The most difficult parts of moderating on Reddit aren’t the trolls or spammers or even the rule-breakers, it’s identifying the accounts who intentionally walk the line of what’s appropriate.

IMO only a human moderator can recognize when someone is being a complete asshole but “doing it politely”, or trying to push an agenda or generally behaving inauthentically, because human moderators are (in theory) members of the community themselves and have an interest in that community being enjoyable to be a part of.

Humans are messy, and finding the right balance of mess to keep things interesting without making a place overwhelming to newcomers is a fine balance to strike that I just don’t believe an AI can do on it’s own.

I will be dead in the cold cold ground before I ever type “/s”

I know it sounds insane but I swear to god BlueSky has astroturfing accounts on Lemmy. Every conversation (including yours here) about BlueSky is met with countless Sealions either saying it “will be federated soon” or asking “Why does federation matter?”

Everything now is rage-bait designed to get more clicks

IMO the greatest strength of the Fediverse is the increased number of mods and admins looking at everything. Don’t want rage bait? Join an instance that has rules against it.

Additional PSA to admins not running a “universal free speech” instance- if you see someone someone being obnoxious it’s probably annoying your users just as much as is is you. Don’t put the onus fully on users to curate their experience. The Fediverse needs our adults in the room!

It doesn’t meet the definition of “developing nation” either.

To be clear- this is just your personal “vibe” and not an actual fact, because the term “third world country” literally means a country that is not aligned with the US or USSR. If you meant “developing nation” that term also has a definition the US does not meet.

Is this just your vibes or do you have a source? Because I just checked the website of the organization this article is referencing and it says no such thing.

First of all, that’s not what “Economic Freedom” means in the context of democracy, but more importantly “economic freedom” is not even a factor in the methodology used by the group this article is citing.

Healthy for Lemmy, totally catastrophic for Pixelfed.

I know this comment is satire (well done… I think) but I want you to it hurt me deep in my bones.

I’m clearly not paying enough for a therapist.

Then moderators make many stupid rules to try to increase quality and overmoderation takes hold

This is so true. One of the best decisions I made during my tenure as mod of /r/StarTrek was changing the rules to be spirt-based instead of language-based. People will literally try to lawyer their way around the language of any rule, and it leads to mod burnout when they are getting drawn into rules-debates when it’s obvious the person is just trying to get around the spirit of the community’s purpose.

For example we had a rule that was literally just “be nice”. There’s no wriggling around that because it’s not some legal text. If someone is ““concerned”” about a request to “be nice” or “be honest”, they are not someone we wanted to be around anyway. These are discussion communities, not civil society, not everyone has a right to participate in every single one of them.

As you said the beauty of the fediverse is that each instance can have it’s own preferred method of discussion.

My least favorite fun fact is that Reddit forced the KiA mod to reopen after they went private calling it a “cancer”.

I was a mod at the time and Reddit always told us we had an extreme degree of editorial independence (hence the justification for allowing r/jailbait, /greatawakening, r/coontown etc) but that event made me consider for the first time that exposing normies to propaganda might not just be a side-effect, but a core function of the company.

Which ones? Searched and couldn’t find anything. This MotleyFool article is over 4 years old when COVID was still raging, hardly “recent”.

Urban dictionary says it’s a term that refers to when an undercover government agent fails to blend in with whoever they’re trying to blend in with.

Absolutely, if you’re seeing propaganda, it’s because it’s allowed on that instance. But the presence of propaganda has nothing to do if an account is an LLM or not.

Moderation on the Feviderse is different than on commercial platforms because it’s context-dependent instead of rules-dependent. That means that a user accout (bot or otherwise) that does not contribute to the spirit of a community will not be welcomed.

There is largely no incentive to run an LLM that is a constructive member of a community, bots are built to push an agenda, product, or exhibit generally disruptive behavior. Those things are unwelcome in spaces built for discussion. So mods/admins don’t need to know “how to identify a bot”, they need to know "how to identify unwanted behavior".

I don’t get why people are so interested in the fediverse.

Because Mastodon is Twitter without the possibility of an Elon Musk and Lemmy/Piefed is Reddit without the possibility of a Steve Huffman. You clearly feel that you can do better than the collective efforts of the ActivityPub devs so I am rooting for you!

“Lemmy” is actually not a platform like Reddit, it’s software and the network of instances running that software is decentralized (Lemmy uses the ActivityPub protocol) meaning each instance is operated by a different person (or group). There are also other similar softwares like Piefed and mBin that work pretty well with Lemmy. That is all to say that if an Admin or Mod is “getting fascisty” you can block that instance, join another, or even create your own. That’s the beauty of ActivityPub!

The only thing I’m aware of that they do even remotely better than anyone else is privacy.

Where did you hear this? Its my understanding that they are one of the worst when it comes to privacy.