As a moderator of a Lemmy instance, you currently have two options to take: pushing users first to your local content or content from all instances you federate with. These options come with the costs seen in the picture. The moderator of another instance has the same choice. However, in this scenario, they will both always switch to promoting the local-feed. I don’t want to say its wrong - it’s just the most sensible way to act on Lemmy currently. However, if everybody does it, it is bad for the overall discussion quality of the Threadiverse.

Its a classical prisoner’s dilemma from game theory, which sometimes happen in society, for example with supply shortage during lockdowns. A way to solve it is by making action B more positive and option A more negative. This would lead to more moderators choosing Action B over A.

Mastodon solved this with an Explore-Feed, which consolidates the Local- and All-Feed. I think this could also be a solution for Lemmy. It would result in less engagement decrease AND an overall positive effect on discussion quality.

Additionally, a general acknowledgement that instance protectionism is a problem and should be avoided could help to make A more negative. In other words: increasing the pressure by the community. This would put a negative social effect on option A. So: start talking about it with your moderators.

Do you think these two measure would do (additionally to more powerful moderation tools, which would only enable a working explore-feed in the first place)? Is this a problem on other services on the Fediverse too (at least Mastodon seems to have handled it quite well)?

  • ithas
    5•10 months ago

    I do think your heart is in the right place trying to find and discuss engagement issues in the threadiverse. That’s obviously been a common complaint people have posted about and I can see you believe strongly about this.

    I think I just disagree with the issue at hand, or at least that there is a single one and that this solves it. To give an anecdotal example: I make a post around every day on kbin.social that gets 0 likes, 0 dislikes, and 0 comments, in other words no engagement. You might say this is due to it being difficult to find! Well, it actually is! So much so because it doesn’t even federate out to lemmy.world, lemm.ee, fedia.io, etc. I check remote instances and my posts never federate anywhere. If you look at my profile from your instance, lemmy.world, it would seem I barely have any posts, but on my home one I have quite a few.

    This is just one example of course, but from my perspective, the major issues we have right now are technical ones, and I’d like to see those fixed before trying to focus on social ones.

    • @blue_berry@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4•10 months ago

      I check remote instances and my posts never federate anywhere. If you look at my profile from your instance, lemmy.world, it would seem I barely have any posts, but on my home one I have quite a few.

      Mmh, true, I shows only two posts for me. Thats weird … something similar happened to me with Mastodon, posts never reaching other instances or only very late …

      This is just one example of course, but from my perspective, the major issues we have right now are technical ones, and I’d like to see those fixed before trying to focus on social ones.

      Yeah, thats definitly so. But I think these technical ones are mostly known and I don’t feel like I can contribute much to them … so I think about the social ones.