Quadruple moderation is killing Lemmy. It’s a gift to Reddit
There’s a rule about online communities I want people here to understand: the 90-9-1 rule.
Roughly 90% lurk, 9% comment, and 1% create.
Additionally - lemmy monthly active users is stangant at about 35k monthly active and not improving:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
When I first got to Lemmy, I had trouble finding enough content I was interested in even commenting on. So I figured: why complain about the lack of content when one can start posting it myself?
That’s why I post so much.
If people don’t post, most Lemmy communities simply don’t have enough creators to sustain themselves. You need posts before lurkers can lurk, commenters can comment, and some of those people eventually become creators themselves.
I’m not posting just to flood Lemmy. I’m trying to help solve one of Lemmy’s biggest problems: not enough content creators.
And frankly, doing that has been a nightmare.
Lemmy has a quadruple-moderation problem
Every active content creator has to survive four layers:
- Community moderators can remove your posts or ban you from the community.
- Your home-instance admins can ban your entire account.
- Receiving-instance admins can block/ban you for everyone on their instance, even though you don’t belong to it.
- Public moderation history means those decisions follow you. One moderator’s decision can influence another and snowball into more moderation.
For prolific content creators, that’s brutal.
I’ve had multiple accounts banned over one or two posts that somebody didn’t like. Months of posting, comments, engagement and contributions can effectively disappear from a community because of a couple of moderation decisions.
And the more you contribute, the worse the odds become. If you make hundreds or thousands of posts, eventually you’re going to post something that one moderator somewhere doesn’t like.
You don’t need one moderation team to tolerate you. You need multiple independent moderators and admins, across multiple servers, to remain aligned indefinitely.
There’s almost no cost to deleting a creator
This is another major difference from Reddit.
There is generally no financial investment in a Lemmy community’s content. A volunteer moderator can ban someone who contributed months of posts and comments and lose all of that person’s past and future contributions without losing revenue, salary or investment. Did you know all creator posts are wiped out from lemmy after account banned?
The creator paid the cost in time.
The community loses the content.
The users lose something to read and discuss.
And the moderator who pushed the button may personally lose essentially nothing.
So who benefits from making prolific content creation this difficult?
Because it certainly isn’t Lemmy.
And this creates an enormous attack surface
I genuinely have trouble believing that everyone complaining about prolific posters simply doesn’t understand this dynamic. At some point I have to question whether some of it is deliberate.
If I were Reddit and wanted to undermine a federated competitor, this is exactly where I’d attack it: its content creators.
You don’t need to hack Lemmy. You don’t need to DDoS instances. You don’t need to take anything offline.
Lemmy already provides the mechanism.
Report prolific contributors. Call their posting “spam.” accuse them of being bots. Point moderators toward their public moderation histories. Get one account banned somewhere, then let that decision influence moderators elsewhere.
Eventually the creator gets tired of fighting and leaves.
I’m not claiming I have proof Reddit is doing this. I’m saying Lemmy’s architecture makes this kind of subversion ridiculously easy, and Reddit would be an obvious beneficiary.
Reddit doesn’t have this same federated quadruple-jeopardy problem. You’re primarily dealing with the moderation of the subreddit you’re contributing to.
Lemmy desperately needs more people creating content, yet its moderation structure makes life progressively harder for the people who create the most of it.
At some point we should be asking:
Who actually benefits from that?
A plea to admins: protect your creators ban reddit agents instead
Before banning someone, look at who is contributing and who is reporting.
If an account with zero posts in years reports someone who has contributed hundreds of posts, don’t treat those two users as equally valuable to the health of the community.
That doesn’t put creators above the rules. Remove bad posts. Warn people. Moderate proportionally.
But stop throwing away months of content and future contributions over one or two posts someone disliked.
Creating content takes time. Reporting takes seconds.
Protect the people actually building your communities.
edit: I am reposting from reddit - there is no rules against that. its actually great thing for majority of lemmy users!
This reposting tool is open source - i’ve never been hiding the fact im reposting from reddit.
people get only high quality pre-dozed, pre-moderated content.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-deep-lighthouse/
I think more people should be using similar tools and populate lemmy with content. - htis is the only way to move that 35k mau number and creat conditions for more OC on lemmy
edit 2 " but we dont want content" argument.
The fuck you dont. who the fuck is we?
And this is why I don’t buy the argument that the people still here represent what users want.
Look at the numbers.
- Fediverse: ~14 million registered, ~1.17 million MAU.
- Lemmy: ~756,000 registered, ~35,000 MAU.
Lemmy has had three quarters of a million accounts created and only about 4.6% of that number is active monthly.
