sanitation

@ sanitation @lemmy.today

Posts

1214
Comments

241
Joined

4 mo. ago

"He's a bot." - Person with 3 posts since 2025.
DISCLAIMER: This account may exhibit unusual levels of activity due to actually using Lemmy. Any reports that I am a bot were filed by Reddit agent provocateurs that want to have no content on lemmy.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit
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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago
Hey I'm trying to change that.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

Thank you, I genuinely appreciate this response and the encouragement. Running my own instance is definitely something I'm considering, im really good on ops and dev side. OVH/Hetzner or other colo Hosting Money isn't really the constraint for me, time is. Between development, moderation, infrastructure, and everything else, I need to be realistic about taking on another thing to maintain.

If some time opens up, though, I may give it a shot. I actually really like the idea of making lemmy work for those people that tried it and left back on to reddit and making it work for both experiences. And if people don't want that, hey whatever at least content is not wiped. srslyt thanks for the thoughtful response and for actually wishing me luck despite disagreeing on parts of this.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

nono - thats actually curation on my side, on top of curation on reddit.my reposting implements AI curation and other stuff

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

I actually agree with most of that. Those are good ideas. Do all of them.

Pull from RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, Hacker News, Lobsters, original sources, and Reddit. These aren't mutually exclusive.

Where I disagree is treating Reddit as uniquely contaminated. If Reddit happens to surface a great article, meme, video, or discussion before we find it elsewhere, I don't see why Lemmy should refuse it on principle.

And the goal isn't to permanently make Lemmy a delayed Reddit feed. It's to bootstrap communities while building exactly the ecosystem you're describing.

Eventually I'd love for the flow to reverse: interesting stuff originates on Lemmy and gets reposted to Reddit.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

I don't have that amount of time to spend - its the same relitigation on and on and on.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

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.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

But I have listened to criticism. I've said volume is fair criticism, filtering can make mistakes, thresholds can be adjusted, and when someone pointed out the OC-label issue, I immediately agreed and said I'd fix it.

Listening doesn't mean I have to agree with you afterward.

And this thread isn't a representative survey of Lemmy users. It's a self-selected group of people with strong opinions, while hundreds of thousands of people created Lemmy accounts and aren't active anymore. We don't get to hear why most of them left.

You can call that ego. I call it disagreeing with you.

And I've never said everyone criticizing me is a Reddit agent. Reddit absolutely has employees, contractors, PR people, marketers, automated systems, and other people acting in its interests. Whether any particular account here is connected to Reddit is another question entirely.

Maybe it's Reddit. Maybe Twitter/X. Maybe Facebook. Or, gasp, Russian and Chinese influence operations. The internet isn't exactly famous for being free of coordinated manipulation.

My point is that Lemmy's structure makes this kind of manipulation incredibly easy. Public moderation histories, reports, fragmented moderation, and a tiny creator base give anyone trying to sow division plenty of leverage.

That doesn't mean everyone disagreeing with me is an agent. It means pretending coordinated influence operations don't exist on social media would be incredibly naive.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

reddit already has it and I can talk to people there

Then by that logic, what's the point of Lemmy at all? Reddit already has communities, posts, and comments.

The entire point is having that experience without having to use Reddit. The content isn't what drove many of us away. The platform did.

And yes, cross-posting native Lemmy content is good. Do that too. These aren't mutually exclusive strategies.

Cross-post good Lemmy content. Bring in good outside content. Encourage original content. Let people comment on all of it.

The goal is to bootstrap enough activity that eventually Lemmy itself becomes the place generating more of that content.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

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.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

Because when Reddit was building its communities, it wasn't trying to pull users away from a mature Reddit that already had 20 years of content, communities, and network effects.

That's the part you're ignoring. they started when the fuck when - 2005?

Lemmy isn't starting in a vacuum. A new user can compare an empty Lemmy community against a Reddit community with millions of members and fresh posts every hour.

