You might enjoy Tildes more than what’s on Threadiverse. Let me know if you want an invite.

Fediverse does everything I require out of social media. Functionality of threadiverse is mostly there and getting better (Piefed will probably replace Lemmy as the go-to eventually), apps are better. Mastodon / microblogging was always good enough for communicating with real people, it’s when you’re an influencer you run into limitations but who cares about that. Maybe there aren’t that many people that are into this and that’s okay because we’re not a corporation that needs to report quarterly growth forever.

I use an iPhone and a Mac but I assume Android as a more open platform has even more of those.

Like those?

https://reederapp.com/

https://usetapestry.com/

I’m a rule nerd and will nerd out a bit. When I modded a national subreddit we wanted to make rules more or less what your are aiming for here so allow me to share some experience.

I’ll post machine translated version of what we came up with and some rationale behind it.

§ 2b. Praise or incitement to violence

The ban includes any kind of incitement to or praise of violence or suicide, death wishes, threats, and promotion of totalitarian ideologies. Content about animal abuse will be treated in a similar manner. Encouraging others to harm themselves and denying the medical consensus on COVID-19 and vaccination are also prohibited.

We opted to not keep misinformation or nazi ban as a separate point because you don’t want to become an arbiter of truth on all things science or political ideology. Limit the scope to things where people can really harm themselves.

§ 2c. Hate speech

Do not post content that incites, supports or justifies hatred or contempt against marginalised or vulnerable groups. These groups may be based on skin color, religious belief or lack thereof, national or ethnic origin, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy or disability. They also include victims of violence, accidents and their families. While the rule protects the above groups, it does not protect those who display hatred or who try to hide their hatred in bad faith by claiming discrimination.

This is lifted near verbatim from Reddit content policy. It makes clear that prejudice based on inborn traits is forbidden but there needs to be a component where that trait makes you vulnerable to harassment, otherwise you’ll get religious people claiming they need to be protected. You’ll love last sentence when dealing with trolls too.

§ 2d. Limitation of promotion and spam

We allow promotion from regular and active members of our community, which does not exceed 10% of activity on ___. We also consider the posting of surveys for research papers as promotion. Spamming, kickstarters and other solicitation are prohibited entirely.

Don’t distinguish between promo and self-promo because on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.

§ 2e. Sharing personal information

Do not post personal information - names of non-public persons, phone numbers, private addresses, even if they are publicly available (e.g., Facebook and Twitter screenshots). If you want to post such a screen shot, effectively remove this information from it. Witch hunts using personal information is strictly prohibited.

You really need outright doxxing ban and what constitutes personal info might be controversial. We wanted to avoid witch hunts of any kind and that did that.

Does this include posting original content like art and blog posts? Seems a bit too wide.

Yeah, best leave it up to individual communities but then again rimu as an instance admin might have a strong stance on self promo which is okay too. It will be very hard to enforce though because it’s very easy to pretend not to be affiliated with promoted content. Something more enforceable is a ban of linking to digital storefronts of any kind, as well as customary ratio of not promoting anything beyond 10% of your overall output including comments.

Yes.

Redlib does that but it’s a game of cat and mouse these days. Facebook fought off web scrapers and while Reddit is much less technically competent they’ll get there too eventually.

Reddit makes browsing without account harder and harder. I assume the end goal is a walled unindexable garden like Facebook or Discord.

I assume those who were interested enough could whip out a script to do that easily until Reddit disabled API which is the moment I lost interest in the platform. I don’t know how people do it these days without getting accounts suspended for automated traffic but it’s something you have to consider and probably the reasons why such tools are not available widely.

Reddit won’t show you that your comment was removed by a mod and shows removed comments on user profiles (unless they had to be nuked for legal reasons). If you suspect you’re shadow banned or if your comment was quietly removed you have to check for that from a separate account in that comment thread directly.

It can’t be stopped this way but this is just some friction or increasing barrier to entry to discourage it. Most people are lazy and will just drop it as not worth the effort, and the most persistent will be annoying no matter what you do.

Ah, there’s even an option to turn off vote types selectively at the federation level, that’s pretty cool! This is kind of like my other pipe dream of vote weight being different based on whether it’s local or federated.

I was thinking of this too but then you need to keep track of who’s allowed to vote and that’s weird thing to federate even conceptually.

Something along similar lines is how they do it on Slashdot where users are randomly assigned limited number of points to be used for voting which makes them more precious in general. Tildes is also interesting in that regard because while there are no downvotes there, trusted users can apply labels that serve as something between a reason for downvote and a report. For example comment can be tagged as „noise” for not bringing anything to discussion which automatically ranks it below other comments but not removes it entirely. This prevents jokes being the top reply which is nice. Nothing against jokes but it depends on what kind of content you want others too see on your platform.

What’s important is that it’s possible if you don’t like any other instance. Maybe once Lemmy gets popular we’ll get commercial hosts offering to spin up a Lemmy instance the same way they offer WordPress.

To me the idea is more important than implementation details because those can be worked out in many different ways as you’ve noticed. If you know what is the goal then you can adjust if you see things not working out as intended.

The most basic approach would be to get positive/negative ratio and decide how much in the middle is still 0.

Does electoral college allow you to create a state and vote as an equal to any other state whenever you feel like?

Being aware of abuse means monitoring and maintenance - more work for admins. I prefer hands off / systemic way of fixing things and this is more like anarcho-syndicalism than an electoral college. Probably similar ideas at the root of things but very different execution.

We’re voting on posts and not heads of state here anyway. In this analogy USA would have to allow you to carve out a bit of land and present yourself as an equal to Florida. This is an intentional backdoor for people who hate this idea enough.

Correct :)

There are now, this one was the first.