single comment section (in this case, the one from [email protected], since it was the “first” one I chose to post to)… so if someone opened the thread on [email protected], they’d see the same comments as someone on either other community.

This implementation wouldn’t require getting content sources on board, and would cooperate with instances that weren’t federated (by simply creating a separate comment section for any instance that isn’t federated with the “first” one the link was posted to).

This doesn’t help if two users post the same link to two separate communities, but it’s at least a little bit cleaner without requiring any external buy-in.