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Feedback from all moderators

Hello world!

We would like to start by saying thank you ❤, no really 🙏 THANK YOU to ALL the moderators out there!

Without you folks, we would have no one to help keep our community safe and help build the communities both here on Lemmy.World and on other fine instances. To this end, we want to make sure your voices are heard 📣 loud and clear📣.

So, in the spirit of transparency, we would like everyone to know that we are looking to help out the folks working on Sublinks. Over the last several months we have grown to be more than just Lemmy.World. We've added platforms such as Pixelfed and Sharkey to help offer our users more diverse options for expressing themselves online. We still are very committed to Mastodon as well.

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time. Any changes in our core services would need to be discussed extensively internally AND externally with our community members. We firmly believe in the growth of the Fediverse and without the users, there would only be software, and that's no fun!

Sooo...

The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.

Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.

👉Moderation Survey HERE👈

Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.

We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!

=Sincerely,
Fedihosting Foundation

PS ... also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘

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238 comments
  • PS … also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘

    "YES FELLOW KIDS, WE ARE ALSO, HOW YOU SAY, STILL DOWN WITH "IT" "

    144
  • We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time.

    Well that is concerning.

    135
  • I don't see why the moderation tools couldn't just be improved on Lemmy. The new moderator view has been very useful for me as a moderator. We already have Lemmy and Kbin. The Sublinks about page doesn't say how it is going to be different/better than the existing options apart from moderation tools. On top of that it is made in Java instead of Rust? That's just going backwards in my opinion... This post also does not state why you guys are interested in a Lemmy alternative. You could have named some issues you have with it and why something else would be better(just like the Sublinks guys could have done in their about page). I started my communities here and put a lot of effort in them. I can't just switch instances without destroying most of the work done. The language used here really makes it sound like this instance is on borrowed time. Being able to transfer communities to another instance would be nice...

    80
  • Hello there! I love lemmy.world - I moderate communities such as /c/Minecraft and /c/Relationship_Advice and will always be onboard for improving our platforms and reaching more people.

    I also do not personally believe in yet another slicing of the communities into different platforms, and if Sublinks aren't integrated into Lemmy - requiring new communities or separate accounts - I will not be following along. Of course, somebody else could always take over my communities in that event, but I just wanted to let out my opinion on this.

    You might not remember specific details during that whole jump in workload, but during the first week of Reddit migration, some moderators from communities that fought really hard to build an user base migrated here - one for menopausal women in particular caught my eye, as the moderator did everything in her power to migrate users who weren't tech savvy to a whole new platform. The reason this effort didn't work and most of these communities reverted back was the extreme fragmentation and confusing nature of the early Fediverse. If, for whatever reason, we add yet another layer we are explicitly saying we only care about esse of use for tech savvy programmers. This is a fine stance to have, but make it clear and explicit if that's the case.

    As a final addendum, the political beliefs of the Lemmy developers never harmed any of the several opposition communities or servers - if that's the root of the matter, I'm even more disappointed.

    Still, as always, I will support the .world family of servers and there's simply nobody quite as good, competent and dedicated as this team in the Fediverse.

    72
  • if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘

    dude that sounds even more corporate 😂😂😂😂

    Just kidding, xoxo <3

    66
  • I want to start by saying I am extremely thankful for Ruud and the team and think that you did an amazing job with lemmy.world and I wish you success in the future.

    That said, I am a monthly 30 dollar donator to Lemmy and I am not interested in Sublinks. I read through the threads and my take is that I think the motivation for the development of it goes against my personal politics and mischaracterizes nutomic and dessalines. While I appreciate the nature of open source to open up avenues for people to act as they think is best, I do not want to leave the Lemmy.

    Ahead of a migration to Sublinks I hope there comes a cleaner way to move communities off lemmy.world. If I had known how the Fediverse worked 11 months ago I would have self hosted an instance and shared my communities that way as to not be defederated from people I want to be federated with. Additionally I think that having a single huge lemmy instance is not great for the architecture of the fediverse as a whole and even if there were no changes planned or being considered. I think that many instances hosting communities is preferable to having large ones like lemmy.ml and lemmy.world.

