This has nothing to do with Lemmy, but more with any social media that is just open to the general public. Ask the moderator teams of Facebook, what they encounter day to day. Many of these poor folks work in shitty job conditions and burn out leaving with PTSD.
If you spin up a fediverse app like Lemmy, you spin up a platform. It is platform software. And you get the responsibility, but also the opportunity, to set that up well. Curate the content in your instance. Lemmy and any other fediverse apps comes with a set of moderation tools that allow you to handle this, and there is a strong focus in the developer community to improve them on a continual basis.
If you create an open club for your hobby in real life, you will also get weirdos joining your group. These people will commit minor offenses like disturb others and serious offenses like sexually harass someone. A club that includes teens will, with non-zero probability, share porn with each other, or even "inappropriate" pictures/videos of their peers - the latter of which is a very serious crime.
You can avoid this in both real life and or the internet by making very closed clubs in which only very trusted people are added.
It's a good time to mention Safe Harbor laws, because not every country has them and so not every person can host something like this without taking on personal liability for what travels through or rests on the "platform".
If a 6-day old account making highly voted posts and no comments? Bot, part of a botnet (check who upvoted, and purge as neccesary).
6 month old account, combination of high and low effort comments? Does not emit hatred with every fibre of their being? Appears to understand debate? Rational human, trust.
You do it on case-by-case basis and slowly increase your trust network
> You frequent enough servers and you realise social media has taught people bad habits
There is a lot of that, and somehow it is acceptable online, while when you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response. Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.
Or how in a private group someone who was invited suddenly leaves the group membership, hops off the channel. Comparative to walking out of a meeting without saying a word and provide a reason. A simple "I enjoyed it here, but I have to spend my time elsewhere" is just simply a polite thing to do, and costs only 2 seconds of time.
> you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle
The difference is that in person you as the asker are more polite about it also. You don't burst into an unrelated meeting just to ask someone a question. Or elbow your way through a group of friends having a conversation just to ask something unrelated.
But in chat rooms (and emails) you do. Easy for folks to get in a situation where dozens of people every day demand their attention and expect a response.
> Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response.
Asking someone a question online does not obligate them to take time to answer it, or even explain why they don’t feel like doing so.
You’re not in a conversation with everyone who is online, so the comparison to in person conversations doesn’t hold.
> Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.
People are doing other things while using their computers and you should not expect to be able to commandeer their attention on demand by tagging them. Again the comparison to in-person social norms doesn’t hold because you can’t see if this person is busy with something else.
I find this sense of entitlement to other people’s instant time and attention to be very negative for any digital dynamic. Whenever someone with this attitude joins a group chat it leads to people turning their statuses to Do Not Disturb all of the time or even leaving the group because they don’t want to feel obligated to drop what they’re doing and respond to that one person every time that person drops a tag in chat.
It depends on the context and situation. You are right for some random public channel. I am talking about for instance chatrooms where a small remote team joins for the express purpose to collaborate closely, and I often find these weird deviations from how you would behave offline in similar setting to be very detrimental for communication and productivity killers. Part of it is about setting expectations and fostering the 'room culture', and that can help improve things. But there is an overall behavior change to the online world. Comparable perhaps (but different in the details) to "road rage", a general behavior shift people have once they step into a car and are insulated from others by their hotrods window screens. And 'commandeering' never works well, btw.
> I am talking about for instance chatrooms where a small remote team joins for the express purpose to collaborate closely
I am too.
A chat room is not equivalent to a face to face conversation. You’re not in an always-on social engagement with those people.
If you need to switch to having face to face conversational norms, you need to request a time for that.
It’s not reasonable to expect that someone’s online indicator means you are entitled to request that they drop what they’re doing and respond to you. Online does not mean not busy.
Nah, you generalize things too much. A chatroom is whatever you make of it. Generally speaking all the social communication patterns we have in the offline world, have equivalents in online communication. A chatroom is but a channel to convey these patterns. A chatroom doesn't have behavioral norms attached to it. The assumption that this is the case, may be a large contributor to many social media problem areas.
Another example. A project chatroom, and the agreement is that comms are async. But there are moments where multiple members are real-time in the chat. It may well happen that you say "Since we chatting now @JohnDoe, we have a decision to make on this and that". John Doe answers "For sure, let's do that", so you give a follow-up with elaboration. Only to suddenly find John unresponsive for 5 days.
That is a ridiculous situation if you depicted that to happen to you offline in a face to face setting.
I always wonder when I see one of those hypnosis shows, where someone from the audience makes themselves a docile fool in front of a large crowd, whether they are stooges or it is the real deal. But I wouldn't volunteer to get hypnotised to figure that out, in fear of being the next person who stands imitating a dog in heat on such a stage.
The few people I’ve asked who’ve been hypnotized said it was true and had no reason to lie or trick me, and it seems true. But if the lens is “we already figured out all biology and physics so we can ignore the possibility of actual hypnosis (putting someone in a trance stage) being possible” then it’s hard to see things that there’s actually immense evidence for (eg the telepathy tapes).
I would formulate it as: The software development lifecycle is inevitable, or you will not have any software. The lifecycle is just not acknowledged and thus implicit to many people. If you hack in Notepad, FTP it to your webserver, then your lifecycle lasts till you switch it all off. A simple lifecycle, but unavoidable to have one.
You can also search for "make invalid states impossible/unrepresentable" [0] to find more info on related practices. See "domain modeling made functional" [0] as a nice example
The phrasing that I hear more often is "make illegal states unrepresentable"; both the submitted article and Alexis King's original article use this phrase. At least according to https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/designing-with-types..., it originates from Yaron Minsky (a programmer at Jane Street who is prominent in the OCaml community).
EDIT: Parent comment was edited to amend the "impossible/unrepresentable" wording
> Decentralization is a great idea in theory. But open networks can't keep you safe. There's no gate, no accountability, no way to guarantee that the person on the other end is real.
Decentralization is just a word. It all depends on how the social networking environment is designed. For instance the Bonfire decentralized fediverse project [0] develops specifically for small and inter-connected communities, and they also support Circles, Boundaries and other functionality that helps create safe social environments.
It is ultra-hard to launch social networks from scratch and be successful with them. You may consider benefitting from the growing ecosystem of the fediverse, and align with Bonfire and similar projects. Be stronger together.
Thanks for the feedback, I really like Bonfire, I'll check it out.
...but I am probably not going to be able to get my mom to use it. And no joke a big part of why I'm trying this out is for something my parents and my family can grab and use easily and quickly.
And yeah it's definitely going to be really hard, I agree. I guess I'm not trying to build something huge (but economies of scale challenge that).
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