Obviously that doesn’t mean 95% were all regular users who quit. But it does tell us something important: the people currently active are a tiny, self-selected fraction of everyone who has tried this platform.
So when 30 existing users say “WE don’t want more content,” you’re hearing from the people the current system successfully retained. You’re not hearing from the enormous number of people who tried Lemmy and aren’t here anymore.
Maybe instead of assuming the remaining users have figured out what Lemmy should be, we should be asking why so many people tried it and didn’t stick around.
I agree with your diagnosis, but I disagree with your treatment. You are doing the same mistake I did when I implemented content mirroring on alien.top: you are putting out so much automated “content” that outsiders will look at this and think the community is just a place for you to dump links.
Also, please drop the main character syndrome and the “Reddit agent” paranoia. You have multiple people here telling you that your approach is harmful to the groups that are already here. It’s not a conspiracy. Reddit doesn’t care about you.
my posts are strictly rate limited several a day top, posts have to have 100+ upvotes on reddit - guaranteed high quality, have to be be recent (no more than 2 days), not have duplicates on lemmy, there are AI rules I typically add to enforce adherance with community rules etc. its only a high quailty highly rationed content.
ummm no that’s not how it works haha
lemmy userbase is stuck ar 35k a month. thats it.
people that propose - “lets do more of the same” and expecting different results are delusional.
and since its so small - there is no content, and since lemmy bans creators that are trying to change this - it will never change.
so if this continues - there is a reason for active creators to also think - wth am I wasting my time for?
You are not an active creator. You are just trying to hack your way into community building. You are frustrated because most people are completely apathetic when it comes to actual action against Big Tech, and you think that by bringing a flamethrower to the beach you will be able to boil the oceans. Trust me, I have done the same mistake.
Yeah I really don’t like people mass-posting news articles calling themselves creators.
Or worse, shit memes. Keep them to the shitpost/meme/196 communities.
most people and mods actually love my posts and that content is highly upvoted,
look at my post history - noone of it has negative karma. im only post content people like.
There are not “your posts”, that’s what I am saying. You are just parroting things you are find elsewhere, and you are doing it in a scale that is not compatible with the current demand here. You see people saying “I am thirsty” and you respond by pointing a firehose directly at their faces.
they re my posts - because im the one posting them onto lemmy. this is valid name. another thing reddit agents would do is argue pointless semantics and waste everyone time.
haha. fuck yes - I made this.
lets take everything they have and then add original content on top.
have a cake and eat it too
there is a demand. that demand just goes back to reddit.
thats what reddit agents want you to belive. just limit posting bro, we dont need so much content bro. And then people just go back to reddit.
If the demand was to get content reposts, then everyone would have been satisfied just by following lemmit.online or alien.top. Instead, the large majority of people rejected them.
But how do you know the large majority of users rejected it? You’re measuring the people who complained, not the thousands of lurkers who never say anything.
The fact that I’m here specifically because I wanted more content is itself evidence that there is demand. I’m obviously not the only person who opens Lemmy, sees a mostly empty community, and wishes there were more things to read and discuss.
And this is exactly why I question who is driving the opposition. Is it actually representative of Lemmy’s users? A small but vocal group of existing users? Or potentially people with an interest in keeping Reddit’s competitors small?
I’m not claiming I can prove Reddit agents are involved. But when a platform desperately needs content, and the loudest voices consistently attack the people bringing content onto it, I think it’s reasonable to at least ask who benefits.
Because I built the whole fucking thing and no one cared.
All the tools to get rid of Reddit and to have a mass migration were there. I’ve been running the infrastructure for over 2 years. It has cost me time, money. Countless nights working on something to the point has affected my own health and put an unnecessary strain on personal relationships.
And yeah, I might have had a handful of people that told me “thanks” and a some others that even saw the value in what I was trying to do. But looking back I can definitely say that what I gained from this was not worth all the pain and misery.
Lemmy does not need more posts, it needs more comments. It needs the personal touch of people manually reading and responding to the posts with their own personality.
If we wanted more posts we would just be using RSS feeds, we’re all here for the comments. And you making many posts dilutes the commentators so that most posts end up with 0 comments. Posting needs to be properly paced to ensure maximum comments per post. And real human comments, not AI or copy pasted.
these people will never come while lemmy dont have content. chicken and an egg problem
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem though. What are people supposed to comment on if there’s nothing being posted?
I agree that comments and actual human discussion are ultimately what makes a community feel alive. But you need something to start those conversations.
And the reality of social platforms is that the overwhelming majority of people aren’t going to create posts or even comment. They lurk. A tiny percentage actually supplies the content everyone else consumes and discusses.
