Not a social media thing. The original quote goes:

Rousseau, who was also one of the people, said: 'When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.'

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_the_rich

I think the general perspective on beehaw needs to change. There's no way they can realistically continue to maintain the largest communities on the threadiverse with only four mods and this is exactly why they should have never let themselves get in that position in the first place.

None of these issues are fundamental. They stem from poor planning from the mod team. You cannot moderate most of the largest communities on the threadiverse with four mods for ALL communities.

Super annoying but a great time to bring up Lemmy's crossposting feature! If the image is hosted nonlocally and posted separately, Lemmy can automatically combine the posts and show it as crosspost links. Seems like this feature should work for local media as well but does not seem to in this case. Now this could be user error or this may be a place that the feature can be improved.

I don't think we've seen any evidence of this yet but I think we should be skeptical of sudden spikes. Could be bots.

I think the fact that they’re more active in this thread than the blahaj folks is fairly emblematic of the problem. They can't seem to help themselves with the brigading and they do seem to be drowning out local opinion with tankie rhetoric and spam.

EDIT: Just pointing out that if this were a blahaj exclusive thread you would get a very different sense of where popular opinion actually stands.

EDIT 2: I was initially pretty excited about federating with hexbear but I think after seeing the effect it has on the overall tone of discussion I'm pretty disappointed.

Not having downvotes does not, by any means, mean you need to post your disagreement. Our instance also does not have downvotes. You ARE drowning out exactly the sort of discussion this community is for. I can guarantee what you would like to say has already been posted and upvoting those posts and moving on IS the appropriate way to handle this issue in a meta community for an instance you are not a part of.

I think this is pretty unreasonable. They should not have allowed themselves to become one of the biggest instances with the existing moderation team. That was never going to work. Placing the blame on the open registration instances and mod tools seems silly. That said I hope this does lead to an improvement in mod tooling.

This is so true and people seem to have a really hard time seeing this. The cultures on other social sites are far more manufactured than we'd like to believe. I think the human driven systems of Lemmy and Mastodon are brilliant but the true killer feature of the fediverse is going to be an open content recommendation algorithm. A collectively developed non-profit driven algorithm would undoubtedly be better at surfacing positive impact content than either system.

This is the thing that I think the mainstream coverage is really missing. I remember listening to a podcast from The Verge where they portrayed the anti-meta pact as primarily a way for tech bros to keep control of these spaces. This completely ignores that the movement largely originated on LGBT instances. Go look at https://fedipact.online/ and tell me that @vantablack@kitty.social is some straight guy. Ultimately, the queer communities concerns were proven correct and Threads has explicitly platformed groups like Gays Against Groomers and Moms For Liberty while remaining wishy-washy at best about future moderation plans.

This is the craziest fucking thing I've ever heard.

Regardless of where the loss in users is coming from the major takeaway here is that we are firmly in a reinvestment phase. This will likely last until Reddit does something stupid related to the IPO but in the absence of that we will probably not see a significant uptick in growth again without major improvements to the threadiverse as a whole. That means that those of us who are personally invested in the growth of the threadiverse should be taking this time to develop the tools and features necessary to weather the next wave more gracefully than the last.

One of the biggest issue I see here is still community growth. Growing certain communities is significantly harder than others and if you don't have a lot of crossposting potential it can be damn near impossible. As it stands, I do not see a way to fix this situation without a hot and active ranking system that takes into account the number of users active in the particular community. As part of a change like this I think we would be best served by consolidating a significant portion of the small dead communities. I think we should also strongly prefer specialized instances like lemmy.film or literature.cafe to truly take advantage of the special attention these sorts of instances are capable of providing particular topics. As it stands only a handful of them have enough broader threadiverse activity to be truly useful.

Another thing I would like to suggest is a change in recruitment strategy. At this point it seems like we are unlikely to pull a significant amount of users from Reddit without more reddit-policy-driven migration, but there are tons of highly educated and engaged users over on Mastodon that would make serious positive contributions to the tone and quality of the discourse over here. For some reason there seems to be minimal overlap between the two communities and that blows my mind. Not only that but I actively see folks disparaging Mastodon in fediverse related communities on a regular basis (and even sometimes in the Mastodon communities themselves). As far as I can tell, these are largely lingering sentiments from a Reddit/Twitter dichotomy. Remember, as things develop the lines between threaded social media and microblogging are likely to blur. A significant number of Mastodon apps already provide a threaded view and one of kbins explicit goals is very much to bridge the gap. With this in mind, Mastodon (and federated microblogging more generally) seems like the best source for new potential users.

I think they should have made a deliberate attempt to remain outside of the top three biggest instances like lemmy.ml. Considering the conscious decision to only have the admins be the only mods (that is there are four mods site-wide that moderate ALL communities) these issues were easily foreseen and they should have accepted that they could not realistically compete for the largest instance while maintaining their moderation goals.

I'm seeing 43k likes and 48k views. That's insane.

Lol at the implication that the term community is indicative of communism.

Honestly this stuff is pretty important for morale and organization among users. Particularly because reddit is censoring conversation on their site. I don't think it's useful to complain about it at this point.

Just want to throw some admin appreciation in here. Sudden drama like this taking off like a wildfire can be pretty difficult to handle (particularly in the face of brigading) and I appreciate y'all staying level headed and legitimately trying to foster broader trans community outside of our instance. It's an important niche and I'm glad to be a part of it.

EDIT: I think this is especially important to mention as the discourse has kind of soured from both sides. Sure it's understandable that tensions are running high but it's important to remember that there's real people on the other end of it, in some cases doing free labor for a community that they love.

Being harassed and called a lib for criticizing their dogpiling doesn't feel like unity to me.

I'm going to copy my post from elsewhere here:

Not only did we let them monopolize niche knowledge we also let them completely supplant forums and other methods for discussion on the web while letting them slowly poison the quality of discussion overall through the wide spread use of bot manipulation. Imagine an internet with reasonable, easy to access, informative and kind discussion. That is where we will trend without highly corporatized outrage driven content algorithms and it's not just a completely different internet, but a completely different world.

But it's probably not legal for them to sell it. The fact that they've tricked us into thinking this is normal is part of the problem.

Some of us experienced the harassment personally and are not eager to allow those people free reign over our spaces.