this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Honest question: how is Lemmy safer against power tripping mods, user-on-user harassment and everything else? Sure it's a super nice place now but eventually the powertippers etc. will pop up. ?
The federation itself alleviates those problems.
In Reddit those problems backtrack to the Reddit admins giving no fucks about the users. Why would they? Even if the users are mistreated, network effect still keeps them in Reddit, as they don't want to lose the content.
Here in Lemmy however, if the admins of an instance are arseholes, negligent, stupid etc., their users will simply migrate to another instance. The users won't lose access to their content, and they know it.
And in some cases, admins of other instances might even defederate the instance with problematic admins, to protect their own users. (Specially useful when it comes to harassment, as harassers tend to gravitate towards the same places.)
So for example. In Reddit you got the powermods going rogue, being abusive towards the users, and the admins went like, "NOOOOO THEY'RE A PRECIOUS PART OF OUR COMMUNITY". Until the powermods turned against Reddit itself; then the admins took action. Here, the admins would need to act as soon as the powermods become an issue for the users, not just for themselves.
Additionally: it's hard to power-trip when you got a public modlog telling people what you did.
Thank you very much! Very well explained.
It contains the fallout of site-wide issues to some extent. Mods and user-on-user will still be issues. If one federation owner goes on a power trip everyone can just leave that server while continuing to use other Lemmy instances.
Essentially you'd only lose access to some subreddits instead of all of reddit in that situation.
You also would have 3rd party apps that would continue to work. Unlike now where apps like Sync are just down for a few months until they finish development for Lemmy.
But don't worry, reddit had a run of like 6-10 years there where mods weren't an issue so we have some time before that all starts.
Yeah but we get some of those mods! Lol.