Lemmy sitting around 35k MAU while tons of communities barely get new posts is pretty good evidence that simply waiting for organic conversation to magically appear isn’t working.
You need posts to get comments, comments to get lurkers engaged, and engaged lurkers to eventually produce more posters and commenters. You can’t skip the first step.
We have posts already. Even if we literally did not have any existing posts, optimizing for maximum comments per post means you make at most one post per community per day.
And most importantly you should be eager to reply to comments in your posts, if you posted it then it would be something you’re interested in.
Honestly looking at your profile, you don’t do too bad. Maybe just slow it down slightly and allow the posts to get saturated with comments, post about the things that you’re most interested in, and give it a personal touch so you’re not just a bot.
And stop using AI for comments lol, Lemmy hates AI
Lemmy doesn’t ban creators. You are just not a creator. Your post slop and repost shit from reddit. If people would want that in their communities they could replace you with a few dozen lines of code. By all means, stop wasting your time doing the job of a bot.
I can almost guarantee that if someone posted original neonazi art most lemmy instances would ban them
that makes me a creator yes. for lemmy.
thats what most posters do - only tiny tiny minority create OC
I post to communities that Im interested in. thats why I came here from reddit.
PCMR and gaming had no contribution at all when I started posting. Im building up those communities, ya welcome
in fact I intentionally dont want to post to games community as it had more contributors, I intentionally picked community with less active contributions. and im sorry - many mods actually reached out and thanked me for contributing.
not just me. many people tried lemmy and back on reddit at this point. just too little content, too much moderation
Can I point out - lemmy MAU is stangant 35k a month, this is a problem.
if its still stagnant by now - it will never improve organically going forward:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats
what is your solution for attracting users?
all im hearing is some whishy washy - “they will come” organically - but they are not coming organically. why is that? there is no content thats why.
Social media usage is declining everywhere.
It’s not a problem if you consider that “Lemmy” is just one of the many ways that people can interact with the open social web. The Fediverse as whole has 50x more users. RSS feeds are (slowly) making a comeback. People who are really deep into their interests (photography, DIY audio, hardware) still have and prefer their specialized forums over hanging out with Reddit bots and agency interns that are doing “social media PR” on certain subs.
Seriously, it seems that you grew up in a time when Social Media was fun and exciting and you’re too attached to those memories. These times are gone. Let go of the nostalgia, focus your energy on building something new and of your own instead of running around trying to convince the rest of the world that we need to go back to some imaginary utopia that never really existed.
I think this is exactly the disconnect: not everyone shares your vision of what the internet should become.
Saying “RSS is making a comeback” as an answer to stagnant social network growth is honestly kind of absurd. RSS is useful, but the average person isn’t abandoning Reddit, Facebook, or TikTok to curate RSS feeds and hang out on specialized forums.
And “the Fediverse has 50x more users” doesn’t solve Lemmy’s problem. Someone wanting a Reddit-style discussion platform isn’t interchangeable with someone posting on Mastodon or using another ActivityPub service.
I’m not asking to recreate some imaginary Reddit utopia. I want the good parts of Reddit: active communities, constant content, and discussion, without the centralized corporate platform, censorship, and control. A federated Reddit alternative is valuable precisely because it can provide that experience differently without corporate overlords banning whatever they want.
You may personally want something completely different from social media. That’s fine. But that’s your vision, not necessarily what everyone who might use Lemmy wants.
If Lemmy is stagnant and huge numbers of communities are nearly empty, telling potential users to “let go” and accept that they shouldn’t want a Reddit-like experience clearly isn’t working.
What’s really funny to me, is you go on this say that your vision is ‘correct’. Clearly people disagree with yours. Please stop using chat gpt to sound more inflated than you already are.
Not everyone wants it to be more populated for population sake. Why should I care how many MAU we have.
You say you want the good parts, but chat got isnt telling you how to keep them. By keeping it small. If you want large and popular, go back to reddit. Not every place has to be the most popular.
The average person is not going to Reddit as well, unless they are searching for something online and end up in a linked discussion.
YOU want a Reddit-style platform, but you don’t want to use Reddit, so you are trying to create your own version of it, with blackjack and hookers. You are part of an tiny minority that is too focused on the medium instead of the message.
You are in the minority. People just want to connect with each other. The medium rarely matters for them.
And now you are seeing that if you remove the “corporate overlords”, the power will be exerted by a multitude of dysfunctional, disorganized tribes. Consider this an opportunity to understand the myth of the Noble Savage.
Please don’t engage with the AI commentors.
