Quadruple moderation is killing Lemmy. It’s a gift to Reddit
There’s a rule about online communities I want people here to understand: the 90-9-1 rule.
Roughly 90% lurk, 9% comment, and 1% create.
When I first got to Lemmy, I had trouble finding enough content I was interested in even commenting on. So I figured: why complain about the lack of content when I can start posting it myself?
That’s why I post so much.
If people don’t post, most Lemmy communities simply don’t have enough creators to sustain themselves. You need posts before lurkers can lurk, commenters can comment, and some of those people eventually become creators themselves.
I’m not posting just to flood Lemmy. I’m trying to help solve one of Lemmy’s biggest problems: not enough content creators.
And frankly, doing that has been a nightmare.
Lemmy has a quadruple-moderation problem
Every active content creator has to survive four layers:
- Community moderators can remove your posts or ban you from the community.
- Your home-instance admins can ban your entire account.
- Receiving-instance admins can block/ban you for everyone on their instance, even though you don’t belong to it.
- Public moderation history means those decisions follow you. One moderator’s decision can influence another and snowball into more moderation.
For prolific content creators, that’s brutal.
I’ve had multiple accounts banned over one or two posts that somebody didn’t like. Months of posting, comments, engagement and contributions can effectively disappear from a community because of a couple of moderation decisions.
And the more you contribute, the worse the odds become. If you make hundreds or thousands of posts, eventually you’re going to post something that one moderator somewhere doesn’t like.
You don’t need one moderation team to tolerate you. You need multiple independent moderators and admins, across multiple servers, to remain aligned indefinitely.
There’s almost no cost to deleting a creator
This is another major difference from Reddit.
There is generally no financial investment in a Lemmy community’s content. A volunteer moderator can ban someone who contributed months of posts and comments and lose all of that person’s future contributions without losing revenue, salary or investment.
The creator paid the cost in time.
The community loses the content.
The users lose something to read and discuss.
And the moderator who pushed the button may personally lose essentially nothing.
So who benefits from making prolific content creation this difficult?
Because it certainly isn’t Lemmy.
And this creates an enormous attack surface
I genuinely have trouble believing that everyone complaining about prolific posters simply doesn’t understand this dynamic. At some point I have to question whether some of it is deliberate.
If I were Reddit and wanted to undermine a federated competitor, this is exactly where I’d attack it: its content creators.
You don’t need to hack Lemmy. You don’t need to DDoS instances. You don’t need to take anything offline.
Lemmy already provides the mechanism.
Report prolific contributors. Call their posting “spam.” accuse them of being bots. Point moderators toward their public moderation histories. Get one account banned somewhere, then let that decision influence moderators elsewhere.
Eventually the creator gets tired of fighting and leaves.
I’m not claiming I have proof Reddit is doing this. I’m saying Lemmy’s architecture makes this kind of subversion ridiculously easy, and Reddit would be an obvious beneficiary.
Reddit doesn’t have this same federated quadruple-jeopardy problem. You’re primarily dealing with the moderation of the subreddit you’re contributing to.
Lemmy desperately needs more people creating content, yet its moderation structure makes life progressively harder for the people who create the most of it.
At some point we should be asking:
Who actually benefits from that?
Putting my thought on your original point at the top: “A plea to admins: protect your creators ban reddit agents instead”
All I can say is: Admins are already doing this to the best of their ability, for better or worse. Some admins moderate proportionally, some others don’t. It’s really a question of whether they appreciate your methods or not.
I also crosspost from Reddit, but specifically those that I would have posted/shared myself if I found it anywhere else.
A few other bots crosspost everything that goes in a subreddit in their own community. What do I see? Only the bots can post i.e. it’s a subreddit mirror. No one comments in it. In other words, it’s glorified spam that no one looks at. At best, it occupies space in lemmy instances. The reader is even required to go to Reddit to read the post itself. Knowing Lemmy, no one wants to bother doing that. Example: !pcmasterrace@zerobytes.monster. I see the new posts as a literal digital deluge that I can’t keep up with. I have better things to do.
I’m assuming here you want to populate Lemmy with a genuine desire to see it as a sustainable ecosystem. For general communities like the top communities you see in lemmy.world, the critical mass has already been reached. Force-increasing its monthly users will only do harm than good. Look up Eternal September to better understand where I’m coming from here.
