After moving here from lemmy.world after learning of their view on federation with Threads, I now face a dilemma which I do not have a clear answer to.
Should I continue contributing to my niche communities on Instances federating with Threads, or build similar communities on other Instances blocking Threads?
I have a feeing this issue is not a one off, but a common one going forward, so it’s better to settle it once and for all. Below is my thought so far. What would you do in my case?
I love to post or comment on my favourite niche communities to share my experience with others and grow them. Those communities are small in size and they usually exist in certain instances only.
One one hand, having everyone in the same place would be much more beneficial since the community is not split and spread across the fediverse. We would also have better discussions with people from different background and diverse point of views.
On the other hand, I do not feel my contribution is in the right place anymore, if let’s say I post on lemmy.world. I don’t want Threads to benefit from my posts/comments and I want people to join Lemmy. Why would Threads users join Lemmy if they could subsribe to our communities?
I wish my communities were instance-independent so this barrier can be removed. I can create a similar community here but it is the last thing I would want to do.
Having written all these down, I realised this was exactly the same situation how I came to Lemmy from reddit, i.e. communities split across Internet due to issues we have with the platform/instance we are on. I guess discussion on platform/instance-independent communities can be a topic of its own
Edit: formatting and clarified my points and updated my question to reflect that
Current implementation seems to focus on administrative domains for control, like email servers with individual policies and reputations. What if we look at this the other way?
People have different value systems. Are you ok with promotion for monetary gain? (No never / only individual contributors promoting themselves / only small businesses and below / yes) Are you annoyed by $controversial_topic? Do you dislike when bored people make a conversation game out of someone else’s need for obscure technical help?
The details can be decided later by people smarter than me. The point, though, is that these value systems aren’t universal. Users should decide their own.
Meta interactions (up down report friend block) should be aligned to these values. My client would gather meta-mod data as well as votes/comments. I could easily configure my client to hide things, or group similar distractions together and show/hide them all together. Your client could work differently.
I have no idea how we would possibly implement this with federation. Civically minded users create a meta-moderation identity with a PGP key, sign and publish their decisions, and let people choose to trust them based on past behavior?
Probably still flawed, susceptible to karma farming and cashing out. If well known mods start betraying their users, the bad activities are signed and can be used as proof they can no longer be trusted, though it could take days to get people to stop trusting someone.
Even the whole value system idea can be subverted. Dog whistles, toxic in-jokes, things which are offensive in context but seem fine judged later out of context, etc.
But I want this for us all. (And I vaguely remember seeing something similar on slashdot in the 90s) I have no idea if Lemmy can even support it though.
