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.
not just me. many people tried lemmy and back on reddit at this point. just too little content, too much moderation
Can I point out - lemmy MAU is stangant 35k a month, this is a problem.
if its still stagnant by now - it will never improve organically going forward:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
what is your solution for attracting users?
all im hearing is some whishy washy - “they will come” organically - but they are not coming organically. why is that? there is no content thats why.
“attracting new users” is not a sentiment that is shared by all of us, not at any cost anyhow.
The cost being the fediverse becoming a sad impersonal place (like reddit) before it even lifts off.
Your “solution” might attract a few people - those who think bigger numbers are better, always.
many people want to switch from reddit, but cant - no content.
also noeone everyone shares your definition of lemmy. to me - I would love it to be decentralized reddit. im fine with reddit content as long as I dont have to use reddit.
That’s a bullshit statement. It doesn’t even make sense. Once again, you’re thinking people only want to participate in platforms that already have a fuckton of users. (edit: or content, sheesh)
That’s what I said. And again, it’s not just Lemmy. Do you even understand how the fediverse works?
OP has a point though. We do need more people, more original content…
Issue is… (and I’m explaining this to OP:) It can’t be low quality content. Reposts also kinda make it look like a dead place with mostly bot activity… You’re not the first person to come up with the idea to spam this place and it’ll attract users. We already tried this strategy and it does not attract new users. You can look up a bit of history of this place and you’ll see you have to come up with a better idea and not continue to make the same mistake other people already made.
That’s a fair concern. I agree that a wall of obvious bot spam can make a community look more dead.
The problem is the 99% problem: roughly 99% of users aren’t creating posts at all, much less original content specifically for Lemmy.
Even Reddit runs heavily on people finding interesting stuff elsewhere and sharing it. That’s what I’m automating - curation, not a blind feed. Popularity thresholds, age limits, community rules and content filtering are all applied.
Original content is obviously better. But you need an active community before you can realistically expect enough people to create it.
Yeah, though that’s not original in any way. It’s a curated dumpster of Reddit posts. And people don’t like it. As I said we’ve already tried it before. We shouldn’t keep making the same mistake over and over again. We need less re-posts, less rehashing of content from better platforms… Why would anyone join a platform with mostly re-used material? They’re gonna stick with the original! And that’s where we’re at.
But it doesn’t have to be either/or. We can have both.
I didn’t leave Reddit because every piece of content there suddenly became worthless. I left because of the platform around that content - moderation, censorship, bans, corporate control, and decisions about what you’re allowed to see or say.
The same interesting link, meme, news story, or discussion can exist on Lemmy without Reddit’s moderation and platform rules attached to it. That’s actually part of the value of Lemmy.
And obviously Lemmy should develop its own original content and communities too. Reposting doesn’t prevent that. It gives otherwise-empty communities something to discuss while that organic ecosystem develops.
Take the good content, leave Reddit’s platform behind, and build original Lemmy content alongside it. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Well, I’ve had arguments about this very issue before. If you ask me… If you do both, you do some good. At the same time you’re also drowning people in noise. Which is going to be a disservice to everyone. Now I can’t see the good content anymore because it’s buried in random other stuff. I’ve muted several people because of that. I know some other people uphold similar opinions as me. Not everyone… But we really get a buttload of politics and news dumped here, copies of memes we already saw on some other platforms, making Lemmy seem like the cheap copycat… A lot of people rather have good content only and skip the added noise. That’d make it feel like a nice place. Maybe a bit smaller than the competition, but at least it has good content and a nice atmosphere. … Every added non-genuine or original post takes away from that.
You’re arguing against something I didn’t say. I didn’t say people only join platforms that already have a fuckton of users. I said people leave or don’t stick around when there’s not enough content they’re interested in.
Those are completely different things.
You can have a smaller community and still have an active, interesting feed. But if someone opens Lemmy, searches for their interests, finds communities with a handful of posts from weeks ago, and goes back to Reddit where those same interests have fresh discussions every day - that’s a content problem, not a “must have millions of users” problem.
And yes, I understand federation. Saying “the Fediverse isn’t just Lemmy” doesn’t change the argument. Federation doesn’t magically create posts in an inactive Lemmy community.
