this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
748 points (98.2% liked)
Ask Lemmy
41161 readers
1829 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Tech Support
No Stupid Questions
You Should Know
Reddit
Jokes
Ask Ouija
Logo design credit goes to:
tubbadu
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I think this is gold, nail on head. So many of the problems in these social environments boil down to bad moderation. The current system of dictatorship of the first is pretty damn awful, right up there with some bird in a lake handing off a sword. The technology allows for the exploration of many other forms of rulership. While we could use a representative democracy system electing dictators, I suggest a step further to direct democracy.
Think of community rules as a constitution, voted on and then those rules enforced by the community in general. Even just replying to a suss comment that it breaks rule X and counting up/down votes and removing the comment at a certain threshold. Takes mod burnout out of the equation for a start. Perhaps vulnerable to brigading, but so is the current system. Perhaps there is a system of rules that could mitigate that, needs thought.
I'm not sure about weighted votes, lurkers are community members too, generally the vast majority. Put the mechanisms in place to try both weighted and equal votes (and perhaps membership age gating or other systems), give people the choice and see which creates better results.
Portability of users across instances is another sore point, as you say, and tagging could be a great enhancement, but I would argue those lesser than tyranny of the first moderation.
If you chose to polish this up (and perhaps split it into multiple) and post it somewhere, please let me know. It bears thought and development.
Thanks, its a critique I've been building on since 2023. Because I watched the consequences of these issues manifest in real time. And I think the same critique we would all rightfully bring to Reddit re-emerged here in lemmy, which is that this space, in-fact, all online spaces: they are something we all co-create; they are not a thing which is owned by one party, be it a company, an instnace owner, an admin, a mod, a poster, or a commenter.
The only right answer to me is also the spiritual fulfillment of the original reddit, of Lemmy and the fediverse more broadly, their deepest goal: to resinstill a sense of ownership of the communities we build together online. Reddit didn't make reddit. We made reddit and it was stolen from us. But then we just fell into the same traps as what happened to reddit. And the answer is as clear as it ever has been, although arguably, far closer to being reached.
I've done some ideating of how this might work, and I've been thinking that a "more general" approach which could be adopted across the fedivserse for democratizing actions would be better. But it would be easier to fork lemmy and just do it there. I also met someone a while back who had implemented some different voting tools in a federated fashion (I think for polls though). It would require some thinking and design and some testing. But it would be a helluva experiment.
Fairly said.
FWIW, I'm a mostly retired coder with enough on my plate with my own projects and a fair degree of burnout, but I can read code. At a guess (unresearched) Piefed would be an easier codebase (and Python a more accessible language) to fork, but I'd probably look toward optional modules that could be added to standard Piefed at the discretion of an instance. Forking is a lot of duplicated maintenance.
At a guess (rule of thumb for developer estimates is double the number and increase the units. You could do it in 2 days means 4 weeks, it's easy to envisage something but the implementation details multiply) the community moderation code would likely be on the order of a couple thousand lines. Given good design docs (hard) a team of three might take a month to get to a stable minimum viable implementation and it could probably be maintained solo thereafter. Highly achievable.
Getting a solid but flexible (to enable experimentation) architecture in place is key and starts with a well formulated, constrained (core features only but with examples of how it is likely to expand) explanation of the goals. Then a mockup of expected behaviour. I'd be happy to offer constructive criticism.