    Again I totally get that this is provided free and as is and as such you are free to make the decision you think is best. Even though I am a difficult person, I very much appreciate you, your team and what you are trying to accomplish. Thank you.

    65
  • I don't understand this post, at all... Did something happen to Lemmy? This post has very clear intentions.

    If you just wished to help the folks at sublinks to gather information on moderation tools, as you claimed, you should have just opened an issue on their github or on their sublemmy or whatever. Do not create a sticky for 200k people to see.

    62
  • We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time.

    At this time

    Hmm.

    56
  • If I'm looking to build skills in a new language, that language is probably going to be Rust and not Java. One of those languages has a bright future. The other is going to look a lot like Fortran in 15 years.

    I expect real performance issues with Java at some point, especially compared to Rust. The initial difficulty in picking up the language is worth it if I never have to see another Factory pattern that only returns one type. Why just use a constructor when you can use idiopathic idiomatic java?

    50
  • Apologies for a bit of a negative thought here ...

    But I went through the survey, mainly curious to see what SL are thinking about in terms of moderation tooling, and was somewhat disappointed to see mostly broad and open ended questions. While these can be very valuable in surveys for picking up on as much information as possible, I was hoping to see more specific ideas about moderation tooling for people to provide feedback on, instead of "what do you find difficult" etc style questions.

    To be harsh for a moment, it almost feels like the SL team decided they'd work on moderation tooling, then realised they don't quite know what to do and so are looking for ideas on what should be done. Now I know that's likely untrue, given that some admins and the SL teams have already had conversations. But still, I was hoping to see some manifestation of those motives and conversations in this survey. Maybe that's unreasonable of me ... I'm not sure.


    All of that being said, a complaint I've made in this space before (to other platform devs), which I'll share here again ...

    platform specific moderation work is a bit of a shame on the fediverse. It may not be tractable, but some form of platform generic plugin style moderation tooling really seems like where things should be headed. It would be cool if something like that was what was being worked on here rather than reinventing the wheel for a ~50,000 MAU userbase.

    It could be in whatever language or stack you want. APIs are there and if new ones are needed they'd be worth working on too. You could make whatever frontend for it you like. And there is likely some interesting protocol involved too. I know there's talk about such things over on the mastodon side.

    But generally, IMO, plugins, rather than whole new platforms (with blackjack and hookers) is likely what the fediverse needs at the moment given its scale (and lack of major growth in the near future).

    46
  • We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time.

    So... you're thinking about it? That doesn't instill a lot of confidence in continuing to use this platform moving forward. I started contributing donations to the lemmy platform development, and will not be very happy if you just decide to abandon it in the future.

    43
  • Are you planning on sharing the results of the survey? I think the Lemmy folks would be interested in it too.

    38
  • Is there an alternate survey site that could be used other than Microsoft? The site is pretty much impossible to see in dark browser mode as well (light grey text on white background).

    Aside from that though, what is the difference between Lemmy and sublinks?

    34
  • After mulling this post over for awhile:

    • .world has many instances in the fediverse and existed long before Lemmy.world. Ruud has never, to my knowledge, posed anything like this post about another potential fedi service. The other fediverse services have coexisted without need to position them against each other. This difference in approach implies intentions, if not outright actions with the illusion of user input.
    • The prevalence of Linux users on this platform is common knowledge. So much so, it is a common complaint from users that feel excluded or uninterested in Linux. The use of Linux implies a distrust for Microsoft, and for the most part megacorporations. While the survey creator (sublinks) may receive anonymous data, Microsoft is absolutely correlating information that comes across their server and selling that data. In my opinion, this should have been an obvious thing most of the Linux community will not participate in, (myself included as one of the most active users and a mod). And it reflects poorly on the FOSS nature of sublinks. A FOSS survey system is needed badly for effective engagement.
    • As many of us in the social sciences background know... Please explain the intention of this statement. I don't mean to be cynical, but to me, this implies I have been part of some science experiment of unknown intentions and implications; at the extreme end of possible meanings. I thought we were a FOSS community, many with a self hosting interest. A social sciences interest and background has entirely different motivations and raises concern for me.
    33
  • While I'd like to contribute to the survey, I'm not comfortable using a Microsoft form in addition to providing uniquely identifying info

