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What safeguards does Lemmy have that allow it to maintain integrity if it sees a sudden rise in popularity?

It appears to me that the current state of Lemmy is similar to other platforms when they were smaller and more insular, and that insularity is somewhat protecting it.

I browse Lemmy, and it feels a bit like other platforms did back in 2009, before they became overwhelmed and enshitified.

If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar "landed gentry" moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.

If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own "eternal September", what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?

81 comments
  • Federation.

    There's a reason why worldnews@lemmy.world and wordlnewa@lemmy.ml are not federated with eachother, yet lots of users are subscribed to both.

    If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar "landed gentry" moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.

    For lemmy, it's again a federation thing. You just don't see many multiple defederated examples due to the small user count.

    It's not the most optimal solution, but it's still miles better than dealing with single instance or single community issues.

  • lemmy is part of a horizontally scaling network of instances (servers). if a popular community on an instance goes sideways... say because of a new terrible mod or rule change, the entire population of that community can up and move to a new community in another instance without having to create new accounts anywhere.

    this has already happened a few times.

  • I think the difference here is there is not some weird, ephemeral person deciding. For example, at the bad place, it could have been a shitty admin, a good admin or actually spez deciding the rules for everyone.

    Here we have instances that make up their own rules on who to federate with (who you see), and whether or not you're banned (who sees you). Also, the admins of your instance can redo moderation order anyway they see fit. It really will be an instance controlled vibe.

    The real thing to be worried about is that if certain instances get too big. They have the most users and can control who sees what across the fediverse. For example, if a super large instance doesn't want any posts on any volatile or controversial topic to be seen (immigration, Nazi salutes, transgender, etc.), they could just have it not show up on their instance and the biggest part of the fediverse would never see it and have no way of knowing they didn't see it.

81 comments