I know that by this point I’m talking to myself, but it’s fine. Weirdly enough, it’s working as some form of catharsis in relation to my own experience with Fediverser and even Communick itself. It’s almost 7 years now that I’ve running this here, and seeing someone else so obsessed with this idea of “taking down Reddit” is making me realize how unhealthy my own behavior has been.
You’re doing exactly what you’re accusing me of doing: taking your own preference and declaring that it’s what “people” want.
You say people don’t care about the medium, they just want to connect. Great. Then why are Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, Discord, forums, and the Fediverse radically different products with different communities and usage patterns? The medium obviously affects how people connect.
And yes, I specifically want a Reddit-style link aggregation and discussion platform without Reddit controlling it. I’m clearly not alone, because that’s basically the niche Lemmy itself occupies. Otherwise, why build communities, posts, comments, voting, ranking, and subscriptions in this format at all?
The funny thing is I actually agree with your last paragraph.
Removing the corporate overlord doesn’t automatically remove arbitrary power. It distributes that power among hundreds of independent admins and moderators. That’s precisely what my post is criticizing.
Federation solves centralized control, but it introduces a different problem: fragmented moderation where multiple independent people can exercise power over the same user’s participation.
That’s not an argument for going back to Reddit. It’s an argument for recognizing the weakness in the federated model and figuring out how to make it better.
“attracting new users” is not a sentiment that is shared by all of us, not at any cost anyhow.
The cost being the fediverse becoming a sad impersonal place (like reddit) before it even lifts off.
Your “solution” might attract a few people - those who think bigger numbers are better, always.
many people want to switch from reddit, but cant - no content.
also noeone everyone shares your definition of lemmy. to me - I would love it to be decentralized reddit. im fine with reddit content as long as I dont have to use reddit.
That’s a bullshit statement. It doesn’t even make sense. Once again, you’re thinking people only want to participate in platforms that already have a fuckton of users. (edit: or content, sheesh)
That’s what I said. And again, it’s not just Lemmy. Do you even understand how the fediverse works?
OP has a point though. We do need more people, more original content…
Issue is… (and I’m explaining this to OP:) It can’t be low quality content. Reposts also kinda make it look like a dead place with mostly bot activity… You’re not the first person to come up with the idea to spam this place and it’ll attract users. We already tried this strategy and it does not attract new users. You can look up a bit of history of this place and you’ll see you have to come up with a better idea and not continue to make the same mistake other people already made.
That’s a fair concern. I agree that a wall of obvious bot spam can make a community look more dead.
The problem is the 99% problem: roughly 99% of users aren’t creating posts at all, much less original content specifically for Lemmy.
Even Reddit runs heavily on people finding interesting stuff elsewhere and sharing it. That’s what I’m automating - curation, not a blind feed. Popularity thresholds, age limits, community rules and content filtering are all applied.
Original content is obviously better. But you need an active community before you can realistically expect enough people to create it.
Yeah, though that’s not original in any way. It’s a curated dumpster of Reddit posts. And people don’t like it. As I said we’ve already tried it before. We shouldn’t keep making the same mistake over and over again. We need less re-posts, less rehashing of content from better platforms… Why would anyone join a platform with mostly re-used material? They’re gonna stick with the original! And that’s where we’re at.
But it doesn’t have to be either/or. We can have both.
I didn’t leave Reddit because every piece of content there suddenly became worthless. I left because of the platform around that content - moderation, censorship, bans, corporate control, and decisions about what you’re allowed to see or say.
The same interesting link, meme, news story, or discussion can exist on Lemmy without Reddit’s moderation and platform rules attached to it. That’s actually part of the value of Lemmy.
And obviously Lemmy should develop its own original content and communities too. Reposting doesn’t prevent that. It gives otherwise-empty communities something to discuss while that organic ecosystem develops.
Take the good content, leave Reddit’s platform behind, and build original Lemmy content alongside it. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.
You’re arguing against something I didn’t say. I didn’t say people only join platforms that already have a fuckton of users. I said people leave or don’t stick around when there’s not enough content they’re interested in.
Those are completely different things.
You can have a smaller community and still have an active, interesting feed. But if someone opens Lemmy, searches for their interests, finds communities with a handful of posts from weeks ago, and goes back to Reddit where those same interests have fresh discussions every day - that’s a content problem, not a “must have millions of users” problem.
And yes, I understand federation. Saying “the Fediverse isn’t just Lemmy” doesn’t change the argument. Federation doesn’t magically create posts in an inactive Lemmy community.
People need something to read before most of them will have something to comment on. That’s the entire point.
Edit: Sorry, already posted this above