I don’t think the Lemmy software can do anything about it, as it places too much emphasis on manual labor on behalf of the moderators to keep up.

PieFed has some really neat ideas though, on democratization of moderation where users can set software preferences, thereby taking a substantial burden off the shoulders of the mods.

e.g. instead of relying on mods to remove posts, keyword filtering allows individual users to reduce exposure to topics such as “Musk” or “Trump” or “USA”. Or user icons are really cool - e.g. new user account with age <2 weeks, or highly contentious user with >10x more downvotes than upvotes, or potential unregistered bot account that posts >10x more often than they reply in comments. None of those cause “removal” of content except in the recipient’s personal feed.

Probably it depends which corners you look at.

A tiny niche subreddit I would presume would be more civil than a politics community here.

It’s also a lot easier to dox people IRL here. e.g. self-host something, get someone to click, and there you go.

And that’s just the people who even read the rules in the first place - many people, sadly, do not (or perhaps do and simply do not care? well, there is no functional difference).

I disagree, bc “exactly zilch” is fairly extreme. It can do something, perhaps it would not be enough but it could have a measurable impact. How would we know if we do not try?

PieFed has a number of features designed to democratize moderation - e.g. keyword filtering (allowing users to filter All, None, and even just Some content, of e.g. Musk or Trump or USA) facilitates individual end-users to curate their experiences so that mods don’t have to be as aggressive at removing things.

Another cool feature is the user icons - like a brand-new account on the Fediverse gets an icon next to their name, as too does someone who receives let’s say >10x more downvotes than upvotes, or a potential unregistered bot account that posts 10x more often but never replies to comments. These icons don’t remove content like a moderator would, just label it so you can choose to use that knowledge however you wish.

Another one is that people looking for a less controversial discussion environment can auto-hide or even auto-remove content from your feed - I have these turned off but if someone would be offended easily and want not to see things that are heavily downvoted, they have this option. Here it is the combination of the entire community and the end user deciding their personal tolerance threshold that decides what content appears in someone’s feed. There are also options to use “community members only” votes, to help separate drive-by votes from people who have not joined the community and were just scrolling All, e.g. for polls and such.

Oh yeah, PieFed has polls. Also flairs - both user and post. And categories of communities that are user customizable and shareable. It has a ton of new features, both related and unrelated to community moderation. Check it out!

It definitely was stated yes. I don’t want to try to search for it now that dubvee.org is down, but fwiw I definitely recall seeing multiple posts by him stating exactly that, how he wanted to replicate “Beehaw” behavior.

Edit: e.g. a link I shared with someone earlier, not that it works anymore but if it helps: https://dubvee.org/post/dubvee.org/1516426 .

The edits may be confusing but the changed part was put above rather than below:

Original plea below, though it’s superseded by the above.

So while below one of the horizontal line separators he asks for help (then crosses out that text), above he adds:

This instance is shutting down for good on 7/31/2025.

You are on PieFed.social, so you do not have “frontends” like Lemmy does, you (we) have “themes” - go to Account -> Settings -> Themes, like Trans Pride, Card Shadow, etc. I use “PieFed”.

The developer in question specifically declined remuneration - he enjoyed his day job and did not want to quit it, and just was happy to share both his code (Tesseract) and instance (dubvee.org) with anyone, completely free of charge.

https://dubvee.org/about#donations :

I built Tesseract in my spare time as a hobby, learning excercise for Svelte, and to address my own personal annoyances with Lemmy and other Lemmy UIs. That said, I do not feel the need to accept donations for its development.

However, if you really want to donate, please consider donating to one of the following:

Xylight: They are the author of Photon from which Tesseract was forked who also did a lot of the heavy lifting for much of the core. While I’ve replaced a lot of it, none of my work would have been possible without theirs.

As a totally third party here, may I say thank you for your efforts at explanation? Far too often social media can be too aggravating for (some) people not involved in the initial conversation to even want to read (ahem Reddit cough; btw also fuck spez cough), and it is “room-temperature” comments like yours (i.e. not extremist/hyperbolic/aggravating) that allow people to keep going.

They absolutely saw it coming - and have been continually posting about it for several years now. This was an experiment, and he is saying that it has now finally failed - not that after multiple years on Lemmy that it finally dawned on him that people can be mean on the internet.

In his latest message he even goes into some depth as to why it failed: it used to be containable, but after lemm.ee’s shutting, all those trolls shifted over to other instances, and he simply does not have the heart to try and figure out which spammers and such that used to have one name (that he had blocked so their messages did not appear on his instance) now have an entirely different, unrelated name but are still up to their old tricks.

Which is important considering that he lives in the USA and could be carted off in a van someday without warning, just for the extremist leftist content that he chooses to host on the machine registered to his irl name (even if deriving from an outside source - but they will not care about that, only that Dear Leader’s name has been besmirched).

You might have read it in reverse? He started by asking for help from additional admins, then switched to wanting to shut it down and just be done with the Fediverse completely.