What I suggest you can do is curate a small number of a subreddit’s best posts for the past 24 hours, copy its content, and crosspost them in an existing federated community. Consent from the community’s mods is important. Transparency (which includes posting as a bot account if this is automated) is also important. If your approach is unwanted by them, move on. That’s just how reality works. Also, respecting their decisions will do your reputation a favor and build trust in the long run.
A few months ago I read a comment which stuck with me, which is that if you try to break that 9:1 ratio by artificially increasing the amount of posts, by simply copying them from elsewhere, you don’t end up with a better community. You end up with an empty community.
The reason the “link to article with comments below” format has worked so well for a huge variety of sites (including reddit, lemmy, digg, slashdot, hackernews at much more) is that people like discussing things. The point of linking content isn’t just to link it, but also to discuss it. Without that, a lot of the point is gone. When I see a community where all the latest posts have zero comments under them it doesn’t fill me with joy that the fediverse is getting more active - it fills me with despair that no-one’s engaging with it.
Lemmy has quite a lot of posts already. If you want to help Lemmy, don’t post more - post a comment. Something you yourself actually think.
But this completely ignores the other 90%. honestly - this is to my point - Icant believe so many people are so ignorant, god help you in life if you are not an agent.
You’re looking at a post with zero comments and concluding “nobody engaged.” You have no idea how many people read it, clicked the article, watched the video, voted, or simply enjoyed seeing it.
That’s what lurkers do. They lurk.
And there’s a pretty obvious contradiction in saying “don’t post, comment instead.” Comment on what? Someone still has to supply the posts that start those discussions.
Yes, 20 great posts with active discussion are better than 2,000 garbage posts. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But an empty community doesn’t magically produce great conversations because we nobly refused to post anything until somebody had an original thought.
Posts create opportunities for discussion. Comments create community. You need both.
And who are you who are so wise in the ways of lurkers? You don’t know what they want either. I know what I want though.
And there’s a pretty obvious contradiction in saying “don’t post, comment instead.” Comment on what? Someone still has to supply the posts that start those discussions.
OK genius, how many posts were there on Lemmy yesterday, not including yours? How many of your posts did you comment on, other than to defend your spam?
god help you in life if you are not an agent.
The fact that you accuse everyone who disagrees with you of taking part in a conspiracy should tell us everything we need to know, and it’s why you won’t be hearing from me again after this.
The unstated logic here is simply that you cannot think of a reason why someone would disagree on this except if they were engaging in some kind of secret skullduggery. That’s a lack of imagination on your part. You need to spend some time - away from the keyboard, I mean - actually thinking about why such a great weight of people (all of whom seem to be quite active on Lemmy) say that you’re contributing negatively. You have no direct evidence for your current guess. Maybe you can think real hard about what those people might be thinking, even if what they think differs from what you think.
I’ve got my own guess what’s going on in your noggin, but in my experience people don’t appreciate hearing such guesses so I’ll keep it to myself.
In the meantime, because that thought process, if you do engage with it, will take actual time (like, months), here’s my advice: limit yourself to posting one post from other social media per day. Pick something that made you think, or made you laugh, so that you can also comment on it and start the discussion.
how many posts were there on Lemmy yesterday?
This is kind of incredible because you’ve submitted 3 posts in 11 months.
You’re basically demonstrating my argument for me.
You prefer commenting. Great. That’s valuable. But those comments exist because somebody else did the work of supplying something for you to comment on.
That’s the 90-9-1 dynamic I’m talking about. I’m not claiming to psychically know what every lurker wants. I’m pointing out that consumption massively outweighs contribution on social platforms, and your own posting history is a pretty great example.
And your solution is that I should limit myself to one post per day, while you contribute roughly one every four months?
If everyone followed your posting rate, this place would be a fucking archaeological site.
As for the “Reddit agent” stuff, I’ve repeatedly said I don’t think everyone who disagrees with me is an agent. I think coordinated manipulation is quite likely and Lemmy is structurally vulnerable to it. You’re free to think that’s ridiculous.
But maybe spend a little less time diagnosing what’s going on in my “noggin” and a little more time considering the irony of telling someone posting too much is killing Lemmy when you’ve posted three times in almost a year.
take your saviour complex to your own instance or community.
Somehow Reddit manages to survive with that ratio of engagement.
