Killing Community

This is a theory that’s previously been stated in log/39-normie-hypothesis.gmi, but I think it’s worth expanding on as it’s become very relevant with the recent Reddit shit-show actualizing just how bad that website has gotten along with social media in general. I think the model demonstrate how the...

Great writing on the current Reddit saga. The author put down in words a lot of things in my mind I couldn't find the right words.

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Could not agree more. I said basically this, less eloquently after a day of being on sh.itjust.works.
What's even cooler here is I feel we have the opportunity to have neighboring villages: I'm a villager in my instance, you're a villager in your instance, and civility and understanding is promoted because we are in a real sense representatives of our respective villages. We don't want to make our villages look bad.
As these instances & communities stabilize and mature over the coming weeks/months, I'm very excited to see what happens next.
- Doesn't it feel completely different to participate in a local community vs a federated community? Its so interesting how that works even if everyone can see everything everywhere.
  
  Eh. You can find a cozy little community on another instance and have it feel like home. Especially if you have a "display name" which will make it hard for anyone to even see you're from another instance unless they actually check
- What’s even cooler here is I feel we have the opportunity to have neighboring villages: I’m a villager in my instance, you’re a villager in your instance, and civility and understanding is promoted because we are in a real sense representatives of our respective villages. We don’t want to make our villages look bad.
  Such a nice point! You gave me something to think about now :) In a way, while you are still anonymous, the instance gives you an outside identity. You don't have to remember the username to "know someone from the village" in a way the author describes it, the instance kinda already gives you this.
- Especially since "villages" can completely block an entire other "village".
  Keeps communities that don't want to be isolated more reasonable without having hardline rules
- Well met, fellow villager named… uh… Barbarian

Yeah, I keep saying this to people when they worry about fragmentation. Like it's important to have all the Baseball fans in the same Baseball forum under one big banner.
No, that's not better, that's worse. What you want is a thousand interconnected forums with 100 people each, not a forum with 100,000 people.
- How is community engagement better in a interconnected forum compared to a single forum consisting of all the participants? I'm asking out of ignorance
  How would cross community discussions take place?
  
  @honeyedcoffee For the reasons the OP mentioned. Familiar faces, being recognized in a community instead of being just today's main character.
  In a single large forum most participants are silent, as they must be or it'd be a cacophony. Many are silent out of worry that they need to say something good enough to impress a hundred thousand people, not just something interesting to their local 100 friends.
  On Fediverse things escape their local instances and their local forum-groups by boosts mostly.
  @Zigabyte
  
  to start with, ive had more vibrant, long and interesting conversations more often on a site of 300-3,000 as opposed to a sub with millions.
  
  The way I see it, it's like a small world model with layers and emerging hierarchies, instead of being flat.
- I agree. The problem is that many people who come to Lemmy don't know how it works, and they gravitate to the biggest instances automatically. Heck, it's what I did when I joined Beehaw. It wasn't until a few days later that I understood the pro's of this method. Fortunately, the Beehaw community rules really aligned with me, so I was lucky in that way.
  
  Im definitely in that boat. Tying back to the baseball example I searched for communities with the keyword baseball and subbed to the largest. With some other interests I have actually joined multiple of the same communities that are just in different lemmy servers.
- I can see pros and cons. More people all at once gives greater odds of some unique perspective to take hold that would otherwise only be seen in a single smaller sub community. But there’s also a more vested interest in the health of “your” community if it’s smaller.
  Baseball is a fun example because I’m really sad the biggest group so far has only like 80 subscribers. I NEEEEEED my fix of baseball chatter so I really want that one to grow, lol.
  
  IDK, it seems that once a community gets big enough, it devolves into an echo chamber so the unique perspectives get drowned out. Sometimes the unique perspectives wins and slowly propagates through the community, and sometimes the unique perspective gets buried, but uniqueness is rarely highlighted.
  For example, I used to be active in /r/personalfinance (kind of a cesspool imo), and there have been times when my perspective won out and I saw it get parroted (often incorrectly), and I was later corrected by yet another perspective and that one got buried and to this day people are parotting my incomplete perspective instead of the more correct perspective. I tried correcting it, but ended up giving up.
  So a community needs to be big enough to have diversity, but not so big that the hive mind takes over. I think that magic number is somewhere around 10-100k people.

