this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
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IMHO those pinned top messages in Reddit were a stopgap for dealing with highly diverse communities and moderation styles "on a single instance".
Again in my opinion, the Fediverse would benefit more from having consistent rules per-instance, with only sub-rules on a community level. Both of these should be made easily discoverable to all participants of a "community@instance" directly through their interface (web or app), making the pinned top messages unnecessary.
Communities with "highly diverse moderation styles", should rather stay on separate instances with similar moderation styles, making it easier for mods to apply a consistent ruleset, for users to decide which instances to follow, and admins whether to federate or not. There already exist interfaces (both web and app) to merge communities from multiple instances if the user so wishes to (at their own risk, but again IMHO the rule differences should be handled by the user's interface).
Ideally, I think that users should be able to use an interface of their own choice to merge comments on a matching post from multiple instances or groups of instances (federated), interacting in whatever style they choose without interfering with users who didn't choose that style.
Particularly in the case of Beehaw, which has a consistent set of "rules but not rules" for all communities, I think those messages would only add clutter.
This makes sense, but I think that Lemmy just has this same problem on a different scale (between instances rather than between communities). The problem we have seen sometimes is folks seeing Beehaw posts in the All feed of their home instance and coming in and commenting/posting without knowing what/who we are and without engaging with the sidebar or any of our docs. And some federated sites make it difficult to even tell that you are seeing a post from another instance (I'm looking at you, Kbin). The vast majority of the time it isn't a huge problem, but it does mean that the mods are having the same conversation over and over because some folks aren't aware of the vibe of the place where they're posting.
Now obviously an automatic bot comment would be a band-aid, and I suspect not a particularly effective one (Lemmy doesn't provide the ability to sticky comments). It would be ideal if there was some functionality built into Lemmy itself to remind users of the instance they are about to post in, and the rules of that instance.
I'd kind of rather they get this as a direct message or even better a warning on the UI they interact with our site on (we cannot enforce the latter).
Yeah, I had been thinking that a better solution would be some built in Lemmy functionality - I think Reddit actually had a reminder like this on posts, but not comments - but between apps, third-party front ends, and federation with other services like Mastodon and Kbin it probably wouldn't reach the folks that would most need to be reminded of the rules of the place they're posting in.