On the Lemmy.ml posting warning
On the Lemmy.ml posting warning
I noticed responding to posts in communities hosted at lemmy.ml gives the following warning:
This post is hosted on lemmy.ml which will ban you for saying anything negative about China, Russia or Putin. Tread carefully.
While I see where this is coming from and I agree with the general sentiment, I'm not sure it's a great idea to include such a message. I basically read it as an invitation to be off-topic and to derail conversations in order to annoy the admins. While it comes from a point of good intentions, it can be disheartening for the people running communities on Lemmy.ml to receive comments about Russia from users basically trying to get banned, in communities that has nothing to do with this issue.
It's unfortunate, but a lot of valuable older communities are still hosted on lemmy.ml, and I think PieFed users should be encouraged to be constructive and on-topic users there as they should be everywhere else.
An alternative suggestion: Maybe it could be useful to remind people which community they are posting in? Like, "This community is dedicated to renewable energy. Please keep this in mind when contributing to the discussion". Then again, that would be a mess to implement in a good way.
I agree that it feels misplaced for "innocent" communities like [email protected] .
Ok, I've changed how this works, as discussed. Now only one lemmy.ml community has a warning.
Thanks to cabbage for starting this discussion to resolve it.
Is this a piefed feature? To add warnings about other instances?
It's an experimental feature. If you post on Beehaw it shows a reminder that Beehaw has a stricter code of conduct than most instances, and remind you to be nice.
PieFed is also developed specifically to be unappealing to tankies and fascists, which I think is generally wise, but of course certain measures might be more successful than others. :)
PieFed is also developed specifically to be unappealing to tankies and fascists,
I like you
Yeah.
Often people will not be aware of the rules a community has (they don't read the sidebar or are on mobile where there sidebar is hard to find) OR, as in the case of [email protected], the rules are written deceptively and there are many unwritten rules. Having an additional message that is front and center above the 'compose a comment' input field is an attempt to deal with that.
We need alternatives to defederation which is too extreme and total. Mastodon has muting and silencing, for example. I'd like to figure out whatever the threadiverse equivalent of that is - some way to allow access to those who want it while steering naive users away from places where they're going to have a bad time.
An idea that has been spinning in my head a bit is to allow people to subscribe to different levels of moderation. Basically allowing users to choose a "curated", "moderate", or "liberal" experience.
Curated: Whitelist of servers rather than blacklist. Well-moderated instances only.
Moderate: Blacklist rather than whitelist, but blocking annoying instances like Lemmygrad and Hexbear. Aiming at a wide yet enjoyable experience.
Liberal: Blacklist, but only blocking instances that allow (or are incapable of handling) content that goes against the content policy.
It's probably more difficult to implement than what it's worth. What I like about it however is that it would make the whole process of content curation much more transparent. Right now it's often not so clear to people signing up to an instance what kind of moderation policy they will be signing up for. At least this would allow the user some agency even after sign-up.
I agree this feature could do with a lot more finesse. Currently it is hardcoded to show on every lemmy.ml community, which is clumsy and over-powered. I'd like features that let the instance admin specify custom messages for any instance and any community.
How this feature is used is then up to the instance admin. They might choose not to have any messages.
With my instance admin hat on - I'd definitely keep this message on [email protected] as that is the one which regularly caused bewildered posts by people wondering why they were banned. All other communities on that instance seem relatively benign and don't really need a warning.
I'll wait a few more hours to gather more feedback and then make a ticket for this.
Yeah, I absolutely agree lemmy.ml has no business hosting a large worldnews community without proper warning.
I'm not sure if it's necessarily bad. There is precedent for unconventional moderation practices on lemmy.ml and I'd like to see some people to move away from the large communities there and their moderators.
I'd like a more scientific approach. Implement that feature and then see if it contributes to a healthier discussion or has negative side-effects. At this point it's just speculation and we can't tell if it helps or attracts trolls.
What about a feature to recommend a better community than whats offered on lemmy.ml. "Have you considered joining [email protected]?"
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