I signed up for Lemmy.world, because not having downvotes is stupid and leads to a shitty community.
Ironic that three people downvoted this. But I agree, a “no downvotes” rule is designed to avoid disagreement and conflict, which is impossible on a public forum without extremely restricted expression. If the point is to be always be nice, why not disable open commenting and make users select their replies from a list of canned positive comments. 100% safety and positivity.
I’m torn on the whole no downvote button thing (I missed that when I signed up), but you can be still nice while having a discussion and disagreeing with people.
I would argue that the downvote button can lead to exactly what you are describing though, no disagreement or conflict.
Someone posts a unpopular opinion, a bunch of users downvote it to hell and poof!, no discussion or exchange of ideas. Just out of mind, out of sight.That’s only true if there is a downvote threshold that automatically hides downvoted comments, which I don’t think Lemmy has implemented. I agree that downvoting can be used to censor and avoid discussion, but the justification for removing downvotes on Beehaw is something like “keeping a positive environment with no negativity from disliking” rather than making sure users have to voice their disagreements and not just smash the
bluered arrow like cowards.There are issues with both sides of the down button debate, but I’m more for it than against.
For a different take on the downvote button, yesterday I put a post up on a technical thread. I hadn’t really read properly what the discussion was about, so my post wasn’t really helpful even if well intentioned. I only noticed when I got a couple of downvotes. I looked again at my post, then at the OP, then realised my error. Eventually I deleted my post. So, in that instance, I found the downvote helpful to myself as well as for the rest of the thread: make sure I read the OP carefully. ;-)
In this case a reply informing you about the missunderstanding would also work. My hope is that one of the people downvoting will take the time to do that when there is no downvote button.
Yeah, true. Fair point.
Wait. Some instances disabled downvoting?
Yes, beehaw one of them.
Maybe when they were a bunch of users it might have been a good idea to prevent brigading, but imho now that there is 1000x user activity it’s needed. I already saw the first spambots posting spam for meds…
Only one user has to report the spam and then it’ll be deleted by a mod. I think that’s a good system as well.
I do kinda wonder if beehaw actually has downvotes not do anything for comment ranking and such, or if they just hid the button for it’s users. Because I can still see a downvote button on beehaw communities, being from a different instance, and I often notice comments on that instance that do have a downvote or two, which seems to imply that it does actually record and send data about downvotes from other users
Disabling downvotes is a feature in the lemmy software afaik, but apparently it affects the users on that instance rather than its communities, which certainly seems like it should be the other way around.
That is hilariously bad design if it’s actually the case
Hexbear would like a word with you
Whoever or whatever that is can suck my dick.
lol
lmao even
It’s actually the opposite.
I like lemmy.world so far - relatively neutral admins, no weird stuff like disabling downvotes, you can create communities and post nsfw!
And the only blocked instance is full of pedos and nazis, so kudos for lemmy.world!
I signed up to lemmy world because I thought it was Lemmy’s World which sounds like Wayne’s World. I like Wayne’s World.
Party time!
Excellent!
I thought of ebaumsworld. The internet was a simpler place back when we were on ebaumsworld. This place feels strangely similar somehow?
I’m here because I didn’t know what I was doing when I signed up.
A more serious reply than my last comment – I’ve been on the fediverse for over 5 years, and on “Twitter-like” instances (GNU Social/Pleroma/Mastodon) there are some communities that either over-police language and have an extremely restrictive CoC, or the absolutely opposite with quite literal nazis spewing nonsense. I just wanted to make sure I found a chill Lemmy server full of mostly regular folk, and lemmy.world seems to fit that description.
Also because because beehaw has sownvotes disabled. Imo downvotes are an integral part of the Lemmy experience. As it is for reddit.
The issue lies with what downvotes really mean. We’ve all seen instances on Reddit where where downvoted to hell because it was an idea contrary to the majority of the sub/echo chamber even though they were totally valid.
It was absolutely impossible to have a constructive conversation between two opposing beliefs on reddit partly because of that system, it was really infuriating. On the other hand, beehaw seems to outright block the instances where users don’t subscribe to their echo chamber, and I don’t think that’s good either.
I would very much like a world where upvotes and downvotes are not symmetric. As is we say total is upvotes minus downvotes, but in reality upvotes exist to say “good job” and downvotes should exist to say “this is spam or unnecessary”
A better system, IMO, would be to make downvoting closer to reporting, a little harder to do, but if the ratio of down to up passes a certain threshold, the comment is then flagged for review and/or just massively downgraded.
Oh, and you cannot do that to something you reply to. Either say “this is trash not worth engaging with” and move on, thus ensuring trolls do not get fed, or reply but acknowledge it was worth engagement.
