Weird racist posts from dank memes keeps showing up in my feed. Are we doing anything to prevent becoming Voat 2.0? We’re really concerned about Threads and that’s a big unknown. Weird racists already destroyed the last Reddit escape are we concerned about that? Like are we going to make a policy of defederating hate groups?
I’m pretty confident this community is using fake accounts since every post starts at ~20 and then gets down voted after it’s been forced into a bunch of people’s feed.
If not that’s fine I guess but does anyone have a suggestion for somewhere that will?
The reason I think there needs to be some kind of federation/consortium/whatever is because it’s a huge load on individual server admins to have to make determinations about which servers to federate with and which not to. That, plus maintaining their server, finding some way to pay for it, fighting spam/abuse/etc, is a lot or work. Ultimately, unless there’s some kind of formal process most servers are just going to end up copying what the big instances do, which centralises power a bit too much for me.
I think the situation of a server admin here, is not that different from the situation of a subreddit moderator, back on the other site.
With the big difference that there is no central instance, which has a final say over things: On reddit the mods of big subs arguably do a lot of similar work. In exchange for having to host and pay for a server, the instance admins here get additional powers which make things easier to manage.
And yes, of course a lot of servers will end up copying what big instances do. But they don’t have to. That’s the critical difference.
While on good old reddit as a mod, you often just don’t have the power to do what you want to do: If you want to get rid of that annoying racist Trump community and its members? You are out of luck, because reddit admins like their traffic. And on the other hand, reddit mods will ultimately have no choice but do what the admins decree, without any recourse whatsoever. We are seeing that now: “You will not label your sub NSFW! If you do, we will boot you, and take over your community!”
Instancing solves those two flaws quite well, because the option to do something else remains open.