EnglishMobster

...ChatGPT?

I mean, not much of it is behind the scenes. A lot of it is out in the open.

But generally, we had the following rules on the sub I helped run (/r/Disneyland):

• If something has a couple reports, send a modmail for a mod to investigate

• If something has a bunch of reports without any moderator action, remove it

• If someone called AutoMod a "bad bot", send a modmail for a mod to investigate

• Automatically set post flairs based on keywords, common URLs, etc.

• Auto-takedown posts with other URLs (link shortener, YouTube link, clickbait rumor mill sites like WDW/Disneyland News Today, etc.)

• If a post seemed to be about our sister parks ("Tokyo", "Paris", "WDW", etc.) then it was removed and the user asked to repost it in the appropriate subreddit

• If a post was about an in-person meet-up, remove it and direct them to our Discord

• If a post was asking about planning a trip, remove it and redirect to the planning subreddit

• If a post was an AMA, remove it and send a modmail to confirm the person's identity

• Any sort of insults, politics (anti-vax etc.), or name-calling was removed, anywhere (this was a big one that did a lot of heavy lifting)

• If an account had negative karma, remove any posts it made (usually trolls or bad novelty accounts)

Those were the big ones. It caused a lot of false positives and modqueue would always be full, so mods would go through the list a few times a day to find any stragglers that got caught in the filter.

I wonder if there's a Pyongyang community.

...Come to think of it, Lemmygrad probably has one. But I'm not going over there to look.

https://fedia.io does.

But bear in mind that this is just the knee-jerk reaction of the admins at Beehaw; they will likely defederate with any community that has open sign-ups.

Beehaw wants to promote a certain culture within their instance. That's well within their prerogative - but I think they're beginning to understand why the fediverse may not be the place to do such things.

The fediverse is designed to link instances with niche communities together. If I had an instance about model-making, there'd be communities for model trains and model rockets and dioramas and Warhammer blah blah blah. These would be a bunch of separate - but related - topics, held under one instance.

That's how the fediverse is designed to work. You have a bunch of people who share a specific interest on a "home" instance, and if they wish to talk about other things then they connect to other instances and grab communities to assemble their custom homepage. Great examples of this are lemmy.blahaj.zone (LGBTQ-focused instance), rblind.com (accessibility-focused instance), and even the much-maligned Lemmygrad (tankie instance).

You focus on the communities you want and block the ones you are opposed to. Each instance has a discrete subject matter and specialty. You could have an instance which only allows verified scientists and historians to replicate AskScience and AskHistorians, and people who are "verified" will have it as their home instance.

What has actually happened is people want to make Reddit 2. And this isn't the fault of the users; indeed, I'd say the fact that lemmy.ml exists as a dev-run general-purpose instance violates this very philosophy the fediverse has.

Beehaw wants to operate under the way the fediverse "should" work; i.e. Beehaw.org is a small community dedicated to a certain mission, with subjects that relate to that mission. The issue is that their mission is very close (but not quite) to being "be Reddit 2".

They want to have a tight-knit community where everyone knows each other and everyone can look at all sorts of content, with strict moderation to prevent the worst of social media showing up on a platform. They want to be a "hub" where people make a home, and their users would be able to dip in to more specific instances if they needed something.

The issue is that the fediverse is a two-way street. I think Beehaw is just now realizing that. They set themselves up as a "general instance" and found wild success. But the "tight-knit community" part is hard when any rando can make an account on another instance and talk to them.

I think Beehaw mostly wants it to be a one-way interaction - their users can participate in other instances, but outside users can't directly talk to their instance. That's the only reasonable way for them to accomplish their goals, but that's not how Lemmy really works, at least not right now.

Add to this that people are flooding in constantly. They want to be in "Reddit 2". The fediverse supports such things - lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, fedia.io, kbin.social, etc. are all great examples - but that's not how it was designed to be used. Beehaw is an older community, one founded with thoughts of the "ideal" fediverse... but it's becoming obvious that (like Mastodon) users are going to gravitate towards the familiar and make everything general-purpose.

