Quadruple moderation is killing Lemmy. It’s a gift to Reddit
There’s a rule about online communities I want people here to understand: the 90-9-1 rule.
Roughly 90% lurk, 9% comment, and 1% create.
Additionally - lemmy monthly active users is stangant at about 35k monthly active and not improving:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
When I first got to Lemmy, I had trouble finding enough content I was interested in even commenting on. So I figured: why complain about the lack of content when one can start posting it myself?
That’s why I post so much.
If people don’t post, most Lemmy communities simply don’t have enough creators to sustain themselves. You need posts before lurkers can lurk, commenters can comment, and some of those people eventually become creators themselves.
I’m not posting just to flood Lemmy. I’m trying to help solve one of Lemmy’s biggest problems: not enough content creators.
And frankly, doing that has been a nightmare.
Lemmy has a quadruple-moderation problem
Every active content creator has to survive four layers:
- Community moderators can remove your posts or ban you from the community.
- Your home-instance admins can ban your entire account.
- Receiving-instance admins can block/ban you for everyone on their instance, even though you don’t belong to it.
- Public moderation history means those decisions follow you. One moderator’s decision can influence another and snowball into more moderation.
For prolific content creators, that’s brutal.
I’ve had multiple accounts banned over one or two posts that somebody didn’t like. Months of posting, comments, engagement and contributions can effectively disappear from a community because of a couple of moderation decisions.
And the more you contribute, the worse the odds become. If you make hundreds or thousands of posts, eventually you’re going to post something that one moderator somewhere doesn’t like.
You don’t need one moderation team to tolerate you. You need multiple independent moderators and admins, across multiple servers, to remain aligned indefinitely.
There’s almost no cost to deleting a creator
This is another major difference from Reddit.
There is generally no financial investment in a Lemmy community’s content. A volunteer moderator can ban someone who contributed months of posts and comments and lose all of that person’s past and future contributions without losing revenue, salary or investment. Did you know all creator posts are wiped out from lemmy after account banned?
The creator paid the cost in time.
The community loses the content.
The users lose something to read and discuss.
And the moderator who pushed the button may personally lose essentially nothing.
So who benefits from making prolific content creation this difficult?
Because it certainly isn’t Lemmy.
And this creates an enormous attack surface
I genuinely have trouble believing that everyone complaining about prolific posters simply doesn’t understand this dynamic. At some point I have to question whether some of it is deliberate.
If I were Reddit and wanted to undermine a federated competitor, this is exactly where I’d attack it: its content creators.
You don’t need to hack Lemmy. You don’t need to DDoS instances. You don’t need to take anything offline.
Lemmy already provides the mechanism.
Report prolific contributors. Call their posting “spam.” accuse them of being bots. Point moderators toward their public moderation histories. Get one account banned somewhere, then let that decision influence moderators elsewhere.
Eventually the creator gets tired of fighting and leaves.
I’m not claiming I have proof Reddit is doing this. I’m saying Lemmy’s architecture makes this kind of subversion ridiculously easy, and Reddit would be an obvious beneficiary.
Reddit doesn’t have this same federated quadruple-jeopardy problem. You’re primarily dealing with the moderation of the subreddit you’re contributing to.
Lemmy desperately needs more people creating content, yet its moderation structure makes life progressively harder for the people who create the most of it.
At some point we should be asking:
Who actually benefits from that?
A plea to admins: protect your creators ban reddit agents instead
Before banning someone, look at who is contributing and who is reporting.
If an account with zero posts in years reports someone who has contributed hundreds of posts, don’t treat those two users as equally valuable to the health of the community.
That doesn’t put creators above the rules. Remove bad posts. Warn people. Moderate proportionally.
But stop throwing away months of content and future contributions over one or two posts someone disliked.
Creating content takes time. Reporting takes seconds.
Protect the people actually building your communities.
edit: I am reposting from reddit - there is no rules against that. its actually great thing for majority of lemmy users!
This reposting tool is open source - i’ve never been hiding the fact im reposting from reddit.
people get only high quality pre-dozed, pre-moderated content.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-deep-lighthouse/
I think more people should be using similar tools and populate lemmy with content. - htis is the only way to move that 35k mau number and creat conditions for more OC on lemmy
edit 2 " but we dont want content" argument.
The fuck you dont. who the fuck is we?
And this is why I don’t buy the argument that the people still here represent what users want.
Look at the numbers.
- Fediverse: ~14 million registered, ~1.17 million MAU.
- Lemmy: ~756,000 registered, ~35,000 MAU.
Lemmy has had three quarters of a million accounts created and only about 4.6% of that number is active monthly.
Obviously that doesn’t mean 95% were all regular users who quit. But it does tell us something important: the people currently active are a tiny, self-selected fraction of everyone who has tried this platform.
So when 30 existing users say “WE don’t want more content,” you’re hearing from the people the current system successfully retained. You’re not hearing from the enormous number of people who tried Lemmy and aren’t here anymore.
Maybe instead of assuming the remaining users have figured out what Lemmy should be, we should be asking why so many people tried it and didn’t stick around.
