

/r/StarTrek founder and primary steward from 2008-2021
Currently on the board of directors for StarTrek.website
I know this comment is satire (well done… I think) but I want you to it hurt me deep in my bones.
I’m clearly not paying enough for a therapist.
Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold
This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it leads to mod burnout when they are getting drawn into rules-debates when it’s obvious the person is just trying to get around the spirit of the community’s purpose.
For example we had a rule that was literally just “be nice”. There’s no wriggling around that because it’s not some legal text. If someone is ““concerned”” about a request to “be nice” or “be honest”, they are not someone we wanted to be around anyway. These are discussion communities, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate in every single one of them.
As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it’s own preferred method of discussion.
My least favorite fun fact is that Reddit forced the KiA mod to reopen after they went private calling it a “cancer”.
I was a mod at the time and Reddit always told us we had an extreme degree of editorial independence (hence the justification for allowing r/jailbait, /greatawakening, r/coontown etc) but that event made me consider for the first time that exposing normies to propaganda might not just be a side-effect, but a core function of the company.
Absolutely, if you’re seeing propaganda, it’s because it’s allowed on that instance. But the presence of propaganda has nothing to do if an account is an LLM or not.
Moderation on the Feviderse is different than on commercial platforms because it’s context-dependent instead of rules-dependent. That means that a user accout (bot or otherwise) that does not contribute to the spirit of a community will not be welcomed.
There is largely no incentive to run an LLM that is a constructive member of a community, bots are built to push an agenda, product, or exhibit generally disruptive behavior. Those things are unwelcome in spaces built for discussion. So mods/admins don’t need to know “how to identify a bot”, they need to know "how to identify unwanted behavior".
Chocolatey and Windhawk
Bing and all Bing-based engines stopped being able to show Reddit results.
Not accurate, actually!
The moderator to user ratio on the fediverse is orders of magnitude higher than commercial platforms. Even Lemmy.world (a large, loosely moderated Lemmy instance) has again, orders of magnitude more eyes on its content than reddit.
This means that even if a chatbot gets invented that is impossible to distinguish form a human, mods will more readily be able to tell if it is pushing a narrative/shilling products.
Save yourself some clicks: https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV
If the article doesn’t define what “AI” means then the article doesn’t actually mean anything. Market research studying what people know about a vague and undefined term like “AI” can ultimately only produce undefined results.
It’s like asking people their feelings on “woke” or “god”. If everyone is talking about something different then nobody can have more or less understanding of it.
Activitypub accounts are portable actually. Lemmy is not as slick as Mastodon with this feature yet but will likely get there.
The kickstarter is official too, Daniel tooted it recently.
Is something finally going to federate with bluesky?
From an e-waste perspective not having a battery is really cool. The article doesn’t mention this, but the plastic appears recycled too. I wonder how it types?
The purpose and shape of a community should be up to the moderator. If someone wants to grow a “community” full of complaining and whining (and there are absolutely people who do) that should be up to the mods.
That said, I think downvote abuse is super annoying, not healthy for “Lemmy in general” and would personally prefer it banned in communities I participate in.
Truly amazing how many journalists have drank the big tech kool-aid.
I don’t get why people are so interested in the fediverse.
Because Mastodon is Twitter without the possibility of an Elon Musk and Lemmy/Piefed is Reddit without the possibility of a Steve Huffman. You clearly feel that you can do better than the collective efforts of the ActivityPub devs so I am rooting for you!
“Lemmy” is actually not a platform like Reddit, it’s software and the network of instances running that software is decentralized (Lemmy uses the ActivityPub protocol) meaning each instance is operated by a different person (or group). There are also other similar softwares like Piefed and mBin that work pretty well with Lemmy. That is all to say that if an Admin or Mod is “getting fascisty” you can block that instance, join another, or even create your own. That’s the beauty of ActivityPub!
The only thing I’m aware of that they do even remotely better than anyone else is privacy.
Where did you hear this? Its my understanding that they are one of the worst when it comes to privacy.