People need something to read before most of them will have something to comment on. That’s the entire point.
Edit: Sorry, already posted this above
Social media usage is declining everywhere.
It’s not a problem if you consider that “Lemmy” is just one of the many ways that people can interact with the open social web. The Fediverse as whole has 50x more users. RSS feeds are (slowly) making a comeback. People who are really deep into their interests (photography, DIY audio, hardware) still have and prefer their specialized forums over hanging out with Reddit bots and agency interns that are doing “social media PR” on certain subs.
Seriously, it seems that you grew up in a time when Social Media was fun and exciting and you’re too attached to those memories. These times are gone. Let go of the nostalgia, focus your energy on building something new and of your own instead of running around trying to convince the rest of the world that we need to go back to some imaginary utopia that never really existed.
I think this is exactly the disconnect: not everyone shares your vision of what the internet should become.
Saying “RSS is making a comeback” as an answer to stagnant social network growth is honestly kind of absurd. RSS is useful, but the average person isn’t abandoning Reddit, Facebook, or TikTok to curate RSS feeds and hang out on specialized forums.
And “the Fediverse has 50x more users” doesn’t solve Lemmy’s problem. Someone wanting a Reddit-style discussion platform isn’t interchangeable with someone posting on Mastodon or using another ActivityPub service.
I’m not asking to recreate some imaginary Reddit utopia. I want the good parts of Reddit: active communities, constant content, and discussion, without the centralized corporate platform, censorship, and control. A federated Reddit alternative is valuable precisely because it can provide that experience differently without corporate overlords banning whatever they want.
You may personally want something completely different from social media. That’s fine. But that’s your vision, not necessarily what everyone who might use Lemmy wants.
If Lemmy is stagnant and huge numbers of communities are nearly empty, telling potential users to “let go” and accept that they shouldn’t want a Reddit-like experience clearly isn’t working.
What’s really funny to me, is you go on this say that your vision is ‘correct’. Clearly people disagree with yours. Please stop using chat gpt to sound more inflated than you already are.
Not everyone wants it to be more populated for population sake. Why should I care how many MAU we have.
You say you want the good parts, but chat got isnt telling you how to keep them. By keeping it small. If you want large and popular, go back to reddit. Not every place has to be the most popular.
The average person is not going to Reddit as well, unless they are searching for something online and end up in a linked discussion.
YOU want a Reddit-style platform, but you don’t want to use Reddit, so you are trying to create your own version of it, with blackjack and hookers. You are part of an tiny minority that is too focused on the medium instead of the message.
You are in the minority. People just want to connect with each other. The medium rarely matters for them.
And now you are seeing that if you remove the “corporate overlords”, the power will be exerted by a multitude of dysfunctional, disorganized tribes. Consider this an opportunity to understand the myth of the Noble Savage.
Please don’t engage with the AI commentors.
I know that by this point I’m talking to myself, but it’s fine. Weirdly enough, it’s working as some form of catharsis in relation to my own experience with Fediverser and even Communick itself. It’s almost 7 years now that I’ve running this here, and seeing someone else so obsessed with this idea of “taking down Reddit” is making me realize how unhealthy my own behavior has been.
You’re doing exactly what you’re accusing me of doing: taking your own preference and declaring that it’s what “people” want.
You say people don’t care about the medium, they just want to connect. Great. Then why are Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, Discord, forums, and the Fediverse radically different products with different communities and usage patterns? The medium obviously affects how people connect.
And yes, I specifically want a Reddit-style link aggregation and discussion platform without Reddit controlling it. I’m clearly not alone, because that’s basically the niche Lemmy itself occupies. Otherwise, why build communities, posts, comments, voting, ranking, and subscriptions in this format at all?
The funny thing is I actually agree with your last paragraph.
Removing the corporate overlord doesn’t automatically remove arbitrary power. It distributes that power among hundreds of independent admins and moderators. That’s precisely what my post is criticizing.
Federation solves centralized control, but it introduces a different problem: fragmented moderation where multiple independent people can exercise power over the same user’s participation.
That’s not an argument for going back to Reddit. It’s an argument for recognizing the weakness in the federated model and figuring out how to make it better.