First, I want to say how great it is to see success in a social media platform not owned by some giant cooperation. That said, right now we are at a turning point where we can still change the platform in major ways and I think we all have a shared interested in Lemmy becoming the best it could be.

Let’s face it, Reddit had many problems even before the API changes. The toxic herd mentality, over and under moderation at the same time, small posts getting drowned out by already big ones and so much more. As you probably are already aware of, social media can quickly end in filter bubbles, extremization and bringing out the worst of the human psyche. These are not problems simply fixed by better moderation. Rather, these are problems resulting from the engagement driven design of most platforms (Post controversial statement -> many comments -> Post gets delivered to more people -> even more engagement -> …) I want Lemmy to be a place that brings people together instead of dividing us apart.

Therefore, I wanna start a conversation on what design changes Lemmy should implement in the future to make sure the platform remains humane and everyone can engage in respectful conversations.

I think a good starting point are the recourses of the Center for Humane Technology, like their course on Foundations of Humane Technology

I’m looking forward to hearing your opinions and ideas on this :)

  • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    1 year ago

    So a straightforward one to get started, and one already in the GitHub issues:

    • Allow the feed to be less viral: the “value” of posts from smaller more niche communities will be weighed against the size/popularity of its community rather than all of your feed. Can even pin this weighting by the size of the community at the time of the posts creation.

    Combined with allowing multi-communities defined by the user so that various communities can be grouped together, any user should find it pretty easy to avoid just seeing the big viral posts. And, AFAIK, this would be something Reddit never did??

    • wiki_me@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      undefined> various communities can be grouped together, any user should find it pretty easy to avoid just seeing the big viral posts. And, AFAIK, this would be something Reddit never did??

      Reddit has this feature, it’s called multireddits.

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I wasn’t clear on that it seems … the novelty I was referring to was weighting posts by their communities of origin. In combination with “multi-lemmy-communities” (which wouldn’t be novel), I’d imagine you’d get a rather powerful and interesting control over your feed.

        • Lennard@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Ah, I see how that could make a difference 👍 I’m wondering wich sorting algorithm should be used by default.

          When sorting by best I come across post I’ve already seen after about 15 minutes. (But maybe that’s more of a feature than a bug; 15 minutes per day is probably just the right and healthy amount of Lemmy 😅)

        • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Yea, multi-lemmy-communities are on the devs’ radar (and have been for a while I think?). But they weren’t the main thing I was talking about as I’d hope that they will come at some point … it was combining them with some equalising weighting (as I said in my sibling response to the same post above).

          • Lennard@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            That makes sense. On Reddit the small communities were always drowned out when using multireddits (worst when sorting by best of the month)

    • Lennard@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I think that’s one great step 👍 It’s always been a frustrating experience asking for help (maybe with a PC problem) and either getting deleted by mods or getting no answer at all

    • Molecular0079@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Combined with allowing multi-communities defined by the user so that various communities can be grouped together

      These multi-communities should also be followable and shareable by others, kinda like how Matrix Spaces work!