I really think both sides of the coin have something to offer. One thing I like about larger communities is just the shear amount of content and discussion you can see, especially if you have a lot of time to kill. That being said I am VERY much enjoying interacting in a smaller community - haven't done that in like a decade.
- I think more content is a double edged sword though. I find I used Reddit to second guess myself a ton, like which thing to buy, whether I should like something, etc.
  In a smaller community, I'm left to think more for myself since I can't just offload that to the group.
  Sometimes that data is really useful, but I think I've gotten too dependent. So a SM diet was absolutely in order. And as you said, I'm very much enjoying it. We'll see what happens in the next few weeks as the Reddit situation resolves one way or another.

Defederation I believe is a really powerful tool. More so than it seems. It creates islands of a sort and you can be more or less assured that your interests are respected. If they're not you move to an instance that federates with likeminded individuals. Makes it so much easier to isolate bad actors since they tend to group together. And then you disconnect from them and suddenly a whole avalanche of problems simply goes away. Moderation is obviously necessary but it is much more of a community effort. Keep in mind that most admins and mods are here because they want to use the forum just like you do. Your interests align much more than if a vc backed company Hosts your community with the singular goal of extracting as much value out of you as they can in whatever way available.

I must say, I was always a stranger on Reddit and everyone was a stranger to me. I was there for the interesting links and discussions, but never for the people or the community.
Being a jerk wasn’t the norm, so it wasn’t as bad as portrayed in the article, but it certainly wasn’t a village at any point. Sure, I visited many small subs all the time, so those places could have been villages, but I was always a traveler, constantly on the move. If I noticed a particular username, I was nearly guaranteed never to see that name again, so I never really paid much attention to the thousands of names I would inevitably forget.
- I hear a lot of people talk about how Reddit was full of terrible people. I very rarely saw these people though. Not sure if their voices got down-voted, or maybe I simply stayed away from the communities they gravitated to. Personally I never really browsed Reddit home screen, I just bookmarked the communities I liked and went directly to their pages. So maybe that's how I missed out on a lot of it.
  That said, I did se quite a bit of nonsense when browsing gaming forums. PC gamers hating console gamers, xbox gamers mocking ps gamers and vice-versa. Never did understand peoples need to be superior in the gaming world. These are all just methods of enjoying the same hobby!
  
  As long as you stayed in small, well moderated subreddits you did find what the OP describes as a community, i for one tended to shy away from the big ones and specially the default biggest
  
  I’ve noticed that it really matters which subs you read. I tried to make my reddit experience a bit more serious, so that I wouldn’t be just joyscrolling cat gifs all day and doomscrolling hate news all night. That’s why I focussed a lot on Linux, FOSS, science, technology, engineering, maths, statistics, biology, physics, chemistry subs and stayed away from subs that were more focused on entertainment and jokes etc. That’s probably a big reason why I didn’t see that many jerks.

One underrated thing that keeps the village going is the police. Or, in our case, the mods.
I know, I know! Everyone hates the mods - with their over-inflated egos and unaccountable practices and their capricious banning of innocuous subjects.
But life without the mods means a village where rioters run rampant.
- I don't think we need the police comparison...
  Some moderation is necessary, but if things get out of hand your instance will just be defederated. So it is more self regulating than you suggest.
  
  How do you stop your instance getting out of hand?
- Absolutely, but if the values are spread across the whole community, the village can self-govern itself and enforce the rules without force. If the majority of the villagers don't tolerate something makes the job of a police much easier.
  
  I think that's a lovely idea - which doesn't work in reality. At some point someone will need to be cast out. That can't be done by peer pressure, because scammers, spammers, and griefers don't care about that.
  Individual blocks also don't work because they leave unaware users open to being abused.
  Sure, you could have a town council vote on a block, or have software which blocks a user for all if they have been blocked >=N times, but that's still moderation.

For those curious about the term
- Wow, that was a great read!
  
  Not this part tho
  From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle
  Steam started off shit and got better. Unshittification?

Good points!
I'm interested in how many active villages we will get in Lemmy ecosystem.

This link and the type of discussion it's already generated gives me so much hope for the future of Beehaw. This place is something special and I hope it is able to continue being a village. Thanks for the share.
- What's beehaw? I'm on fedia. 😉

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