First, I want to say how great it is to see success in a social media platform not owned by some giant cooperation. That said, right now we are at a turning point where we can still change the platform in major ways and I think we all have a shared interested in Lemmy becoming the best it could be.
Let’s face it, Reddit had many problems even before the API changes. The toxic herd mentality, over and under moderation at the same time, small posts getting drowned out by already big ones and so much more. As you probably are already aware of, social media can quickly end in filter bubbles, extremization and bringing out the worst of the human psyche. These are not problems simply fixed by better moderation. Rather, these are problems resulting from the engagement driven design of most platforms (Post controversial statement -> many comments -> Post gets delivered to more people -> even more engagement -> …) I want Lemmy to be a place that brings people together instead of dividing us apart.
Therefore, I wanna start a conversation on what design changes Lemmy should implement in the future to make sure the platform remains humane and everyone can engage in respectful conversations.
I think a good starting point are the recourses of the Center for Humane Technology, like their course on Foundations of Humane Technology
I’m looking forward to hearing your opinions and ideas on this :)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It’s fun we are at a stage in which we can define what we want this community to be like not just technologically but as people. Also note this can be done on an instance by instance basis, too.
Maybe controversial …
Enable us to follow people as on microblogging platforms like masto. A person, if they’re open, has varied opinions and interests. Plus, as there id a personal relationship, a posture of respect is natural. It isn’t hard to get a varied feed once you follow enough people. Combine that with subscribing to communities, and the cross-pollination and you should naturally get a more varied diet of posts.
That’s a great idea, but I don’t know if it fits this platform. What makes Lemmy (and Reddit) great for me is that I can follow specific communities (specific video games, movies, kinks…)
Well there’s no reason we can’t have both. Kbin is experimenting with this by providing two separate interfaces, and seems to be working well. Other platforms kinda mix things up too like Facebook, friendica and hubzilla (last two being on the fediverse though not particularly popular).
Tbh, I do find the micro blogging interface in Kbin to be very confusing. It almost feels like two sites smashed into one.
Paste the Lemmy username into your Mastodon search bar, you can follow them there.
@maegul@lemmy.ml
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@maegul@lemmy.ml
I think it will only start syncing all their new posts and comments once you follow them
So a straightforward one to get started, and one already in the GitHub issues:
- Allow the feed to be less viral: the “value” of posts from smaller more niche communities will be weighed against the size/popularity of its community rather than all of your feed. Can even pin this weighting by the size of the community at the time of the posts creation.
Combined with allowing multi-communities defined by the user so that various communities can be grouped together, any user should find it pretty easy to avoid just seeing the big viral posts. And, AFAIK, this would be something Reddit never did??
Combined with allowing multi-communities defined by the user so that various communities can be grouped together
These multi-communities should also be followable and shareable by others, kinda like how Matrix Spaces work!
I think Lemmy being decentralized and not having user karma by design already gets a pretty good base. With the concerns of censorship, admin drama, and protecting marginalized groups, the rest has to come from your instance admins and moderators of communities you follow. With the nature of the platform, you can create toxic places but those are easily defederated and/or blocked.
We are definitely off to a good start :D Still there are starting to show problematic signs
In some news communities people are obviously upvoting news article based on nothing more than the headline. This creates an environment where only articles with polarizing headlines succeed, and a real discussion becomes impossible
How do you prevent that? I think that might simply be inherent of unrestricted news communities, not necessarily the platform itself. You can have a more restricted news community that disallows click bait or polarizing titles or only allow posts by approved users (or go further and lock to instance like beehaw).
I’m not really sure if that’ll work, but maybe the OP can post a description/summary of the keypoints in the news as an alt-text?
That’s a good idea that I’d really like that to be a norm in news communities.
That sounds like some authoritarian lunacy. No thanks.