And lurkers aren't "mythical." They're the overwhelming majority of users on basically every large social platform. You don't build a network by pretending only the people posting original content matter.

The goal of reposting isn't to make Lemmy permanently dependent on Reddit. It's bootstrapping. Give people something to read and discuss now, build an audience, and that audience eventually produces more native posts.

You need people before you can expect those people to start creating stuff here.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

You're ignoring the 99% of people who consume far more than they create.

An empty community gives them nothing. A community with one person consistently posting relevant content gives lurkers something to read, vote on, and eventually comment on.

Will one poster make a thriving community? Obviously not. But you need something there before the other 99% have anything to engage with.

"Keep it empty until organic posters magically arrive" is how communities stay empty.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

This is literally the first time anyone has raised the OC labeling issue with me. And yes, that's easy to fix. I can add a check for OC labels and either reject those posts or correctly mark them as reposts.

This is exactly the kind of feedback I'd rather get: identify a concrete problem and I'll fix the tooling, instead of jumping straight to "ban the account."

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

I think you're completely confusing the barriers to entry.

Linux had to overcome hardware compatibility, drivers, software availability, installation complexity, gaming support, OEM deals, and decades of Windows dominance. And even after billions in corporate investment, desktop Linux still isn't mainstream.

Lemmy is a fucking website. Click a link, make an account, start using it. The barrier isn't remotely comparable.

Getting Lemmy from 35k MAU to meaningful critical mass should be infinitely easier than getting people to replace their entire operating system.

And an empty community looks a hell of a lot more dead to me than one with relevant posts waiting for people to discuss them.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

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.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

The Linux analogy proves my point. Linux didn't sit around waiting for the eggs to hatch. People identified barriers and aggressively fixed them.

Drivers sucked? Fix them. Gaming sucked? Build Proton. Installation sucked? Make it easier.

And let's not pretend Linux grew purely "organically." Billions of dollars and enormous amounts of engineering have been poured into Linux by IBM, Red Hat, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Valve, and plenty of other corporations.

Lemmy has empty communities and poor retention. So fix the problems.

"Organic is the only way" isn't a law of nature. It's a strategy. And after years of stagnant MAU, we're allowed to question whether that strategy is working.

I don't want line-go-up. I want critical mass so communities aren't fucking empty.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

I'm a human using a tool. The argument is mine, the opinion is mine, and I'm right here responding to you.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

But "eventually people will come" is exactly the assumption I'm challenging.

Lemmy has been around for years. Hundreds of thousands of accounts have been registered, yet MAU is still tiny and countless communities are barely active. At what point does "just give it time" stop being a strategy?

And again, who is "people on the Fediverse"? The people who are still here? Of course the current users disproportionately like the current culture. The people who tried it and left aren't here to tell you what they wanted and thats 95% of users - they are not here anymore

I'm not trying to speedrun Reddit. I'm trying to solve a very basic chicken-and-egg problem: people want human conversations, but conversations need something to start them.

If organic posting alone isn't producing enough of that, I don't see anything sacred about waiting another five years and hoping it suddenly does.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

But that's exactly why I'm proposing a solution that doesn't require a billion-dollar marketing budget.

Reddit is doing plenty of negative marketing for itself. People are already frustrated with the platform, moderation, API changes, ads, corporate decisions, etc. Lemmy doesn't need to manufacture that dissatisfaction or outspend Reddit. The potential users are already looking for alternatives.

The problem is what happens when they arrive.

If they open Lemmy and find inactive communities and little content around their interests, word of mouth isn't going to fix that. They leave.

I'm proposing a way to bootstrap those communities with relevant content, give people something to discuss, and hopefully turn some of those lurkers into commenters and eventually native posters.

Maybe moderation isn't the main cause of stagnation. I'm open to that. But "we just need to shout louder" won't help if people arrive and don't find enough reason to stay.

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

feeling is mutual

1w ago

Quadruple moderation is killing lemmy. It’s a Gift to Reddit

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sanitation @lemmy.today 1w ago

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.