I think that’s the kind of idea being debated at https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/ right now
I like where you are going with that thought. I would like to see tags users can vote on like “spam, bot, hate, troll” or something. So the users can moderate themselves a bit. These tags can then be reviewed by a moderator who can make the ultimately decide what happens. Of course this is still prone to bridging and bullying but just trying to think outside the box
Honestly it was kinda foolish for Reddit to ever think it was going to be otherwise. People are inherently tribal by nature.
That’s always distressing to see, but if it keeps happening it’s also evidence that community isn’t worth the time to visit.
basically every thread i was apart of.
I don’t really care about the lack of downvotes but the reason I didn’t join beehaw was because users are not allowed to create new communities there, you have to ask the admins for permission
not that I wanted to spam a bunch of stupid communities but I prefer a more organic approach to growth than constant applications to get anything done
reminds me of intentionally obtuse government functions where everything has to go through committee before approvalI do respect their intentions though wanting a more curated experience, just not for me at this time
I just think its fantastic that instances can try different things and users can (actually, really, for real this time) easily vote with their feet.
Working as intended then. Because in general most instance admins just care that you’ve put in at least a little effort to answer their questions, which in their eye makes it less likely that you’re a spammer or troll.
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This will just create a culturally irrelevant ivory tower.
This. Lemmy.ca also had questions which were clearly just a check that you were a human
Yeah, I just said that I’m coming from Reddit and my username is what I’ve always used, and I got approved within a minute.
I didn’t know there are major differences between the instances (like the voting system). I’m basically here because the join-page suggested lemmy.world 🤷🏻♂️. But I like it here :). Still haven’t fully understood how these instances work or work not together but I like that you don’t need accounts everywhere you want to post something. Is there a single server that handles user authentication or how do other instances know my account? 🧐
Yeah. Each instance is able to run their local communities how they want. Basically each instance is it’s own thing with its own rules and subs (communities). You can join that instance by creating an account there and your settings, saves etc will be maintained there.
You can’t use that login to log onto another instance, but your posts and any communities on that instance are shared with other instances so people on other instances can see your posts. The other instances don’t know about you directly, but since your instance name is there in your account name e.g. [email protected], an instance knows it can go ask lemmy.world about MoonKitten to get information.
tldr; accounts only work on the instance you signed up on, but instances talk to each other and exchange posts, user info etc.
Ah, so I’m basically posting into foreign communities through my home-instance :).
Exactly. If you select ‘local’ you’ll only see local communities but you’ll see other’s posts and comments on there. If you select ‘all’ you’ll see communities from all federated instances. The instances just share stuff between themselves as long as their federated. If there is a ‘bad’ instance then your local instance might decide to not federate with them.
What would be nice is when instances could merge their communities so there aren’t many dedicated duplicates, like I could imagine there are for example LEGO-communities on 7 instances and the according owners of those communities could initiate that they want to merge with others so everyone can post wherever they are but have a common community-feed.
Agreed, tools / protocols for merging communities or migrating them and user accounts between instances would be good. But it’s a nice start and I like that it seems like it’s going back to the old days of services like email, usenet and irc.
What happens if a certain instance goes down? Is everything posted by this instance then gone? Can there be duplicate usernames across different instances? What about the email address you need to provide during sign up? Does is do anything?
I spent 2 days trying to get my reverse proxy running with my own server just so I didn’t have to write 2 sentences lol
Wow. I didn’t realize beehaw has over 380 instances blocked! Now I feel like I’m missing out on the Lemmy fediverse.
I don’t think you’re missing out on much. Most aren’t even lemmy instances.
I received this reply about this from Alyaza:
this is because we started using a heavily curated blocklist for the worst mastodon instances (they can interoperate with us). we didn’t expect any trouble from any of them, but any instance in the new batch of banned instances can be safely assumed to be quite bad and it’s better to be proactive than not.
link https://beehaw.org/comment/176651
edit:
checking into a few of the listed blocks now… most of them don’t seem to be operating anymore.
Still I’d like to have a choice in the matter lemmy.ml unfortunately also has a lot of blocked instances, and alot of the other instances are overloaded right now. I’ll probably wait a week or so until this craze blows over and sign up w/ a newer and smaller instance
For sure, if you want the raw unadulterated experience of the fediverse, that’s definitely the right choice.
Personally, I’m not looking to engage with the type of people who flock to ‘uncensored’ spaces, so I appreciate the admins filtering them out.
Is there a way to view blocked instances and why?
That’s the reason I didn’t join there, they try to be this wholesome safespace with heavy moderation and it’s just not my vibe.
I prefer minimal policing, I don’t mind seeing opposing views even if I think they are stupid, I can just scroll pass it and ignore.
I think a lot of it comes down to people who want to have a like minded experience; which can be good and bad. It essentially enforces to them that they’re in the right regardless without seeing the big picture. And that can be dangerous.
Shame the instances list doesn’t include reason for blocking. Looking at the names most seem obvious (and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on those) but there must be some grey areas.
