I actually started on Kbin.social, but then it got shut down, Kbin died and now fedia.io seems to be the largest one running MBin. I like the interface on MBin and I guess it’s good to have a diverse fediverse with different services, but at the same time, why use mbin when everyone congregates on lemmy instances? The local magazines on fedia are for the most part, quite dead, when compared to lemmy collections. In the end I feel like there aren’t enough people to go around to support many more services like MBin and Piefed.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but what I picked up by the Beehaw drama is that the Lemmy devs do not seem to be too interested in improving moderation support. I don’t know if this is politics related but I wouldn’t be surprised.
I think everyone is always interested in improving, but there are a billion different ideas of what improvement looks like. Especially with content moderation.
What is a brilliant way to handle some issues might cause new problems that may or may not be difficult to predict. A lot of people have a lot of ideas, and people feel strongly about it. And most importantly, it’s a lot of work to implement and typically not the most fun work for developers who tend to be be underpaid at best anyway.
It seems every fediverse service that gets big enough has people chanting about a hard fork because the developers don’t care enough about content moderation. I believe it’s probably more that it’s extremely difficult, and that developers facing the reality of the situation might come across as dismissive when responding to ideas and suggestions.
The Lemmy developers initially included a filter for numerous slurs - I have a hard time believing they don’t want content moderation to be their own vision of as good as possible.
In the end our strength is in fragmentation. I believe, no matter how little moderation tools improve, the small instances I’m on will never get as awful as Reddit. And if they do, I’ll migrate to another one that’s more trigger-happy about defederating. :)
That said, not sure whether you’re wrong and absolutely not correcting you! Just my five cents.
The problem is that them being on a political extremist side of things makes it incredibly hard to take their word for it and to take them at face value. The most trouble Lemmy communities are facing is coming exactly from the spaces that align not just with the devs views, but in case of Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad even the ownership. So when more moderate lefty instances like Beehaw complain about the lack of moderation tools to handle the trolls from those places, it might just be that the devs are completely fine with what’s happening.
While the political friction is very real, my perspective on the whole dynamic is that the anticipation of or focus on the friction is one of the biggest source of problems.
For instance, you cite beehaw and state that it’s the extreme leftist instances that are the most troublesome … when beehaw famously defederated from lemmy.world ages ago, as well as sh.itjust.works, while the admin of lemm.ee has said, controversially for some of their users I believe, that they don’t really understand all of the fuss over hexbear. Meanwhile, lemmy.ml tries to stay widely federated AFAICT, and from what I’ve gathered, the admins have even gotten in hot water with their lefty users for not defederating from more right-wing-ish instances earlier, and then are often criticised for their active moderation on their own instance.
Point being that it’s all probably a bit of a mess that doesn’t neatly align with left v right.
I’d bet that the biggest problems with the core devs approach to moderation tooling is that they have like making them and don’t like what they perceive to be a culture of demanding open source users (which I’ve come to understand over time actually).