As a moderator of a Lemmy instance, you currently have two options to take: pushing users first to your local content or content from all instances you federate with. These options come with the costs seen in the picture. The moderator of another instance has the same choice. However, in this scenario, they will both always switch to promoting the local-feed. I don’t want to say its wrong - it’s just the most sensible way to act on Lemmy currently. However, if everybody does it, it is bad for the overall discussion quality of the Threadiverse.

Its a classical prisoner’s dilemma from game theory, which sometimes happen in society, for example with supply shortage during lockdowns. A way to solve it is by making action B more positive and option A more negative. This would lead to more moderators choosing Action B over A.

Mastodon solved this with an Explore-Feed, which consolidates the Local- and All-Feed. I think this could also be a solution for Lemmy. It would result in less engagement decrease AND an overall positive effect on discussion quality.

Additionally, a general acknowledgement that instance protectionism is a problem and should be avoided could help to make A more negative. In other words: increasing the pressure by the community. This would put a negative social effect on option A. So: start talking about it with your moderators.

Do you think these two measure would do (additionally to more powerful moderation tools, which would only enable a working explore-feed in the first place)? Is this a problem on other services on the Fediverse too (at least Mastodon seems to have handled it quite well)?

  • Bebo@sffa.communityEnglish
    61·
    1 year ago

    As a a casual lemmy user with accounts on a few instances, I can say that I never visit the local or all fields of any of my logged in instances. I only visit my subscribed field, which is identical over all my accounts. How much do the local and all fields really matter for users?

    • scottywh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      I use all constantly, local occasionally, and subscribed rarely at this point.

      That may change but that’s how I typically use Lemmy as it stands today.

      • MusketeerX@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        When I first joined I mainly used all to find communities I was interested in and then subbed to them.

        Now that I have nearly 100 communities subbed, I mainly use the subscribed view, occasionally I’ll take a look at all, very rarely local.

    • Elevator7009@kbin.cafe
      2·
      1 year ago

      I do the exact same as you, with the exception of a few topic-specific instances, where the local communities are only about that topic. There I will actually use Local as default.

      At least on my Kbin instance, going in All and Local opens me up to doom-and-gloom “big corporation and alt-right bad” news and outrage bait.

      I agree wholeheartedly with “big corporation and alt-right bad” and that they’re the cause of too many of the world’s big serious problems. I’d also rather spend my time on Kbin enjoying what I see instead of getting mad. I can already find out what horrible thing a corporation or alt-right politician has done from the regular news, without the understandable but exhausting comment chain of outrage.

      Even without an algorithm shoving it down your throat, outrage bait will rise to popular status on its own. Unfortunately, getting mad at and feeling superior to the idiotsincars, choosingbeggars, etc. is kind of crack to our brains. I’m no exception, which is why I have to only look at /sub. I have to keep it out of sight, because if it’s in my feed, I’ll click on it and get mad too.

      So how do I find new stuff? There’s a lot of communities out there whose purpose is to advertise other communities. I subscribe to those.

      • Bebo@sffa.communityEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I too think the same way. I purposely stay away from all due to excessive doom and gloom. However I haven’t really found any topic specific instance where I would enjoy local content. Now I think finding interesting topic specific instances is a problem whose solution I haven’t found yet. Communities I can find using search function; I even created an account on lemmy world simply to find obscure communities I would be interested in. I wish there would be a simple search function to find topic specific instances.