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Are lemmy’s moderation tools ready for scaling up? An upcoming review says no. (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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See thread from the reviewer here: https://hachyderm.io/@thisismissem/110550824230711531

They’ve apparently only shared it on some matrix room so far but will publish it.

You can read the comments in the thread for slightly more detail, but the essence of it is that lemmy (and especially kbin?) and too immature in terms of moderation tooling and shouldn’t really be opening themselves up to the public as anything more than an alpha test.

Some sort of response or discussion here makes sense, especially in light of Beehaw.org’s recent defederation from lemmy.world, because of, it seems, lemmy.world’s open signup policy and what beehaw find to be insufficient moderation tooling (see discussion here: https://lemmy.world/post/170911 or same but on lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.ml/post/1281130 )

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[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

[Warning: I didn't read her full report yet.]

I agree that it's flawed. As of now, to my knowledge:

  • users can report content and state the reason (e.g. "kgshkewq");
  • moderators can read the reports;
  • moderators can remove content, and ban users;
  • admins can set up the registration method, to either "free for all" or manual approval.

It works in a small scale, but once it gets big enough, it'll become a mess.

However I don't agree with her IMHO dichotomic conclusion that "if you care about user safety, do not deploy either of these" (implication: "if you deploy either Lemmy or Kbin you don't care about user safety"). It's a more weighted decision that depends on:

  • scale (how many users),
  • how much do you think that people would be willing to moderate it (brute-forcing lack of mod tools)
  • the nature of the group that you're trying to migrate (is it a marginalised group often attacked by society? or just a bunch of randoms sharing meme?)

Plus discouraging people from migrating creates a chicken-and-egg problem. Open source projects rely a lot on user contributions; specially for code. If both Kbin and Lemmy are used enough then someone will eventually code the missing tools.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Yea. There might be a little hypocrisy here in failing to compare lemmy to where mastodon was at times of large growth. Slightly more subtle language with some suggestions and insights as to where things might go would probably have been more helpful.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

That being said, it is super awesome that thisismissem, a mastodon dev primarily, is reaching out across platforms and advocating for platform-generic tooling for important tasks. They didn’t need to do this, but it surely moves the needle forward, and cross-platform collaboration or discussion is certainly a good thing.

this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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