EnglishMobster

From your Mastodon account, just search @technology@lemmy.ml. You’ll see the whole community as if it was one user. You can also interact with comments, reply, or upvote.

Note that Lemmy kind of does a bad job of integrating with Mastodon. Each community is an account that “boosts” (retweets) every post and comment in it, making it very noisy. I talked to the devs about it a while back and better integration is just not something they’re interested in.

Kbin (which is a Reddit clone like Lemmy) works much much better. If you search @Disneyland@kbin.social from Mastodon, you’ll see the Disneyland magazine appears to be an actual user and the threads/comment sections work like you’d expect them to on Mastodon. Any posts appear to come from that Mastodon account (instead of being “boosts”).

Kbin allows you to follow Mastodon users as well, which Lemmy doesn’t support and has no plans to support. You can flip between “Reddit mode” (“Threads”) and “Twitter mode” (“Microblog”) at the top of the page on Kbin, effectively merging 2 services into 1.

Kbin’s roadmap also has it integrating more ActivityPub stuff natively over time. It’s the reason why I use it over Lemmy.

Technically, the domain name is itjust.works. ;)

https://fedia.io does.

But bear in mind that this is just the knee-jerk reaction of the admins at Beehaw; they will likely defederate with any community that has open sign-ups.

Beehaw wants to promote a certain culture within their instance. That’s well within their prerogative - but I think they’re beginning to understand why the fediverse may not be the place to do such things.

The fediverse is designed to link instances with niche communities together. If I had an instance about model-making, there’d be communities for model trains and model rockets and dioramas and Warhammer blah blah blah. These would be a bunch of separate - but related - topics, held under one instance.

That’s how the fediverse is designed to work. You have a bunch of people who share a specific interest on a “home” instance, and if they wish to talk about other things then they connect to other instances and grab communities to assemble their custom homepage. Great examples of this are lemmy.blahaj.zone (LGBTQ-focused instance), rblind.com (accessibility-focused instance), and even the much-maligned Lemmygrad (tankie instance).

You focus on the communities you want and block the ones you are opposed to. Each instance has a discrete subject matter and specialty. You could have an instance which only allows verified scientists and historians to replicate AskScience and AskHistorians, and people who are “verified” will have it as their home instance.

What has actually happened is people want to make Reddit 2. And this isn’t the fault of the users; indeed, I’d say the fact that lemmy.ml exists as a dev-run general-purpose instance violates this very philosophy the fediverse has.

Beehaw wants to operate under the way the fediverse “should” work; i.e. Beehaw.org is a small community dedicated to a certain mission, with subjects that relate to that mission. The issue is that their mission is very close (but not quite) to being “be Reddit 2”.

They want to have a tight-knit community where everyone knows each other and everyone can look at all sorts of content, with strict moderation to prevent the worst of social media showing up on a platform. They want to be a “hub” where people make a home, and their users would be able to dip in to more specific instances if they needed something.

The issue is that the fediverse is a two-way street. I think Beehaw is just now realizing that. They set themselves up as a “general instance” and found wild success. But the “tight-knit community” part is hard when any rando can make an account on another instance and talk to them.

I think Beehaw mostly wants it to be a one-way interaction - their users can participate in other instances, but outside users can’t directly talk to their instance. That’s the only reasonable way for them to accomplish their goals, but that’s not how Lemmy really works, at least not right now.

Add to this that people are flooding in constantly. They want to be in “Reddit 2”. The fediverse supports such things - lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, fedia.io, kbin.social, etc. are all great examples - but that’s not how it was designed to be used. Beehaw is an older community, one founded with thoughts of the “ideal” fediverse… but it’s becoming obvious that (like Mastodon) users are going to gravitate towards the familiar and make everything general-purpose.

I’ve been kicking around an idea in my head of making a Lemmy fork that has Tildes’ ideas about modding baked in. (I would fork Kbin but I don’t know PHP.)

In my experience, it’s always been the best approach to select new moderators from the people known as active, high-quality members of the community. My goal with the trust system on Tildes is to turn this process of discovering the best members and granting them more influence into a natural, automatic one.

…

Trusting someone is a gradual process that comes from seeing how they behave over time. This can be reflected in the site’s mechanics—for example, if a user consistently reports posts correctly for breaking the rules, eventually it should be safe to just trust that user’s reports without preemptive review. Other users that aren’t as consistent can be given less weight—perhaps it takes three reports from lower-trust users to trigger an action, but only one report from a very high-trust user.

This approach can be applied to other, individual mechanics as well. For example, a user could gain (or lose) access to particular abilities depending on whether they use them responsibly. If done carefully, this could even apply to voting—just as you’d value the recommendation of a trusted friend more than one from a random stranger, we should be able to give more weight to the votes of users that consistently vote for high-quality posts.

…

Another important factor will be having trust decay if the user stops participating in a community for a long period of time. Communities are always evolving, and if a user has been absent for months or years, it’s very likely that they no longer have a solid understanding of the community’s current norms. Perhaps users that previously had a high level of trust should be able to build it back up more quickly, but they shouldn’t indefinitely retain it when they stop being involved.

Between these two factors, we should be able to ensure that communities end up being managed by members that actively contribute to them, not just people that want to be a moderator for its own sake.

Combine that with things like AutoModerator (the person behind Tildes is the one who built AutoMod on Reddit) and it seems like a reasonable way for a platform to promote good stuff and cut down on bad.

You’ll have to deal with per-community “power users” with a lot of power, but the alternative is unelected mods who can be just as bad.

I don’t know if I’m ever going to get around to making that fork. But I think taking Tildes’ approach to mods is novel and fresh, and I quite like it.