I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Lemmy is a fantastic Reddit clone, and federation is great for persistence, but it completely lacks nuance in how content is delivered. Defederation is only going to further fragment the platform. No one is going to be totally happy with it until the onus is primarily on the individual, rather than the community or instance.

As a user, I want choice. Give me settings. Give me more control. Then if I see something I don’t like, or something I’d rather change, that’s on me. That sounds much better than hoping and waiting for a level-headed admin to figure it out for me, or making yet another account when they get it wrong.

We’ll never get anywhere if all the admins are afraid of getting on everyone else’s “bad side” for content they can barely control themselves.

Well said. I knew that something like this would happen eventually. I’m actually surprised it didn’t happen sooner tbh.

I just hope that proper warnings will be given to people in the future (rather than the banhammer being used as a first resort) and that this doesn’t have too much of a chilling effect on expression going forward. I consider myself a pretty open-minded fellow, but even I have my limits.

It’s clear that lemmy still has some major work to do yet on this front. The fact that you have to visit the community first in order to block it seems like quite a flaw. And there is no way, to my knowledge, to deemphasize some content on the front-end without basically purging it completely. Not exactly ideal solutions for those that don’t want to be blasted by scat or gore, but also don’t want to live exclusively in their subscribed tab.

I understand the sentiment of trying to build a more positive oriented community by getting rid of something like downvotes. However, that feels almost exactly like what Youtube did in removing dislikes on their site, which was widely unpopular. It’s a great indicator of spam or other undesirable content and removing it altogether might be doing more harm than good.

Plus, if filtering becomes a thing, being able to, for example, ignore posts with less than 5 upvotes would do wonders for some browsing once the site gains more traffic.

That said, I will always advocate for options. If that became a setting in a menu somewhere, I think that could be the best of both worlds.

This seems fair, and very helpful! Thanks!

Personally, I think giving users more options than blocking a community outright or completely defederating from other fringe places is very much worth looking into.

Not saying everything should be promoted in /all or anything like that. Obviously you’d want to avoid anarchy, haha. But if it’s legal, relevant, and doesn’t hurt anyone, it would be nice to be searchable at least, imo. I’ve always been more of a live and let live kinda person and blocking things, even uncomfortable stuff, never sits well with me.

In particular, I really like the idea of better tagging and filtering so the user can pick and choose for themselves. I guess we’ll see how things develop, but this was very encouraging!

Ok, cool. Maybe I’ll make a post then so other people can weigh in, thanks!

@Wander@yiffit.net Is there a general questions or feedback thread somewhere? I’m currently in the process of exploring other instances and trying to figure out if this one’s for me or not.