    I'm still willing to contribute in other ways tho🤗

    30
  • I'm excited to see more and more activity pub compatible software. These projects are created and maintained by just a few people and could stop being maintained at any point. Many of these platforms lack features that make moderation a reasonable task among other less desirable quirks. It's one of the reasons I decided against hosting my own instance.

    I think it is a shame that the creators of these projects lead with stating which programming language and methodology they're using. IT DOES NOT MATTER. This is a major sticking point for the pedants. Just tell us what it does, leave the technical aspects of the project in the docs for the people that it actually matters to.

    The mix of microblogging and threaded posts should be interesting. Kbin has both, but they are not intermingled. I personally don't use microblogging, but I do see screenshots of posts on here, which is basically the same thing I suppose.

    As far as complaining about fracturing of the userbase, well, this is an issue across the Internet. There's Facebook groups, Reddit, message boards, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and too many other platforms to list, all fracturing topic enthusiasts and competing for users. I believe that more projects will allow the fediverse to contribute to grow and eventually mature into something a lot of people will use. More projects and forks means more ways to try new ideas and improvement without a single project owner preventing growth of the entire ecosystem.

    29
  • LMAO, Sublinks devs are so engrained in Java that they want to rewrite Rust in Java, and their survey they send is written in Office 365? They're a meme.

    The Java idea is absurd and shouldn't be taken seriously.

    I disagree with the Lemmy devs' political views a great deal, but:

    1. It's open source so you can audit if they're doing anything bad
    2. Just fork it and improve if you have issues with the code they're writing / features

    Java is a horrible language. Nearly every developer I've talked to in the last several decades agrees, even previously hardcore Java devs. Please just stop.

    27
  • Whoa. Some of us moderators are just average users who escaped from Reddit. I moderate two small niche support groups. (Stopdrinking and bipolar) I know the other moderator in bipolar is about the same tech level as me. (NOT coders!).

    This sounds like we need to rehome our groups???

    20
  • I run a community of over 11K almost by myself on reddit and I can't say I struggle to moderate it. Here on Lemmy I post to one I set up, but I'm the only one doing it. That said, I saw virtually no moderation tools, so it would definitely help to have something. However, I don't want my posts to get lost or be spread across two or more communities, as opposed to having everything searchable in one place. What would be the technical obstacle in copying the posts and preserving the dates? If size is an issue, they could be capped to a specific size, only with the metadata transferred in those cases.

    19
  • When's the IPO?

    18
  • The survey form eats more RAM the longer it's open until it becomes unusable.

    16
  • A lot of people here seem to think that Java code is awful and disgusting and no projects should ever use it. The thing about popular languages is that more code existing in a language inevitably means a lot of it ends up being bad. The same thing will likely happen to rust as it gets popular, but that isn't exactly a problem. It's possible to have a well-maintained Java codebase.

    Debate between functionality of the actual programming languages at this point is pretty meaningless, if they have good development standards then a Java program could end up just as well maintained as rust. Any time saved by compiler enforcement of specific standards (like no using null) would be lost by the fact that the devs don't know rust tooling. You could just have a requirement in PRs that null isn't used. Both Java and Rust have usable frameworks for REST API development, so using one or the other comes down to familiarity.

    The idea that programming languages make code suddenly good or bad is pretty silly. Different languages have different language-level guarantees which can help produce good or working code. That being said, it's not like it's impossible to write good Java code, just like it's not impossible to write bad rust code. Most people seem to be conflating guaranteed functionality and safety with maintainability, stability, and readability. Rust is still a new language, so although it's great, Java will probably be the better choice for the latter 3 qualities.

