I can imagine whitelisting to become more popular as Lemmy user base grows and communities become more suitable for lurkers and non-techies who know nothing about federation.
Data for your instance: https://defed.xyz/check/eviltoast.org
It’s such a contrast seeing blank blocklist after using Beehaw and blahaj honestly. Small instances are so much better tbh. And this tool is great, thanks! I hope we’ll figure out how to get a list of blocked communities somehow. This lack of transparency is so annoying.
I don’t mind big blocklists honestly, the problem with auditing is purely on a UX side - if we would have a way to sort/filter isntances by software and have some kind of grouping (“all of these instances are on a list of badies”), it wouldn’t be such a problem.
What’s really a problem is whitelisting. It’s proactively punishing those who use small/personal instances, and not federating is much easier than defederating, so it’ll more probably be abused by admins.
Tags would be so good for Lemmy actually. Instead of creating new extremely specialized community we could use tags to help those who want this kind of content find it in a less focused community, preventing segregation of small Lemmy user base. And when certain tag gets enough traction we would create a community for it.
Instead we have sorting mechanisms that actively punish small communities and big communities mostly driven by news (e.g. c/technology).
Do you think there would be similar frustration points in the Mastodon to Lemmy process?
Nah, Lemmy style discussions are everywhere nowadays: youtube comment section, facebook groups, forums of all kinds. I think most Internet users are familiar with at least one of these. It’s just that microblogging can be confusing if you never used it before.
I think Mastodon adds up to the frustation Lemmy users experience with microblogging software with their really bad and familiar web UI and strict word limit. I think we would be more successful if we’re starting with -oma or firefish honestly. But most guides for Fediverse written for Mastodon unfortunately, and you’ll need to learn about how the federation between mastodon and rest of microblogging fedi works to get some content.
Also those aren’t weird names for tags they are more like existing communities.
Yeah, sorry, ‘weird’ isn’t the best word to describe it. They’re more like not that obvious - if you just got into mastodon and want to check what people posting there, you’ll need to figure out first what these tags even mean.
Maybe we could build a few communities on Lemmy that would use tags to get traction on Mastodon so users outside of Thrediverse could learn about our existance? I’m pretty sure most Mastodon users don’t really know about the whole reddit thing and that we now have second entryway to Fediverse.
For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind.
I’m not surprised at all. Microblogging is kinda hard to get. When I want to participate in some online social space, I lurk a bit on there to get the general vibe and then start or join discussion. Yesterday I tried to get into microblogging fedi (mastodon, firefish, akkoma) and I couldn’t get past lurking part because interaction on microblogging social media seems so fractured. And a lot of posts on Lemmy indicate similar problems people encounter on mastodon.
And weird names for tages aren’t helping at all
I think the problem in this case isn’t freedom of speech, but the ability to scream so loud that other voices can’t reach the audience. Corpos and governments use their already established influence to control narrative.