More critically, the proof-of-concept so far appears to lack any real work on moderation tools or implementing a web of trust system. These would be absolutely vital components for a federated encyclopedia to have any chance of controlling quality and avoiding descending into a sea of misinformation and edit wars between conflicting “truths.” Centralized oversight and clear enforced guidelines are key reasons why Wikipedia has been relatively successful, despite its flaws.
Without a robust distributed moderation system in place, a federated encyclopedia runs the risk of either devolving into siloed echo chambers pushing various agendas, or becoming an uncoordinated mess making it impractical as a general reference work. The technical obstacles around federating content policies, privileges and integrated quality control across instances are immense challenges that aren’t obviously addressed by this early proof-of-concept.
While novel approaches like federation are worth exploring, straying too far from Wikipedia’s principles of neutral point-of-view and community-driven policies could easily undermine the entire premise. Lofty goals of disrupting Wikipedia are admirable, but successfully replacing its dominance as a general reference work seems extremely unlikely without solving these fundamental issues around distributed content governance first.
Yeah, you are right. I’ve always remembered it this way because it makes more sense to me.
The idea of a federated, decentralized Wikipedia alternative is intriguing, but implementing it successfully faces major hurdles. Federating moderation policies and privileges across different instances seems incredibly complex. I believe it would also require some kind of web of trust system. Quality control is also a huge challenge without centralized oversight and clear guidelines enforced universally.
While it could potentially replace commercial wiki farms like Wikia/Fandom for niche topics, realistically replacing Wikipedia’s dominance as a general reference work seems highly ambitious and unlikely, at least in the short term. But as they say - shoot for the stars, and you may just land on the moon.
That said, ambitious goals can spur innovation. Even if Ibis falls short of usurping Wikipedia, it could blaze new trails and pioneer federated wiki concepts that feed back into Wikipedia and other platforms. The federated model allowing more perspectives and focused communities is worth exploring, despite the technical obstacles around distributed moderation and content integration. The proof-of-concept shows the core pieces are in place as a starting point.
Human bias is a pervasive element in many online communities, and finding a platform entirely free from it can be akin to searching for the holy grail. Maybe look into self-hosting an instance and punish moderators who don’t follow their own rules.
Regrettably, complaining tends to be a common pastime for many individuals. I acknowledge your frustrations with certain users who may appear entitled or unappreciative of the considerable effort you’ve dedicated to developing Lemmy. Shifting towards a mindset that perceives complaints as opportunities for enhancement can be transformative. Establishing a set of transparent rules or guidelines on how you prioritize issues and feature requests could help turn critiques into opportunities for improvement. This transparency can help manage expectations and foster a more collaborative relationship with the users in your community. While not all complaints may be actionable, actively listening to feedback and explaining your prioritization criteria could go a long way in building trust and goodwill. Open communication and a willingness to consider diverse perspectives can lead to a stronger, more user-centric product in the long run.
The philosophy of Complaint-Driven Development provides a simple, transparent way to prioritize issues based on user feedback:
Following these straightforward rules allows you to address the most pressing concerns voiced by your broad user community, rather than prioritizing the vocal demands of a few individuals. It keeps development efforts focused on solving real, widespread issues in a transparent, user-driven manner.
Here’s a suggestion that could help you implement this approach: Consider periodically making a post like What are your complaints about Lemmy? Developers may want your feedback. This post encourages users to leave one top-level comment per complaint, allowing others to reply with ideas or existing GitHub issues that could address those complaints. This will help you identify common complaints and potential solutions from your community.
Once you have a collection of complaints and suggestions, review them carefully and choose the top 3 most frequently reported issues to focus on for the next development cycle. Clearly communicate to the community which issues you and the team will be prioritizing based on this user feedback, and explain why you’ve chosen those particular issues. This transparency will help users understand your thought process and feel heard.
As you work on addressing those prioritized issues, keep the community updated on your progress. When the issues are resolved, make a new release and announce it to the community, acknowledging their feedback that helped shape the improvements.
Then, repeat the process: Make a new post gathering complaints and suggestions, review them, prioritize the top 3 issues, communicate your priorities, work on addressing them, release the improvements, and start the cycle again.
By continuously involving the community in this feedback loop, you foster a sense of ownership and leverage the collective wisdom of your user base in a transparent, user-driven manner.
Having shared tags across communities allows for better content discovery and curation based on specific interests or preferences. Users could also easily filter out or avoid posts related to triggering content like their phobias, traumatic events, or other sensitive topics by specifying certain tags they wish to exclude.
stop browsing by all and only subscribe to the communities you are interested in
The issue with this is that subscribing to a large community results in seeing predominantly content from that community, overshadowing the smaller communities. All the communities I subscribe to would have to be about the same size.