I've been kicking around an idea in my head of making a Lemmy fork that has Tildes' ideas about modding baked in. (I would fork Kbin but I don't know PHP.)

In my experience, it's always been the best approach to select new moderators from the people known as active, high-quality members of the community. My goal with the trust system on Tildes is to turn this process of discovering the best members and granting them more influence into a natural, automatic one.

...

Trusting someone is a gradual process that comes from seeing how they behave over time. This can be reflected in the site's mechanics—for example, if a user consistently reports posts correctly for breaking the rules, eventually it should be safe to just trust that user's reports without preemptive review. Other users that aren't as consistent can be given less weight—perhaps it takes three reports from lower-trust users to trigger an action, but only one report from a very high-trust user.

This approach can be applied to other, individual mechanics as well. For example, a user could gain (or lose) access to particular abilities depending on whether they use them responsibly. If done carefully, this could even apply to voting—just as you'd value the recommendation of a trusted friend more than one from a random stranger, we should be able to give more weight to the votes of users that consistently vote for high-quality posts.

...

Another important factor will be having trust decay if the user stops participating in a community for a long period of time. Communities are always evolving, and if a user has been absent for months or years, it's very likely that they no longer have a solid understanding of the community's current norms. Perhaps users that previously had a high level of trust should be able to build it back up more quickly, but they shouldn't indefinitely retain it when they stop being involved.

Between these two factors, we should be able to ensure that communities end up being managed by members that actively contribute to them, not just people that want to be a moderator for its own sake.

Combine that with things like AutoModerator (the person behind Tildes is the one who built AutoMod on Reddit) and it seems like a reasonable way for a platform to promote good stuff and cut down on bad.

You'll have to deal with per-community "power users" with a lot of power, but the alternative is unelected mods who can be just as bad.

I don't know if I'm ever going to get around to making that fork. But I think taking Tildes' approach to mods is novel and fresh, and I quite like it.

But what you mentioned absolutely happens, though.

It's €17 to go to the Louvre. Many of the paintings there are public domain, which logically says they should be free as they have no owners. Yet to see them, most people need to pay €17.

Those are paintings locked behind a paywall. The pieces may be donated freely by an artist - just as users contribute freely on a website - but the museum still charges for admission.

So while I'm not defending the practice - and there are many free museums; even the Louvre has ways to get in for free - it's also not exactly a way to convince others that the practice is inherently bad.

AutoMod is currently missing from both Lemmy and Kbin.

If AutoMod gets baked in to one or the other (or both!) then this sort of thing will go away down. I was a mod on a 500k+ user subreddit and AutoMod did most of the heavy lifting for this stuff.

It worked! ;)

Lemmy purposely doesn't allow that; it's one-way with no intentions of changing.

Kbin allows it, though. Kbin merges Lemmy and Mastodon so you can easily flip between one or the other. You can follow Lemmy communities and Mastodon users, and you can be followed by Mastodon users. It's one reason why I switched.

https://fedia.io is the currently-recommended instance right now; should still be open sign-ups. Check your email for confirmation if you register; it tends to go to spam.

Beehaw has strict instance-wide moderation policies (which don't really work in a federated model tbh, but they haven't seemed to realize as such yet).

Beehaw's trying to funnel Reddit-related stories into a single megathread. However, if people aren't subscribed to that community on their instance, they don't see the megathread and don't know to post in it.

Simply put - while Beehaw is a nice place, their moderation style is at odds with much of the fediverse. I wouldn't be surprised if Beehaw started defederating fairly broadly to prevent users from other instances coming in to their communities without respecting their rules and standards.

I also wouldn't be surprised to see Beehaw remove themselves from federation entirely, since they very much want to be their own thing.

You can disable join requests for private subreddits by going into your subreddit settings on new Reddit and turning them off there.

That button doesn't exist on old Reddit, so if you just checked there then you didn't have the option.

I had a 500k sub and I forgot to turn off join requests until midway through day 1. After that we got about a dozen modmail requests but that's it.

IMO, Lemmy is the one that's incorrect by requiring the URL. Kbin does the same thing Mastodon does by having it use the @ instead.