If all 35,000 MAU posted at your rate of 3 posts/year, all of Lemmy would generate about 288 posts per day.
just for the record - my accounts post more daily (>300 posts) than entire lemmy if everyone of 35k users were like you - 3 posts a year.
just for the record - my accounts
Your accounts? Plural? Can you share which ones are your other accounts? I’d like to follow them for the quality and carefully curated content you post
Nice try, Reddit agent. 😂 I’m not handing you the whole network map that easily.
If all 35,000 MAU posted at your rate
But they don’t, so who gives a shit? Did you already forget your own stat that you took from a completely different site?
just for the record - my accounts post more daily (>300 posts) than entire lemmy if everyone of 35k users were like you - 3 posts a year.
Is that supposed to be a good thing??
Reddit barely survives
Citation needed???
3 posts/year
3 posts a year.
3 posts in 11 months
Wow, say it again, maybe that’ll help you. Say it 300 more times.
my accounts post more daily (>300 posts)
Can’t believe you’re outing how badly you’re spamming Lemmy like it’s a good thing.
You’re making the place worse, and all you can keep doing is bragging about how much you spam.
You keep using “spam” to mean “more content than I personally like.”
300 posts across an entire federated network is nothing. A single large subreddit can do that in an hour.
Spam is indiscriminate garbage. Mine is filtered for relevance, score, freshness, duplicates, community rules, and quality.
And yes, your 3 posts in 11 months matters when you’re lecturing people who actually supply the posts you spend your time commenting on.
spam
I’m not posting Viagra ads, crypto scams, affiliate links, or promoting my own shit. I’m posting relevant content that was already highly upvoted by real people, then filtering it again for freshness, duplicates, relevance, and community rules.
Call it automated. Call it reposting. Call it too much for your personal feed.
But “content I don’t want to see” isn’t the definition of spam.
Exactly. Reddit barely survives with that ratio because the tiny percentage who post generate enough content for everyone else.
That’s literally my point.
You have 3 posts in 11 months and you’re telling someone else to post once a day. If everyone contributed at your rate, there’d be almost nothing here to comment on.
Reddit has millions of users, so 1% is enormous. Lemmy has ~35k MAU. Its 1% is tiny.
You can’t copy Reddit’s participation ratio while missing Reddit’s scale and expect the same result.
Thanks for sharing!
I think there are three systemic issues that we can see here.
- Centralization
As repeated again and again in many contexts, high level of centralization leads to instance admins having too much power over the whole space.
As things stand, if you are banned from lemmy.world, no matter what instance you are on, you might as well start over, as you’ll never reach the majority of Lemmy audience. Admins protect the instance, as they should, but end up taking Lemmy with them.
This is something we can influence. If you make a new account, don’t open it on lemmy.world. You’ll still have full access to it, but you’ll also help decentralize the space. You can also find instances with moderating policies better fitting your views - from essentially zero moderation (like lemmy.today the OP and me both come from, but there are other such instances too) to strict moderation based on various principles.
- Permanent bans
Lemmy is very black-and-white when it comes to bans. Sometimes, a temporary ban or a warning could suffice, without permanently cutting someone out of the community or instance.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of problem that must be solved on the development side, and that’s something I would suggest for !nutomic@lemmy.ml
Lack of proper ways to mark botswhoops, they do exist. But make it more visible!
There must be a good standardized way to mark and filter bot content, so that those who don’t want to see it do not see it (again, a suggestion to !nutomic@lemmy.ml and other Lemmy contributors)Until then, it could be reasonable to move bot content to separate instances and make respective communities there so that users could easily choose whether they want to see bot content or not.That said, bot owners must take full responsibility for their bots and the way they may breach the community rules when posting. Moderating bot posts is a major added burden, and while we have a small amount of posters, we have even less moderators and admins. Let’s respect each other, shall we?The issue is that I’m not a bot and I’m not marking account as a bot because I’m not a bot.
Bans and moderation histories should be private as all they do is used as a justification for further bans
If sanitation would tick this box in their settings then all their problems would go away:
But they won’t, because that would let people filter them out.
I’m not a bot. Again with this humanity relitigation, on and on and on.
Lemmy just isn’t what you think it is. The monthly user count doesn’t matter. If people wanted reddit content they would just go to Reddit. Lemmy is a replacement for the small scale human authored forums of the 2000s. Reddit killed them with embrace, extend, extinguish. Lemmy isn’t a replacement for Reddit, it is a replacement for the thing Reddit extinguished.
I don’t care about reddit posts and traditional social media. If I did I would just use that. I use reddit to moderate and participate in my small community with a few posts a week and I think it is going well.
