cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5110168

As a moderator of a Lemmy instance, you currently have two options to take: pushing users first to your local content or content from all instances you federate with. These options come with the costs seen in the picture. The moderator of another instance has the same choice. However, in this scenario, they will both always switch to promoting the local-feed. I don’t want to say its wrong - it’s just the most sensible way to act on Lemmy currently. However, if everybody does it, it is bad for the overall discussion quality of the Threadiverse.

Its a classical prisoner’s dilemma from game theory, which sometimes happen in society, for example with supply shortage during lockdowns. A way to solve it is by making action B more positive and option A more negative. This would lead to more moderators choosing Action B over A.

Mastodon solved this with an Explore-Feed, which consolidates the Local- and All-Feed. I think this could also be a solution for Lemmy. It would result in less engagement decrease AND an overall positive effect on discussion quality.

Additionally, a general acknowledgement that instance protectionism is a problem and should be avoided could help to make A more negative. In other words: increasing the pressure by the community. This would put a negative social effect on option A. So: start talking about it with your moderators.

Do you think these two measure would do (additionally to more powerful moderation tools, which would only enable a working explore-feed in the first place)? Is this a problem on other services on the Fediverse too (at least Mastodon seems to have handled it quite well)?

  • poVoq@slrpnk.net
    2·
    1 year ago

    You just claim that this “decreases discussion quality”. How do you justify that claim? It is clearly not self-evident and I would claim the exact opposite.

    The ”global town-square” as some people like to call the by-gone era of social media is based on this IMHO false idea that the more interconnection the better the " discussion quality" or what ever you like to use as your metric for “better”.

    But I think Twitter even before the Elon induced melt down has pretty well disproven this idea, as such " global town-squares" seem to rather devolve into low quality shouting matches and are easily manipulated into outrage (“engagement”) maximizing hell-sites.

    Let’s not try to turn Lemmy into another one of those please.