Ask Lemmy
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@solrize
Well, let me go by example: The strength of E-Mail lies in the fact that its a robust standard that, instead of siloing users into their platforms, brings people together into one single userbase.
Similarly with federation in social media, this makes userbases not compete but collaborate. If I created an ActivityPub-Powered project right now, I'd have to convince nobody to use it and still be part of a community.
One difference however is that social media is public. As the person that runs the server, you do have to put in some measures to make sure that your users are actually feeling safe. The most extreme of these measures is defederation, where you just completely cut off another server, but there's also other ways to limit other servers, like for example, hiding their accounts by default in say the "federated" feed in Mastodon and co.
I didn't feel unsafe on Reddit. I know there were jerks there but I mostly stayed in my niche technical communities and the jerks stayed in theirs. If on Lemmy you need the admins to keep them out of your feed, that is a problem with the software. You should be able to manage your feed better.
It was generally enough to moderate at the level of subreddits or Lemmy communities, rather than blocking whole servers.
I'm happy to have my server block misinformation and hate. I can do it myself just as easily, but it's great to be able to say my community doesn't put up with or tolerate it. Their hateful message doesn't deserve any weight. It's disingenuous or based on false premises that are unshakeable via social media aggregator or whatever this is. There are just some communities that are toxic hate factories. Maybe some people need that in their lives? I personally don't think it's healthy, but they'll just take that as having my head in the sand or whatever.
Meanwhile, new communities are born, and I'm happy to join with them and see new ideas and content.
It's great that misinformation and hate are blocked, until someone decides that something you want to see is misinformation or hate. Server admins like drinking Coke? No prob. But maybe you drink Pepsi, and suddenly all the Pepsi-drinking communities are blocked. How is that safe space working out for you then? As a more real example, a blog that I like got demonetized by Google (reversed after some journalists intervened) because it published some opinions that Google's algorithm (incorrectly) decided were misinformation. Not good.
On Reddit, I mostly hung out on fairly sedate subreddits, but there was one that I occasionally visited that got blocked for posts containing, shall we say, more extreme forms of sarcasm than the genteel shitposting than we see here on Lemmy. It seems that Reddit decided to block its Trump subreddit, while simultaneously blocking a bunch of unrelated ones (collateral damage) to make it look like they weren't being political. The Trump one really was misinformative and hateful but overall I think it would have been fine to leave everything alone. Even with the Trump subreddit gone, Trump is still likely to become president again, so blocking the subreddit wasn't the answer.
I see some attraction to having a standardized API for forums to offer as an alternative to web UI's, but I don't like the Lemmy software all that much (it's too much like Reddit, i.e. oriented towards memes and link propagation rather than discussion), and I don't like social media (defined as systems where other people vote on what you see). I prefer traditional text-only discussion that is purely chronologically ordered with no voting or ranking. Also it should be fine to have private forums. There are private subreddits and private youtube channels and there is private email after all.
Anyway I got into another discussion like this a while back, where I gave my .02 on how I thought Lemmy should work (basically all subscriptions, blocking, ranking etc. should be done in client software that is completely separate from the backend, though it could itself be running on a server of its own). I don't feel like rehashing that. But basically, Usenet was great until spam killed it, so I would just fix a few things about it and try to resuscitate it.