If he comes back, it will be on Beehaw or some such.

We are using their tools though…

Well, you are, while I am on PieFed:-P If you do not like what you’ve heard here, then consider switching to Piefed.World (Lemmy.World’s recently-announced PieFed replacement for Lemmy)

PieFed is a 100% for this.

Topic-focused puts you into the Threadiverse, where there are mainly 3 options: Lemmy, Mbin, and PieFed. I haven’t looked at nodeBB but that’s a fourth up-and-comer. (Also people expect flarum to gain ActivityPub support but it currently lacks it.)

Mbin’s major claim to fame is combining the topic-focused Threadiverse with the user-centric Mastodon like sharing, which sounds like not what you want… although it does have hashtags, and yet iirc only on the Microblogging side?

A very few - and unfortunately no longer maintained - Lemmy apps have some of what you want, but it is not worth what you would lose out on by doing so.

PieFed has perfectly what you have asked for. Hashtags sit on top of regular communities, so it is not either-or but rather both capabilities at the same time. And while I don’t know if you can block a particular hashtag (that feature should be added, if not, it’s a great idea!), the concept of keyword filtering (regardless of hashtags) can not only block out all of such content, but there’s even an option to only block out some, if you would rather, so that additional level of choice is nice. The only catch is that app support is experimental at best, so make sure to use the web browser view, at the very least to set up your account with the blocking that you want to see associated with your account, even if you then use an app for just daily browsing.

As Rimu (inventor of PieFed) already said, PieFed has numerous other features that you will fall in love with as well - e.g. categories of communities, which are both customizable and user shareable (so you can create a curated one if you like, and then share with literally everyone housed on the same instance, but there are pre-defined ones so that you do not have to) and many other features lacking on Lemmy such as user and post flairs, ability to hold polls, and just an absolute ton more behind all of that. It even goes further in terms of features than Reddit does, e.g. combining all the comments across all reposts of a particular OP into one view, to help deal with the fragmentation inherent in an implementation of the ActivityPub protocol i.e. the nature of the Fediverse trends towards fragmentation so this helps counter-balance that.

Happy explorations!

It is soooo very hard to overcome our natural biases. An interesting video on the subject: https://youtu.be/5Peima-Uw7w .

Lemmy offers a great deal of freedom - to an instance admin, and to a lesser but still high degree a moderator (e.g. their decisions are immediate, final, and unquestioned unless overturned by a higher authority) - though a lot less to an end-user. Reddit offers things like the modmail, notifications of events, and I can only guess that people are not aware of the level of censorship that has become more common lately. Meh, but if that’s how they want things, then perhaps we here would prefer that they remain over there as well:-P.

As in, perhaps they simply prefer the gilded cage to the level of effort required here to be truly free.

INTERESTING! Indeed I was relating a story from the past, although occasionally I kept confirming that it remained true, and today is the first day that I see that it is no longer. Like on page 1 I see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network), then several pages later (on mobile) I see lemmy.world, but no lemmy.ml up top, anymore.

Thank you for telling me - I’ll stop telling this story or else make sure that I say that it describes the past rather than present.

I would hope so, and yeah when I tried Interstellar with PieFed (admittedly quite awhile ago, and since then I’ve forgotten how to make it connect again) the button placements and such were… far less than ideal, having been designed for Mbin. Also I recall something along the lines of when you switch between looking at a Lemmy vs. a PieFed instance you had to entirely delete all of your app data in order to get it to connect (I submitted a bug report to the dev; well, at least I told them here in the Threadiverse so they know and probably fixed that one by now).

But… I am sure that developing an app is not easy. Which makes me wonder: even when the likes of Thunder and Voyager gain full support for using PieFed the same as Lemmy, will they continue forward and add things such as user & post (community) flairs? And Topics / Feeds? And as you said here the conjoined comments.

And even if the answer was yes, what about the next feature to come along, and the next?

But yeah, with all the major shift to PieFed now, and the most-used apps adding support, it seems only a matter of time before not only the forward development but the pace of that too quickens:-).

I would argue that their authoritarian preferences get baked right into the codebase: e.g. there is a modlog but no notification of a moderation event, no modmail to contest or at least discuss such an event, no ability to DM or even be aware of which moderator performed the action (it used to say the mod name, but now it merely says “mod”), and deleted or removed posts disappear as if they never existed, ironically with the message to check back in later, as if it might come back but of course it never will.

The “rights” of someone being moderated are either to spin up their own instance or to not and just suck it up and take it, or else leave Lemmy entirely. Unsurprisingly, we see people leaving Lemmy in droves (and some, such as those who went back to Reddit, we don’t see so clearly, only being able to read their complaints about Lemmy if we go to Reddit to do so).

And yes the codebase is open, but it’s also complex and written in Rust. It is just easier to write an entirely new application of the ActivityPub protocol in a more comfortable language than to work with the Lemmy codebase, people such as the developers of Kbin, now Mbin, Sublinks, and PieFed seem to feel. And now these have a chance to do differently.:-)