That’s the exact definition of serfdom.

It’s frustrating that being a mod is first-come-first-serve, but people have been complaining about the system for many many years (/r/Canada is one strong example). So in a way, voting on mods could be a welcome change, but this is clearly not actually for the good of the community.

It seems problematic to have a poll to about boycotting when those actively boycotting won’t be there to participate.

For posterity, would you explain what you don’t like?

I like it and was able to adapt easily, but some of the UI is terrible (and I mean this in a constructive way), specifically:

• Page weight is too high, when I use back/forward or switch tabs on mobile my browser has to do a full refresh. Tildes and kbin are very lightweight by comparison, not sure what the JS code of Lemmy/Beehaw are doing to cause this issue.
• Adding new subs is confusing, but mostly because the “Subscribe” button is hidden by default when you visit a community on another instance.
• The process of subscribing is convoluted You 1. visit an instance, 2. find a community, 3. copy the url,4. go back to your community, 5. past it, 6. open the search link in your instance, then 7. click subscribe and wait a little. It feels like that can be streamlined or something.
• Loading “All” is slow, I understand why, but the UI should do something to explain it to me instead of popping in posts.

But, the discussion seems good, the actual UI is reminiscent of old reddit so I’m happy, and I’m surprised how easy it is to discuss things across instances.

I’d guess that with so many top subs going dark, the mixing algorithm needs to dig deeper and it’s not tuned for that. These algorithms are hard to get right at Reddit’s scale.

As an example to populate the frontpage or /r/all it might would need to scan all posts from the private subs before even getting a sizeable amount of candidate posts from the public ones to rank. Then the public subs won’t be in cache nor will caching help as much on those long tail subreddits. Not being in cache means more hits to the DB and that’s going to affect nearly all requests to Reddit.