I unfollowed Alec on Fedi because every other post would be him complaining about his interactions on there. Reply guys. Trolls. Lack of algorithms which raise some of the better comments out of the drek. Insufficient moderation. Etc. This got boring and depressing to read about honestly.

However I think he’s totally right. Mastodon/Fedi works well for certain kinds of people. People with limited engagement, people posting mostly uncontroversial things, and perhaps people who just don’t give a shit. But for high-visibility folks like Alec the old-school unfiltered discourse seems really uncomfortable.

It has little to do with federation itself, I think. But if Mastodon ever added the choice for users to enable “modern social media algorithms” for their view of their feed I suspect it would work a lot better for many people.

I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works on Lemmy. For some reason “block” here is really what “mute” is everywhere else on fedi.

Most large instances have a support community. That seems like the suitable place to raise a moderation issue with specific a community on the instance.

Yeah Lemmy, besides news and technology, is very quiet and I think it suffers from having communities fractured between instances, so niche interests get even less traffic than they would on Reddit. But my Mastodon feed is always busy and interesting. If it isn’t you’re not following the right people yet. I recommend some hashtag searches for things you’re interested in.

Moderation tools on Lemmy are supposedly seriously lacking. Defederation may sometimes be the only practical option even if it’s not ideal.

The larger the group of people gets, the more likely it is to contain toxic people. Normal distributions and all that.

Mastodon is by far the largest Fedi platform, which the article points out. So it will unavoidably contain the largest number of toxic people. Also most likely the largest number of absolute saints but that’s hardly as obvious I suppose.

I hope instance admins can clean up their databases from this stuff, because I suspect these Reddit mirroring bots take up enormous amounts of database storage on popular instances once all those posts get pushed there.