After giving it some more thought, I believe the best way to solve this would be through an API call to fetch metadata from today’s posts. This would include post ID, votes, and comments. By doing so, anyone can experiment on their client with a custom JavaScript Greasemonkey plugin to determine the best way to sort the posts. When a better sorting method is discovered, it could then be implemented in the backend.
This is not possible because sorting is done in the database, so adding a new sort option requires a database migration with new indexes, columns and updated queries. Not something that can be done with a simple plugin.
@[email protected] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3936#issuecomment-1738847763
We’ve already mentioned that it isn’t possible. You can’t assign percentages to categories or personalize the sorting in any way since it is done in the database.
It would be beneficial to talk more about these desirable features to ensure that when developers do invest time in them, we’ve already come up with a good and robust solution. Otherwise, we may encounter a situation similar to the Scaled sort implementation, where issues remain unresolved despite the feature being added.
I just want a superintelligent AI that always talks to me about the things I like to hear. That’s a bit far-fetched, but I also thought it was possible before: Algorithm Marketplace
It certainly doesn’t help that Lemmy had and still has absolutely no sensible way to actually surface niche communities to its subscribers. Unlike Reddit, it doesn’t weigh posts by their relative popularity within the community but only by total popularity/popularity within the instance. There’s also zero form of community grouping (like Reddit’s multireddits) - all of which effectively eliminates all niche communities from any sensible main view mode and floods those with shitty memes and even shittier politics only. This pretty much suffocated the initially enthusiastic niche tech communities I had subscribed to. They stood no chance to thrive and their untimely death was inevitable.
There are some very tepid attempts to remedy this in upcoming Lemmy builds, but I fear it’s too little too late.
I fear that Lemmy was simply nowhere near mature enough when it mattered and it has been slowly bleeding users and content ever since. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, though.
Where? I haven’t heard any of that.
Trust lvls themselves are just Karma plus login/read tracking aka extra steps.
Trust Levels are acquired by reading posts and spending time on the platform, instead of receiving votes for posting. Therefore, it wouldn’t lead to low-quality content unless you choose to implement it that way.
The Karma system is used more as a bragging right than to give any sort of moderation privilege to users.
But in essence is similar, you get useless points with one and moderation privileges with the other.
If you are actually advocating that the Fediverse use Discourse’s service you have to be out of your mind.
You are making things up just so you can call me crazy. I’m not advocating anything of the sort.
On a basic level, the idea of certain sandboxing, i.e image and link posting restrictions along with rate limits for new accounts and new instances is probably a good idea.
If there were any limits for new accounts, I’d prefer if the first level was pretty easy to achieve; otherwise, this is pretty much the same as Reddit, where you need to farm karma in order to participate in the subreddits you like.
However, I do not think “super users” are a particularly good idea. I see it as preferrable that instances and communities handle their own moderation with the help of user reports - and some simple degree of automation.
I don’t see anything wrong with users having privileges; what I find concerning is moderators who abuse their power. There should be an appeal process in place to address human bias and penalize moderators who misuse their authority. Removing their privileges could help mitigate issues related to potential troll moderators. Having trust levels can facilitate this process; otherwise, the burden of appeals would always fall on the admin. In my opinion, the admin should not have to moderate if they are unwilling; their role should primarily involve adjusting user trust levels to shape the platform according to their vision.
An engaged user can already contribute to their community by joining the moderation team, and the mod view has made it significantly easier to have an overview of many smaller communities.
Even with the ability to enlarge moderation teams, Reddit relies on automod bots too frequently and we are beginning to see that on Lemmy too. I never see that on Discourse.
Karma promotes shitposting, memes and such, I’ve yet to see that kind of content on Discourse.
Yeah, and the FOSS alternative Codidact isn’t any better. What’s the point of asking for solutions for bugs when even an LLM can solve that already? I want proper solutions to actual problems so that I can find everything in there, not just troubleshooting bugs.
I don’t know how that works. Why would have to do anything to participate in the discussions? The curation can be done by whoever wants to do it.
I’ve based the idea on Discourse which has very good moderation. I don’t know why everyone is talking about StackExchange, did I mention it anywhere?
I think in a few years using an AI for this kind of task will be much more efficient and simpler to set up. Right now I think it would fail too much.
Nice!
A quick suggestion. I personally would prefer if you mention what you will be working on rather than what you’ve completed. It creates more excitement to know what’s coming next. I also find it easier to understand issues than pull requests.