Instance Protectionism in the Threadiverse happens because of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (protecting one's own instance is currently more sensible than increasing overall discussion quality)
Instance Protectionism in the Threadiverse happens because of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (protecting one's own instance is currently more sensible than increasing overall discussion quality)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5110168
As a moderator of a Lemmy instance, you currently have two options to take: pushing users first to your local content or content from all instances you federate with. These options come with the costs seen in the picture. The moderator of another instance has the same choice. However, in this scenario, they will both always switch to promoting the local-feed. I don't want to say its wrong - it's just the most sensible way to act on Lemmy currently. However, if everybody does it, it is bad for the overall discussion quality of the Threadiverse.
Its a classical prisoner's dilemma from game theory, which sometimes happen in society, for example with supply shortage during lockdowns. A way to solve it is by making action B more positive and option A more negative. This would lead to more moderators choosing Action B over A.
Mastodon solved this with an Explore-Feed, which consolidates the Local- and All-Feed. I think this could also be a solution for Lemmy. It would result in less engagement decrease AND an overall positive effect on discussion quality.
Additionally, a general acknowledgement that instance protectionism is a problem and should be avoided could help to make A more negative. In other words: increasing the pressure by the community. This would put a negative social effect on option A. So: start talking about it with your moderators.
Do you think these two measure would do (additionally to more powerful moderation tools, which would only enable a working explore-feed in the first place)? Is this a problem on other services on the Fediverse too (at least Mastodon seems to have handled it quite well)?
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You just claim that this "decreases discussion quality". How do you justify that claim? It is clearly not self-evident and I would claim the exact opposite.
The ”global town-square” as some people like to call the by-gone era of social media is based on this IMHO false idea that the more interconnection the better the " discussion quality" or what ever you like to use as your metric for "better".
But I think Twitter even before the Elon induced melt down has pretty well disproven this idea, as such " global town-squares" seem to rather devolve into low quality shouting matches and are easily manipulated into outrage ("engagement") maximizing hell-sites.
Let's not try to turn Lemmy into another one of those please.
The ”global town-square”
I don't want that. I stand with the idea of federation. You would have that with one big instance on which everything happens but I'm not for that.
But if instances only push their users toward their own content, user engagment will center around instances. There are many problems to that, which negatively impact discussion quality: small instances don't work because no one sees their stuff, therefore they eventually shut down. Also, filter bubbles develop, users don't see content from other instances, which they might be interested in and comment on. So yes, I think a better distribution over the federated instances of an instance is healthy for the threadiverse.
I don't agree with you that small instances lead to poorer quality, if anything there's a better sence of community in a small forum.
I'd rather have more in common with old style unfederated forums than big social media.
In my experience, the problem with small instances isn't content quality or community, it's moderator/administrator transparency and competency.
What is the difference between one instance with an "all" feed and multiple instances with the same "all" feed?
I don't agree with your assessment of problems with small instances. A healthy federation is exactly what makes small instances viable, compared to non-federated small forums. Small instances are still easily discoverable by searching for their communities or getting explicit recommendations by other (human) users.
Mixing their communities into an single "all" feed, or worse merging them in "multi-reddits" is what kills them as they loose their unique character.