Not going to lie, I got banned so I made my own World News Community. This community differs because there’s no silly bot, I’ll happily listen to the communities voice, and we’re a bit more lax on rules policing.
Feel free to come on by and comment. I would love to foster a News community that’s active in discussion.
Good points. I also think the fediverse and Lemmy, in particular, could be attractive to certain bad actors in terms of misinformation and astroturfing, and vote manipulation would certainly help with that. I think some people think we’re safer here from that because of smaller size, etc. - but I think Lemmy users are more likely to be willing to engage (as we wouldn’t be here without willing to take leave of places like Reddit), and influencing the conversations on Lemmy could be a significant boost to someone looking to share misinformation or make a difference in very tight elections.
On the whole, I think that’s one of the reasons Lemmy needs better built-in moderation tools than what might otherwise be thought appropriate based on its size. And an overall maturity of the platform to protect against that kind of manipulation.
It’s very obvious that someone is doing deliberate astroturfing on Lemmy. How much is an open question, but some amount of it is definitely happening.
The open question, to me, is why the .world moderation team seems so totally uninterested in dealing with the topic. For example, they’re happy for UniversalMonk to spam for Jill Stein in a way that openly violates the rules, that almost every single member of the community is against, and that objectively makes the community worse. Why that is happening is a baffling and interesting question to me.
I agree. In terms of the .world mods and some of the specific cases you mentioned, I think at least part of the problem is that they are often looking at stuff at a per-comment or per-post basis and sometimes missing more holistic issues.
My guess is that a good portion of that comes down to the quality and breadth (or lack thereof) of the Lemmy built-in moderation tools. Combined with volunteer moderation and a presidential election year in the US, and I’m sure the moderation load is close to overwhelming and they don’t really have the tools they need to be more sophisticated or efficient about it. Generally I’ve actually been impressed with a lot of the work they do, though there have been obvious missteps too.
Everyone talks about Lemmy needing to grow in terms of users and activity, but without better moderation tools and likely some core framework changes, I think that would be a disaster. We have all the same complexities of some place like Reddit, but with the addition of different instances all with different rules, etc (not to mention different approaches to moderation).
I completely agree. I have a whole mini-essay that I’ve been meaning to write about this, about problems of incentives and social contracts on Lemmy-style servers in the fediverse that I think lead to a lot of these issues that keep cropping up.