Having a reason listed would be nice. I picked one off the list that I couldn’t figure out from the name alone why it would be banned and decided to take a look and see why. I was apprehensive. What horrors was I about to see?
Couldn’t figure out why it was banned from the content alone. I looked it up and found a website that has their defederated instances list and the reasons. I didn’t see anything that matched the reason given, but I didn’t care enough to keep digging further.
I think the list is shared among a few instances.
Is there any chance instances will start (or already are) blocking other instances based on instances they’re linked to? Similar to the way some subreddits would automatically ban users for participation in other subs, it could further enforce echo chambers. If Lemmy.world is a little more open, I’d hate for it to get blocked by somewhere like Beehaw just for that.
It’s possible, any admin can do anything they want, but it would be relatively rare. The way I’ve seen that play out is like if an instance pops up that seems like it’s run by a Nazi but you can’t really tell so you look at who their friends are. Usually it’s like if the admin is interacting a lot with Nazi instances or content you can guess where their loyalties will lie. But a lot of instances simply won’t block random small instances that haven’t caused trouble yet, through nothing but being unaware.
Some communities want to be insular though, it’s totally valid to want a “private forum” for let’s say kids or religions or schools or a marginalized demographic. So they may block nearly everything for their own internal reasons.
My advice, don’t hang out near Nazis and don’t hang out in a place that doesn’t make it clear that Nazis aren’t welcome. Lemmy doesn’t really have a lot of code of conduct stuff set up but that’s the main thing to pay attention to.
How can you see what has been blocked?
/instancesurl of a server shows both linked and blocked instances for a particular node. For example: https://lemmy.world/instances shows them for lemmy.world, https://beehaw.org/instances for beehaw.Hey, cheers for this. I asked someone earlier in a post how to see what instances were shown and blocked. Is this published for all sites? Is there a way it can be hidden? Or is that the way it’s built into the software? 👍
It’s build into Lemmy. However, since it’s open source, in practice anyone running a node could disable it, or even just block the url on a reverse proxy or something.
Under “Instances” (at the bottom of the website).
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kbin.social is on beehaw’s linked list, not the blocked list
LMAO, felt this.
The last time I had to write a Statement of Intent was to get into grad school and I sure as shit ain’t doing homework for a free online community.
I wrote 1 sentence and was accepted.
TIL people think 1 sentence constitutes an essay.
Are you Shakespeare?
I wrote one and never got a response, and it was a respectable answer lol…
I wrote a bunch of sentences with honest responses to their questions. But crickets…
TBF I’m sure they’re dealing with a lot of new signups rn.
yeah they stopped accepting new signups for a bit, i think they said they’re like 3500 behind ATM
Has anyone tried to see if ChatGPT could write that answer? lol
Seriously. Tell me you’re lazy without telling me you’re lazy, OP.
I signed up for beehaw initially, got in, but wasn’t a fan of some of their rules and how they police speech in their community.
All good, I can still view and participate in their comments, but Lemmy.world had more of the vibe i was looking for
I tried to sign up for beehaw 2 days ago, but still haven’t been approved. I guess my statement about wanting to discuss science and philosophy and videogames wasn’t good enough :(
ya im just figuring out all this but the fact i can still see and post on the beehaw instance makes lemmy.world the jammy on day one. people commenting and shit
i still dont really understand it but its social media and im feeding my addiction.
Yeah I originally created an account at beehaw.org before coming over to lemmy.world. The main reason I moved was because I wasn’t a fan of the fact I couldn’t freely create new communities over there (and I don’t think you can create communities on other instances?), but also just ~vibes~.
To be fair, this is actually kinda great to see - it’s one of the strengths of this federated system. The folks that run these instances are being pretty generous already to just let us talk and share whatever the heck we want, and it’s perfectly reasonable for a host to want to be selective about who they let use their resources.
I have accounts on a few different communities. Mostly because there is no real way to know how the community is until you start interacting with it and it starts interacting with with other communities.
Beehaw is nice because they are actually trying to cultivate a friendly community and moderate a lot of the trash out. But also… sometimes you dont want that hand holding…
I’m on beehaw mostly because I don’t want my lemmy experience to mirror my reddit experience: ie getting into 10 comment arguments with bigots over things like “trans people deserve to live” or “art is inherently political”. I’ve had enough of that for a lifetime.
I wrote like 2 lines and got accepted immediately, you don’t need to write an essay
Idk I tried a few times on that one and never got approved. I like the concept of it but at the end of the day I just want an account so I can finally interact with you fine folks over here.
You may have been approved without getting an email. That is how it was for me.
I tried for the 24 hours I was told to wait. It’s all good though I found one that I could sign up on.
I had the same thing happen I tried signing up twice and wrote lengthy responses and still haven’t been able to sign in. Found a more stable lemmy anyway.
Yeah I doubt the admins would appreciate anybody who actually did write an essay
