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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Seems baked into the cake a bit. I think one solution is to allow user/ sublemmy migration.
But is that technically possible? I imagine it would be pretty tough migrating all that data ...
Basic account information and subscriptions are easy to migrate and support for it (similar to Mastodon) will likely come sooner or later to Lemmy. And there are already 3rd party scripts to help with that.
Migrating "all data" is unlikely to happen, as it makes little sense to migrate isolated posts in a discussion, and for legal and ethical reasons you can't migrate other people's posts or full communities as those are not yours and people participating only consented into sharing them on that specific community on that specific server (because it is for example based in the EU where better data protection applies).
Interesting, I hadn't thought about the ethical and data protection issues for this problem before.
Could linking of communities solve it? You close a community, open it on another instance and link the two?
I'm honestly on the side of "This is fediverse 1.0" right now. Its obvious to me that there are some fundamental issues with the design of both activity hub and lemmy that aren't clearly fixable in the current version of things. I also think that its 'somewhat' fine. I think of this as an opportunity to find those pinch points and hot spots, patch and glue in fixes, and then when its time for activity hub "2.0" or whatever, we can resolve them at a design level. Fixing the issues around discovery, toxic engagement, de-federation; they are tough issues to solve for and its clear that to some extent, the design of the system is to blame. However, its not worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. We should stick with the current system for as long as it take before it becomes very uncomfortable, mainly to continue to find issues and blemmishes. This will heavily inform "the next big thing" that comes from the fediverse.
Basically, do nothing other than have discussions like these. Collect the notes, have informed conversations, and maybe experiment a bit on fixes. But don't worry about getting it all perfect and right. Just try. We can incorporate the good ideas into a new version down the line.
I like that idea