this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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I used Reddit a lot, but I always thought a foss alternative should exist. The thing is most don't care about if things are foss or not, so I thought nothing was going to change.
Just like with Whatsapp, Youtube, Discord, Instagram... You name it. There are foss alternatives out there that do the same thing, but most people just don't care about this issue.
Honestly, I'm glad they fucked up. We can build a strong foss community where there are no crazy CEO's or overall people that you don't even know getting rich from advertisements and shit, and no tracking or obscure algorithms / code too.
Let's hope Whatsapp goes next!
Foss is the way to go.
9 years ago, Reddit was open source. the community didn't seem to want to have alternate owner/operators on any significant scale.
At the moment there is still nothing stopping people with an agenda from creating a community and then censoring its posts to fit within their narrative. Reddit suffered from this and other than making your own instance and trying to get people to move over there is not much you can do here either. If you're struggling to think of a legitimate problem: /c/countryname can get created by person affiliated with political party x and then control the content to be in favor of said party.
How would you prevent that though? If you don't have any moderation at all the first commercial spammer or griefer who comes along destroys your community.
My thinking is that for communities with names where its important to be impartial (like for instance a country's name) they should have some way to appeal to the instance owner to take back the name from a mod team that you can show evidence is repetitively being unfair or biased. Something like a poll. How that could be implemented and protected from abuse, I'm not sure. For communties where its obvious its a company managing their social image, I have no problem with more harsh moderation. My main problem is political coercion and control of the media.
Wouldn't that just push the problem up to the instance owner level?
Also, the idea of unbiased media is a nice theoretical construct but if you look at RL media options like books, news papers, TV,... you will notice that none of them are unbiased. At best you have a balanced mix of sources biased in different directions.
I dont think you understand what I mean. Active censorship of topics and discussions that go against the mod teams agenda is the problem. The content is provided by the users, the mods should not be deep throating you your media. They are there to moderate... a discussion... go look up those definitions.
I see that more as the strength of the federation model. Yes, communities or entire instances could and will have political leanings that disagree with your own, and that difference could lead to censoring decisions that would be counter to your opinion.
But, nothing is stopping you or anyone from creating that same community with your political beliefs as the guiding methodology to compete. Then people who disagree with the original decisions can flock to the new one. Itβs a co-existence that I think is impossible with the centralized model.
I think we have learned enough from Reddit that echo chambers should be avoided. Fair and open discussion is possible without censorship, it just requires mods to not be children. Since we are at the beginning of the Lemmy explosion and there is still much development to be done, it's worth talking about IMO.
If you manage the mods, you've only created a second layer of mods.
Hierarchies have been an ideological plague on humanity since Rome - if you want to build a nice thing with clean lines it certainly helps.
If you want to build a community or an ecosystem, anarchy works better. Not no rules, but no rulers
Flatter organizations are more efficient and far more productive - if we shout down shills and move on when a specific group gets too echoey, we'll be just fine
The strength of federation is (in part) the fact that names are only as special as the server they live on - I'm subbed to 4 gaming groups, so the moment one becomes toxic I'll drop it.
And moving forward, we already have people experimenting with ways to reconcile similar groups across servers - I think the key is to maximize content delivery and individual control over curation while avoiding locuses of power that can be abused