    That being said, something like Kotlin would probably have been a better starting point since it can interact with Java (and works like Java in most cases) but also has some nice improvements like stricter null checking (Kotlin nulls are treated similarly to rust's Option<T>, it's just described as T? instead and the syntax is generally a lot more concise). There's also the benefit of being able to write some code in Kotlin and some in Java since they are mostly cross-compatible.

    15
  • Can you help me understand what the first 6 questions have to do with the survey subject of moderation? They seem to collect personal information without direct bearing on anything.

    14
  • This is very sad to see... Instead of improving things from within, you are trying to split the community.

    13
  • What's with the demographics questionnaire? It's an experience survey lol.

    12
  • Whelp, I've spent enough time here to make a decision. As of right now, I love it here, and I don't see that changing. I've decided to go premium, in an effort to support things. I will withdraw that so fast though if I see any reason to do so.

    10
  • So if someone has a community on lemmy.world, would they need to move to sublinks at some point? Where and how would one do that? Asking for myself.

    Thanks for all your work here.

    7
  • Too long a survey, and the tiny communities I mod I've had to take zero actions. But don't do it! Java is a joke of a language, and Jerboa is a fantastic client

    5
  • Why are .world admins always so hostile? First Antik and now you?

    Why does this instance continuously bleed admins? This is why we had an abrupt change on the piracy change

    Why was that post shamefully hidden in your community while every donation post and survey pinned for days?

    Why do you continuously make up lies about the lemmy developers and spread negativity about them when they promoted this instance at the start of the reddit exodus?

    Rookie has a horrible track record with privacy concerns and user-data respect, first with the .world scraper discord bot and now with a microsoft survey?!?

    From your reply below it is clear that .world is going to move to sublinks (you are all developing it right?) you mention a script that will automatically move communities there. What about those people that don't want to move, will you allow them to move their community away before you forcefully transfer it?

    Will .world federate with Meta on Sublinks or with lemmy?

    Will you commit to having a town-hall with the users? This is by far the worst instance for user communication and we deserve to know if that will continue.

    5
  • thanks to instance-wide mod efforts. take the drudgery out of chasing most spammy types. out here getting fat.

    5
  • Wow this is very frightening. I didn't think the lemmy.world heel turn would come so soon. I'm going to have to find a new instance to recommend to new users.

    I hope I'm proven wrong about this, but the largest lemmy instance pitching something to replace lemmy is in no way a good sign. Most of us left reddit to get away from things like this.

    4
  • I literally just got permanently banned from reddit because I criticized some mods who mass reported it as "harassment". I'm looking for reddit alternatives and found this. Please tell me the mods here are respectful civil and levelheaded?

    2
  • Thanks peeps, making this community awesome! People in lemmy have 2000% better critical thinking than other similar social forums.

    1
  • Had to leave the .world instance because of biased moderators censoring my opinions and admins not giving a shit. If not for Lemmy having a system in place for dealing with ineffective staff I would've left this platform already.

    Edit: Never seen so many people rush in to defend a dictatorship. Sickening to be honest.

    0
  • Everything will be migrated fully automated, you will only see some downtime but that will be announced before that happens

    -1
  • There are definitely some federated servers that need to be removed from network

    Lemmy.ml in particular is being used to push specific voices and banning anyone else

    Banned apparently from asklemmy on there because one asshole interpreted me supporting Israel. When my comment exclusively was pointing out that the past the use made was low effort trolling meme in a thread complaining about trolling

    So thank you davel@lemmy.ml for directly evidencing that you, and your node are hateful little agenda pushing shits.

    I want to love lemmy

    But the federated model will fail if nodes like the .ml continue to online and assholes like this mod have zero accountability

    I honestly don’t feel like because I’d these problems this site is any better than Reddit.

    We also need the power to block a node completely from our feeds.(found it in filters) Also to block and ban entire nodes from our own communities as i don’t want any lemmy.ml users in my sub

    Keep being salty little shits ml users. Your proving the point to the rest of the lemmy world

    The biggest mod tool: manual ban entry for preventing certain users. Looking for a way to ban from a community an individual before they show up.

    -5
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