What are your thoughts on the Lemmy ecosystem?

I’ve been trying it out for the last week. I have my own opinions, but I’d like to hear others and see if we have common ideas on what is good/bad/indifferent about the Lemmy ecosystem.

  • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    I… That’s not how this works. Or at least that’s not the context I’m referring to.

    I can make an account (or 1000, Lemmy doesn’t exactly have controls to stop me) and run it as a bot, and NOT mark it as a bot. And use it to automatically manipulate the tone of conversations and threads without anyone knowing. And the premise of your argument is now void.

    Labeling of bots is done via goodwill.

    We’re not worried about goodwill users in this context. We’re talking about astroturfing bots posing as actual users. That said, labeled bots are still a problem if their content out grows organic user content, since that just isolates us, and erodes our community in favor of w/e interesting content bots scaped up today.

    Which is a massive problem on almost every social media platform already. And will come to Lemmy soon enough.

    • OpenStars@discuss.online
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      3 days ago

      Oh… then yes, ofc.

      But if we can’t stop it, then so be it. Nothing is perfect, but you try anyway.

      Wikipedia has some nice ideas about trusting people incrementally to increasing degrees depending on the outcome of previous manually curated efforts. And PieFed is bringing some of those thoughts into the Fediverse: https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/.

      But part of it is not merely bots vs. humans, and rather different styles of what human psychology tends to gravitate toward: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb. e.g. people saying things like “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, “And my bow”, etc.

      Lonely people just wanting to be heard… but unless emoji reactions are provided, how else other than to write a comment? And/or upvote an existing one that says what you wanted. Therefore… “^This” it is then indeed, none of us are immune to such, and any system that relies on people never falling into that trap is going to be vulnerable. The same way that news organization in the West were vulnerable to being bought out by the wealthy - it was always going to happen.

      Anyway, wishing for something doesn’t make it happen - that requires effort, like the PieFed approach, imperfect as it may be.