Wow. I really hate reposts and cross-posts, and I block the accounts that make them.
I sort of thought I was alone in that, figured other people must enjoy that crap.
I am amazed to see my exact viewpoint expressed here a couple hundred times over.As to the point the post makes, I’m new to moderation, and I read the post because that seemed like a subject I should review.
The post looks like useless hand wringing to me.I don’t see anything worth concern with lemmy moderation.
I’ve pissed off a couple mods in my time on lemmy and gotten banned. Every one of them was a community I have disagreements with, and its fine that we don’t talk.
I don’t feel I have ever been treated unfairly. In fact, the only mod action I ever disagreed with on lemmy was reversed after I discussed it with him on YPTB.I love this fantasy that Lemmy is powered by 35,000 investigative journalists, war correspondents, documentary filmmakers, and artisanal meme craftsmen creating fresh OC around the clock. 😂
My brother in federation, almost everything here (99.99%) came from somewhere else.
It’s a link aggregator. We find shit on the internet, post it here, and argue underneath it.
You can hate reposts. Totally fair. But let’s not pretend we’re protecting the Library of Alexandria from Reddit screenshots.
Dumping thousands of posts from billionaire-owned social media onto Piefed/Lemmy isn’t doing anything helpful.
If I wanted to see feeds full of that I’d be on Twitter, Reddit and the other garbage sources you pull your reposts from.
you get this content to attract users to lemmy, but then you can feed them all natural non-corporate controlled lemmy weird communist propaganda too. everybody wins (except corporations who loses a lot)
It’s garbage low effort ai powered reposts.
No one wins.
If reddit, Facebook and x bleed cash and users - hell yes people win.
You are not doing that you’re just being annoying here.
I am a reddit refugee just showed up today. Thanks for this information (Quadruple moderation is killing Lemmy) as it will be my last post ever. I came for the fun, left for the moderation… well at least I’ll still be able to view without having to be logged in.
Hey I’m trying to change that.
Bye totally real account that is definitely not OPs alt.
Believe it or not it’s not. There is a proof many people create accounts, but lack of content drives them off.openly available lemmy stats numbers confirm this
Aren’t you just searching for 4chan?
Consent should matter though?
Also, a poster of OC is a “content creator”, but just offering links isn’t really “creating” anything really, just spreading it around?
Kudos for trying to help. If you listen first before speaking then you may find your messages received better.
If you start your own instance, then no mods or admins can stop you from posting whatever you want. Even CSAM.
Though consent really should matter, and others could defederate from your instance if they wanted.
Mods are never going to change. Think what you could do differently to enjoy your time here better, and encourage people to like your posts more. e.g. label your account as a bot, and/or make a separate alt account for your human interactions, to allow people to recognize (and even block) based on the bot label if they want to? A bot that is properly labeled is no issue at all, it’s the lack of transparency that gets people upset when it seems one way and then they get disappointed at finding that it is something else. If you are empathetic to others’ sensitivities then obviously you would be better received? It’s more work for you, but far less than the cumulative efforts of all people who end up having to catch you individually.
You have a right to speak, but nobody owes you a platform, nor should others be forced to listen. The consent of the governed should matter! And it will, one way or another.
Flooding “Lemmy” with reposts from Reddit will make “Lemmy” look like a “tardy clone of Reddit with less discussion”. Why stick with a repost platform if you can get the same content but more and earlier with Reddit? New Reddit frontend still remains browsable without login (maybe with some irritation, but anyway).
One has to act differently. To get to the sources first (or, at least before Reddit, at least sometimes). RSS feeds of publications (already worked on in PieFed), microblogging support: compatibility with Mastodon (available on MBin and now on PieFed), already existing bot comms reposting from Hacker News and Lobste.rs (both these sites have no subs and crossposting to a comm may have sense…), reposting e.g. art from Mastodon, Bluesky, cara.app…
I actually agree with most of that. Those are good ideas. Do all of them.
Pull from RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, Hacker News, Lobsters, original sources, and Reddit. These aren’t mutually exclusive.
Where I disagree is treating Reddit as uniquely contaminated. If Reddit happens to surface a great article, meme, video, or discussion before we find it elsewhere, I don’t see why Lemmy should refuse it on principle.
And the goal isn’t to permanently make Lemmy a delayed Reddit feed. It’s to bootstrap communities while building exactly the ecosystem you’re describing.
