Onno (VK6FLAB)

It’s true, but it’s not obvious if you’re new to the fediverse, since until now the closest we’ve had to decentralized communities online is Usenet and that’s only familiar to you if you’re been online for 30 years or more.

I think it depends on where you go. I’ve seen lots of supportive behaviour across the fediverse.

As an end user, ie. not someone who either hosts an instance or has extra permissions, can we in anyway see who voted on a post or comment?

I’m asking because over the time I’ve been here, I’ve noticed that many, but not all, posts or comments attract a solitary down vote.

I see this type of thing all over the place. Sometimes it’s two down votes, indicating that it happens more than once.

I note that human behaviour might explain this to some extent, but the voting happens almost immediately, in the face of either no response, or positive interactions.

Feels a lot like the Reddit down vote bots.

Build your own

I think that the missing link for the fediverse is the user interface that most users see.

This is oxymoronic given that the original Reddit looks eerily similar to Lemmy today, but it’s not just looks I’m talking about.

Moderation and usability tools, bots, blocks, filtering and spam control need to go through several iterations before we can actually grow this community.

Search is another issue, as is post deletion. Right now a post vanishes, but all the stuff hanging off it is still there. This makes for a complex user experience.

Finally, Lemmy appears to be run by developers who appear to be interested in their own issues and regularly appear to dismiss issues raised by users. This is not sustainable.

I consider myself a user of the fediverse before I’m a Lemmy or Mastodon user. We have a way to go before this settles down.

I am part of the Reddit exodus. I’m here because I have no interest in promoting or supporting the atrocious policies that now govern Reddit.

The pace here is different, but the interactions feel more measured.

Based on being online since 1990, I’m comfortable with being an “early adopter”, even though I’ve only been here for a few months and Lemmy is five years old.

Will Lemmy survive? Who knows. The horse and buggy didn’t, neither did Yahoo!, MySpace or Google+, but here we are nonetheless.

I like it here.

I suspect that this will require backend support to implement. Raise an issue in the Lemmy repository.

Is this not a slightly selfish action? It solves the problem for you, but doesn’t make the community better for everyone. I feel like blocking users should be reserved for issues like harassment, not spam.

This is an aspect that I had not considered. Even thinking about it now leaves me unsure of the best way forward.

Specifically, whilst it’s a valid argument that blocking the user only solves this for me, and not blocking would help me see if the issue was dealt with, I feel that leaving the user free to roam across my screen is impacting me directly and if I’m not a moderator in a community, it’s not my place to second guess their decision to leave such a user and post in place.

In other words, I’m stating to a moderator that I think that this post is spam and should be dealt with accordingly, but if you leave it alone, that’s your choice.

I moderate several communities outside of the fediverse and spam in my communities is a one-strike ban. That’s not what everyone does.

Having now thought through this again, now in more detail, I’m comfortable with blocking the user.

I’ve noticed a sharp increase in spam and I’ve been reporting each one simply as “spam”.

I then block the user

Many of these posts have dozens of down votes.

Several go back months, which I discover when a new variant turns up.

I’m unsure if what I’m doing is helping or not, and as an ICT professional, I’m not sure why this obvious spam isn’t caught earlier.

Thank you for the menu suggestion!

Shame that all those business models require US centric payment processors to actually get paid.

I’m not in the US and my choices for actually getting money into my bank account are PayPal or Stripe, neither of which have policies that permit the distribution of electronic data or alternatively donations without being a registered charity.

Neither has dispute resolution procedures that go beyond “you broke the rules and we’re keeping your money”, and “sorry, that was a fraudulent card and we’re taking the money back, plus a fee, and the fraudster keeps the goods”, and finally “our word is final and we’re now closing your account without disclosing why”.

So, yeah, good luck with that.

Source: I’ve spent months looking for alternatives and as far as I can tell, they just don’t exist.

This is an excellent idea. It’s gateways like this that will continue to offer options that are not available on other platforms.

Look forward to seeing how this evolves!