Quadruple moderation is killing Lemmy. It’s a gift to Reddit
There’s a rule about online communities I want people here to understand: the 90-9-1 rule.
Roughly 90% lurk, 9% comment, and 1% create.
Additionally - lemmy monthly active users is stangant at about 35k monthly active and not improving:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
When I first got to Lemmy, I had trouble finding enough content I was interested in even commenting on. So I figured: why complain about the lack of content when one can start posting it myself?
That’s why I post so much.
If people don’t post, most Lemmy communities simply don’t have enough creators to sustain themselves. You need posts before lurkers can lurk, commenters can comment, and some of those people eventually become creators themselves.
I’m not posting just to flood Lemmy. I’m trying to help solve one of Lemmy’s biggest problems: not enough content creators.
And frankly, doing that has been a nightmare.
Lemmy has a quadruple-moderation problem
Every active content creator has to survive four layers:
- Community moderators can remove your posts or ban you from the community.
- Your home-instance admins can ban your entire account.
- Receiving-instance admins can block/ban you for everyone on their instance, even though you don’t belong to it.
- Public moderation history means those decisions follow you. One moderator’s decision can influence another and snowball into more moderation.
For prolific content creators, that’s brutal.
I’ve had multiple accounts banned over one or two posts that somebody didn’t like. Months of posting, comments, engagement and contributions can effectively disappear from a community because of a couple of moderation decisions.
And the more you contribute, the worse the odds become. If you make hundreds or thousands of posts, eventually you’re going to post something that one moderator somewhere doesn’t like.
You don’t need one moderation team to tolerate you. You need multiple independent moderators and admins, across multiple servers, to remain aligned indefinitely.
There’s almost no cost to deleting a creator
This is another major difference from Reddit.
There is generally no financial investment in a Lemmy community’s content. A volunteer moderator can ban someone who contributed months of posts and comments and lose all of that person’s past and future contributions without losing revenue, salary or investment. Did you know all creator posts are wiped out from lemmy after account banned?
The creator paid the cost in time.
The community loses the content.
The users lose something to read and discuss.
And the moderator who pushed the button may personally lose essentially nothing.
So who benefits from making prolific content creation this difficult?
Because it certainly isn’t Lemmy.
And this creates an enormous attack surface
I genuinely have trouble believing that everyone complaining about prolific posters simply doesn’t understand this dynamic. At some point I have to question whether some of it is deliberate.
If I were Reddit and wanted to undermine a federated competitor, this is exactly where I’d attack it: its content creators.
You don’t need to hack Lemmy. You don’t need to DDoS instances. You don’t need to take anything offline.
Lemmy already provides the mechanism.
Report prolific contributors. Call their posting “spam.” accuse them of being bots. Point moderators toward their public moderation histories. Get one account banned somewhere, then let that decision influence moderators elsewhere.
Eventually the creator gets tired of fighting and leaves.
I’m not claiming I have proof Reddit is doing this. I’m saying Lemmy’s architecture makes this kind of subversion ridiculously easy, and Reddit would be an obvious beneficiary.
Reddit doesn’t have this same federated quadruple-jeopardy problem. You’re primarily dealing with the moderation of the subreddit you’re contributing to.
Lemmy desperately needs more people creating content, yet its moderation structure makes life progressively harder for the people who create the most of it.
At some point we should be asking:
Who actually benefits from that?
A plea to admins: protect your creators ban reddit agents instead
Before banning someone, look at who is contributing and who is reporting.
If an account with zero posts in years reports someone who has contributed hundreds of posts, don’t treat those two users as equally valuable to the health of the community.
That doesn’t put creators above the rules. Remove bad posts. Warn people. Moderate proportionally.
But stop throwing away months of content and future contributions over one or two posts someone disliked.
Creating content takes time. Reporting takes seconds.
Protect the people actually building your communities.
edit: I am reposting from reddit - there is no rules against that. its actually great thing for majority of lemmy users!
This reposting tool is open source - i’ve never been hiding the fact im reposting from reddit.
people get only high quality pre-dozed, pre-moderated content.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-deep-lighthouse/
I think more people should be using similar tools and populate lemmy with content. - htis is the only way to move that 35k mau number and creat conditions for more OC on lemmy
edit 2 " but we dont want content" argument.
The fuck you dont. who the fuck is we?
And this is why I don’t buy the argument that the people still here represent what users want.
Look at the numbers.
- Fediverse: ~14 million registered, ~1.17 million MAU.
- Lemmy: ~756,000 registered, ~35,000 MAU.