Lemmy: ~756,000 registered, ~35,000 MAU.
ill leave you at this. no - lemmy is not better. its a skeleton of what it can be
You talk like a c suite wanna be. Must be in the frequent AI use.
I don’t know if the LLM you run everything by told you that’s a compelling argument or not, but it isn’t. Valuing numbers is what led to reddit being a shit hole. All of which have nothing to do with serial bot posting or using AI to post.
This, a hundred times this. Chasing big numbers like posts totals, upvotes, MAUs is what ruins communities. Slow the fuck down! Make communities for people, not bots and investors!
You can make fun of the “C-suite” language, but retention and growth aren’t imaginary concepts invented by Reddit executives. They’re how you tell whether people actually want to keep using something.
I think Lemmy has enormous potential. That’s precisely why I’m arguing about this instead of just leaving.
I doubt you’ve made multiple profitable businesses if you can’t even make your own arguments and just copy paste LLM output between comments. Not that it matters if it is somehow true.
Prioritising growth is practically antithetical to decentralisation and the fediverse in general. If the growth takes longer, so be it. Lemmy has grown in the relatively short time I’ve been here. Noticeably so and a majority done without shitty bot posting and AI posting. People who join here typically hate that shit and the glorious algorithm TM. Again you’re attempting to conflate the growth/health of Lemmy with serial bot posting and AI posting. The former does not require the latter. The majority of internet sites grew without the latter. The majority of people here don’t like the latter and don’t think the former is worth it. No amount of jank LLM output, because to you’ve had to make it argue your perspective for you, will change that. Anyway I’ve not going to waste further time on this with someone too lazy to formulate and type their own response.
The irony is that you’re arguing decentralization requires accepting slow growth, when decentralization says absolutely nothing about growth rate.
And “Lemmy has noticeably grown” is anecdotal. MAU is measurable. If the numbers are stagnant, saying it feels busier doesn’t change the trajectory.
I’m also not claiming automation is the only way Lemmy can grow. I’m saying it’s one tool for solving the empty-community problem. If you have a better scalable way to get thousands of mostly dead communities active, great. Build it.
As for AI, yes, I use it. I also write software to automate repetitive work. That’s kind of the point of software.
Attacking the tool I used to phrase an argument is a lot easier than addressing the argument.
I’m criticising your use of the tool in posting as well as commenting because you’re either intentionally or too stupid to realise it’s leading you around in circles e.g.
Does not make fucking sense as a response to my point. Only an idiot prompt fondling their argument would think this is somehow a passable or logical reply. You’re arguing for automation, not that it’s the only way, nor did I claim you said it’s the only way. It’s practically a non-sequitur. Christ I have to restate your argument for you that’s how bad it is. It’s why your post/reply get downvoted consistently, because you value any output over all else, even if it’s trash you claim to be curated. It’s noise.
Build it? Build fucking what. Actually read what people type and understand it instead of feeding it to an LLM in a vain hope to convince people of your POV. I and most people here don’t want inorganic growth or “”tools””. If some community are empty, low traffic then people can populate them when and if there is enough desire. Do you understand that?
Also you don’t write shit, you don’t create content and you don’t curate anything. You vibe code AI to do these things for you with a minimal amount of input. Either way, I’m arguing with an LLM essentially. Cya never hopefully.
You’re right about one thing: my previous reply didn’t address your point cleanly.
But your actual position seems to be: if a community is empty, leave it empty until enough people spontaneously decide to populate it manually. I give that the same probability of happening like spontaneous combustion in south park https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjrwS47Z4Lc
I understand that. I just fundamentally disagree with it.
I think tools can help bootstrap communities. You think that makes growth “inorganic” and would rather wait. Fine. That’s an actual disagreement.
The rest is just you repeatedly calling me stupid, lazy, fake, a “vibe coder,” etc. That’s not an argument against automation. It’s just hostility toward someone using tools you don’t like.
I’ve built several web businesses that actually make money, so yes, I tend to look at things through the lens of whether a product is working and what trajectory it’s on.
And from that perspective, Lemmy right now feels like a skeleton of what it could be. That’s not “valuing numbers above everything.” It’s recognizing that hundreds of thousands of people have tried it, MAU remains tiny, and huge numbers of communities are barely alive.
You can make fun of the “C-suite” language, but retention and growth aren’t imaginary concepts invented by Reddit executives. They’re how you tell whether people actually want to keep using something.
I think Lemmy has enormous potential. That’s precisely why I’m arguing about this instead of just leaving.
Well, despite how slimy and disgusting everything you just said is, your position, and best future actions for you to achieve your goals, are pretty clear cut.
Start your own instance, and try to make it grow. You apparently have the experience, so go ahead.
Don’t you dare complain about people’s ability to defederate with you again, because it will start to sound like what you want, is to force people to consume what you decide to upload, and that’s authoritarian.
Do your best, since you know so well, and attract the people who agree with you.
slimeball reporting for duty question - do they defederate just one community or entire instance? because it sounds to me its entire instance and thats another dumb thing about lemmy.