I agree with @OmanMkII@aussie.zone. More voices is great, but only if they're actually engaging in good faith. Launching into an argument saying abortion is murder is prima facie bad faith, but I tried engaging with that user multiple times just in case they were just ill-informed, until it became absolutely clear they were not veering away from their predetermined script.

While I do agree, and more representation is excellent for a healthy debate, it was also quite a rude awakening this morning to read a "fuck you evil people and your abortions" type comment. I think we need to be very careful blocking whole instances, but some people can just fuck off. Maybe more tools for moderation could be beneficial?

It would be interesting to see if we could have admins alerted on early indicators of spam/bots/idiots, e.g. an account made in the past few days has a high downvote ratio, or a dead account suddenly starts high volume comments/posts. Not sure how you'd do it exactly, but it would be interesting to take a look at the application logs and see if it could be fed into a SIEM platform to create these alerts. Then again there's probably a much better way I don't know haha.

Na, the users i saw were all stating their opinions and they were essentially fine, no rules were broken in my eyes.

It just struck me last night that the way they delivered those opinions was pretty toxic.

We’re a relatively small community, so it wouldn’t take much for us to be overwhelmed.

You are correct, we are small. But I do have a contingency for brigading. I've not had to put it to the test, yet - but I think we can handle a brigade descending on us. For a start, I have a "Nuke Post" button that will kill a post outright. That will likely suffice in most cases.

Worst case: I can go thermonuclear and flip federation. Instead of a list of blocked "naughty" instances, I can move us to a list of "nice" instances and block everyone else aside from the site for a time. I should review that list, I haven't updated it since about March.

The Admin tools are a bit rudimentary. Like the Internet in the 70's and 80's, Lemmy was set up on the assumption that people are cool and not out to ruin everyone's day. But there are some tools there to provide us with some shelter from a storm of bad faith actors if we need them. I'm hoping they'll continue to mature as Lemmy itself does. And by the time we need stuff like this, there are better options than effectively going dark to much of the Fediverse in case of emergency.

Everythings cool over a White Russian, or two.

But then we also get people like yourself who are always awesome to hear from! :) So swings and roundabouts.

Yeah, although i better stand on my high horse, my takes are also a bit shit, lol!

Part of it is definitely that context matters. I've noticed that when well meaning North Americans enter the discussion, they tend to apply their own context, or haven't the correct info.

Good example was that person who was, well meaning and nonetheless made a valuable contribution, but had incorrect info about the submarine fleet.