Lemmy has had three quarters of a million accounts created and only about 4.6% of that number is active monthly.
Obviously that doesn’t mean 95% were all regular users who quit. But it does tell us something important: the people currently active are a tiny, self-selected fraction of everyone who has tried this platform.
So when 30 existing users say “WE don’t want more content,” you’re hearing from the people the current system successfully retained. You’re not hearing from the enormous number of people who tried Lemmy and aren’t here anymore.
Maybe instead of assuming the remaining users have figured out what Lemmy should be, we should be asking why so many people tried it and didn’t stick around.
As a member of the admin channels, this seems to be the most loathed part about your account. Reddit is a hatred echo chamber for the fediverse, second only to AI. While you view it as a positive element, nearly everyone else here left reddit and take offense to it’s posts following them. They view your participation to be bot-like behavior and that’s why you’re seeing so much pushback to your accounts in particular. I can promise you that a normal user that isn’t aggregating reddit content for the fediverse is not sharing your moderation and banning experience.
For a normal user, the gauntlet is much different. At least on the .zip domains, our policy is to not interfere with reports that don’t have a user or community that belongs to our instance unless it’s something requiring fast action like csam or doxxing, etc. We leave the rest to the mods and admins that the community belongs to.
Your account doesn’t offend me and I appreciate your participation but I will say that I’ve blocked you on my browsing account since I browse New/All and I don’t enjoy seeing what amounts to an overwhelming feed of reddit posts.
TL;DR: You’re using the fediverse in way that the majority of the platform feels it wasn’t designed for so you’re going to continue seeing the same retaliatory behaviors for as long as you continue to participate in that manner.
I appreciate the explanation, and honestly this “we dont want to be reddit” idea was brought up several times.
But I think there’s a fundamental disagreement here: not everyone shares your idea of what Lemmy should be. The existing 35k-ish MAU shouldn’t get to permanently define what Lemmy is allowed to become.
If the current philosophy were working, we’d see it in the results. Instead, Lemmy’s active user base has largely stagnated, and enormous numbers of communities are empty or get a couple of posts a week. Whatever we’re doing now isn’t producing meaningful growth.
And “we left Reddit” doesn’t necessarily mean “we never want to see anything that appeared on Reddit.” I left Reddit too. I wanted an alternative platform, not an alternative universe where interesting links, memes, news and discussions become contaminated because somebody also posted them on Reddit.
If my volume overwhelms New/All, that’s completely fair criticism. That’s something we can solve with posting limits, better filtering, community subscriptions, blocks, or better tooling.
But “the existing users don’t like this, therefore this isn’t what the Fediverse is for” becomes circular. The people who don’t like the existing culture may simply leave, so naturally the remaining population increasingly reflects that culture.
I’m trying a different approach because I want Lemmy to actually grow beyond its current niche. If most communities are empty and the active-user count isn’t meaningfully growing, I don’t think we should treat the status quo as proof that we’ve already figured out what users want.
And now you’re subjecting us to AI slop comments? Fuck all the way out of here with that shit. Use your own goddamn brain.
argue the points if you can.
When you make a point, I will. I’m not going to respond to slop.
I sign off on everything that was said.
I completely agree with you but until the community as a whole swings more toward wanting to feel like a Reddit part deux but without the algorithms, you’re going continue seeing this pushback and fighting an uphill battle. I wasn’t condoning the way your accounts are being treated. Lemmy and Piefed have a fairly robust blocking and filtering system. Your aggregation doesn’t affect my use of the platform at all because I’m able to hide it and I feel that’s enough protection, I don’t want to see your accounts reprimanded for behaving in a way that’s not breaking any rules that I can find.ike I said, I’m glad you’re here, regardless of whether I benefit from your posts or not. We need the variety to protect from these polarizing extremist mentalities towards behavior that doesn’t really effect us personally at all.
That being said, I am ok with stagnant growth metrics but I do understand that many users are not ok with that and desire for it’s popularity to explode. If it were ever to become as popular as reddit, I’m sure I would be looking for the next niche platform because I know in my heart that you can’t see that kind of popularity without the negative aspects that come along with it.
“Why should I change it? He’s the one that sucks.”
New users shouldn’t have to start their experience by blocking a bunch of accounts.
They don’t. As I said, I browse New/All and it’s a niche platform. I’ve been a new user, and as very few people browse the way I do, for the most common method of browsing, simply creating your sub list and blocking a very few accounts that don’t align with your desirable feed is more than enough effort to keep from seeing anything you don’t want to.