this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Fedigrow
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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
Resources:
- https://lemmy-federate.com/ to federate your community to a lot of instances
- !fedibridge@lemmy.dbzer0.com to organize overall fediverse growth
- !reddit@lemmy.world to keep tabs on where new users might come from :)
- !newcommunities@lemmy.world
- !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
Megathreads:
- How (and when) to consolidate communities? (A guide)
- Where to request inactive or unmoderated communities? (A list)
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Personally, I'd just like to see up/downvotes replaced wholesale with emoji reactions.
Downvotes are a dark feature designed to excuse Reddit (and YouTube, etc.) from actually moderating their platforms under the guise of "social" moderation, but it's actually something that stifles speech that challenges the consensus, rather than preventing toxicity.
Meanwhile, custom emojis are another way for instaces to differentiate themselves.
On one hand I did often see toxicity downvoted on Reddit, and the very few times I saw spam it was correctly heavily downvoted.
I also often saw subs with "be civil!" as a rule frequently let comments that made good points but just had to throw in an unnecessary insult at the end, even when the person they replied to did not bring any kind of aggression at all. Or comments that were nothing but an insult, as long as the person they were insulting expressed an unpopular opinion. And I often saw unpopular opinions, expressed politely; that weren't "well it's just my opinion of course, you are free to disagree :) but I think it would be best for everyone if the Jews were all gassed," that were not obviously hateful opinions expressed in polite wording but that actually added to the discussion, get downvoted. I often hold majority opinions online so I am not usually the victim of this, but man did it feel bad seeing a reasonable, friendly person who maybe wasn't as anticorporate as everyone else or as informed about things get punished and shown disapproval in a way that should have been reserved for comments of "fucking idiot :)". Which actually received upvotes for being said to someone expressing a non-hateful opinion politely and reasonably.
I also see all that unkind behavior on Lemmy, though less often. Poke your head in enough "bad news" posts, especially "company does anticonsumer move" posts on !gaming@lemmy.world and you'll probably see some of what I am talking about. I have since learned to either just read the title, or click to the news article and avoid the comments like the plague if I do not want to be upset by "amazing explanation of a point you agree with followed by mean words to someone who wasn't being offensive," or "people online fighting again" or "comment whose only content is insults gets upvoted"
I miss Facebook style reactions so much, one of the best features they came up with. It's a shame everything else was garbage, including the company hahahaha
They can be disabled on Lemmy but it has to be done at the instance level. Our instance has them disabled. Not a perfect solution but it does help address this issue.