Eventually I’d love for the flow to reverse: interesting stuff originates on Lemmy and gets reposted to Reddit.
Good post. Very true.
The answer is for new instances with set moderation rules promised to be equally enforced, with a set of appeals ending in a jury trial of members of that instance for a moderation decision.
The current feudal nature of lemmy makes it just as policed as reddit, just instead of protecting the rich oligarchs it’s often bad faith arguments trying to misunderstand on purpose to get someone banned. Or just for going against majority opinion. In a couple cases because world news related instances hire zionist moderators.
You very obviously used Gen AI to write this. People are here to interact with people, not bots. Otherwise we’d be on Reddit.
I’m a human using a tool. The argument is mine, the opinion is mine, and I’m right here responding to you.
Then use your own words and not words generated by a machine.
I dont have that might time to spend - its the same on and on and on.
It’s really just that easy.
You can reply to replies. You don’t need multiple top-level comments.
After blocking I didn’t have access to any of the leaf discussion nodes. I suppose I could have replied to myself. Terribly sorry.
feeling is mutual
Ah the tired old thing we need the fediverese like x.
Mastodon tried to do it. now you with lemmy.
people on fediverse doesn’t want cross posted stuff. They want stuff from actual people and those poster interacting with the post.
This moderation you are upset about isn’t as much of a problem.
You are trying to speed run reddit here and it isn’t going to work. Just work with what lemmy offers and eventually people will come but it is going to take time.
But “eventually people will come” is exactly the assumption I’m challenging.
Lemmy has been around for years. Hundreds of thousands of accounts have been registered, yet MAU is still tiny and countless communities are barely active. At what point does “just give it time” stop being a strategy?
And again, who is “people on the Fediverse”? The people who are still here? Of course the current users disproportionately like the current culture. The people who tried it and left aren’t here to tell you what they wanted and thats 95% of users - they are not here anymore
I’m not trying to speedrun Reddit. I’m trying to solve a very basic chicken-and-egg problem: people want human conversations, but conversations need something to start them.
If organic posting alone isn’t producing enough of that, I don’t see anything sacred about waiting another five years and hoping it suddenly does.
what chicken and egg problem. we have the eggs we are just waiting on them to hatch.
You talk about how many accounts are here like some techbro that wants to line go up. It isn’t going to happen. It took linux years to get where for people to see as a solution for their everyday computer and still more edge cases that need to be solve.
you can’t solve everything by cloning a product, you been seen as an inferior especially if you cross post stuff from another social network.
organic is the only way to get things working to attract people that is the unfortunate about these things.
The Linux analogy proves my point. Linux didn’t sit around waiting for the eggs to hatch. People identified barriers and aggressively fixed them.
Drivers sucked? Fix them. Gaming sucked? Build Proton. Installation sucked? Make it easier.
And let’s not pretend Linux grew purely “organically.” Billions of dollars and enormous amounts of engineering have been poured into Linux by IBM, Red Hat, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Valve, and plenty of other corporations.
Lemmy has empty communities and poor retention. So fix the problems.
“Organic is the only way” isn’t a law of nature. It’s a strategy. And after years of stagnant MAU, we’re allowed to question whether that strategy is working.
I don’t want line-go-up. I want critical mass so communities aren’t fucking empty.
Still took linux years. You sound like it needs to happen yesterday.
Cross posts isn’t the answer. People see that as an dead community.
I think you’re completely confusing the barriers to entry.
Linux had to overcome hardware compatibility, drivers, software availability, installation complexity, gaming support, OEM deals, and decades of Windows dominance. And even after billions in corporate investment, desktop Linux still isn’t mainstream.
Lemmy is a fucking website. Click a link, make an account, start using it. The barrier isn’t remotely comparable.
Getting Lemmy from 35k MAU to meaningful critical mass should be infinitely easier than getting people to replace their entire operating system.
And an empty community looks a hell of a lot more dead to me than one with relevant posts waiting for people to discuss them.
Took years
A community with just post and only one person posting everyday is more dead than an empty one
You’re ignoring the 99% of people who consume far more than they create.
An empty community gives them nothing. A community with one person consistently posting relevant content gives lurkers something to read, vote on, and eventually comment on.
Will one poster make a thriving community? Obviously not. But you need something there before the other 99% have anything to engage with.
“Keep it empty until organic posters magically arrive” is how communities stay empty.
