I’d like to start a discussion about a potential feature for our platform.

As someone who moderates religious-based communities here on Lemmy, I’ve encountered a recurring issue: frequent brigading by anti-religious users.

This got me thinking about community management options.

Currently, Lemmy allows communities to be public or mod-only.

However, I personally believe that Lemmy could potentially benefit from additional options similar to those available on Reddit:

  1. Restricted Communities: Where anyone can view, but only approved members can post/comment.
  2. Private Communities: Where only approved members can view and participate.

Questions for discussion:

  • Do you think these additional privacy options would be beneficial for Lemmy?
  • How might this impact the overall user experience and community dynamics?
  • Could this help address issues like brigading in sensitive topic areas?
  • Are there potential downsides or concerns about implementing such features?
  • How would this align with Lemmy’s philosophy and goals as a platform?

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts, experiences, and perspectives on this matter.

  • jetAEnglish
    15·
    2 days ago

    As somebody who moderates health and diet communities, yes these community tools are absolutely required.

    Especially with respect to voting, there needs to be an

    • option for a community to not go to the all feed if requested
    • option to only allow subscribers to vote
    • ability that doesn’t require a ban, but to unsubscribe someone from the community,
    • require people to have accounts of a certain age, or certain level of participation in Lemmy, or in a community, before being able to post or vote
    • remove a user from a community if they only have negative interaction with the community, like only down votes

    Right now it’s very difficult for small communities to get started unless they’re loved by the current population of lemmy. Which means it’s going to be difficult to bring other groups here.

    I think it’s critical for the growth of Lemmy that there are genuinely opt-in communities.

    I think the philosophy needs to take into account that people want to make a community to talk about a subject, sometimes they want to talk about the subject in detail, and not just hold a general referendum on the popularity of the subject for the Lemmy as a whole.

    Imagine star trek fans downvote everything from star wars, and vice versa. If someone comes along to make a community for snow speeder project building… They’re going to have a bad time, all the Star trek fans will downvote and chill participation. We need these super small interest communities to grow to attract a broader population

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      Some of these will be available in Lemmy 1.0:

      • #5478: different community visibilities, including Unlisted which is not included in All feed, and Private (only approved followers can view/post)
      • #5038: some more site settings for voting
      • Plugins RFC: allows arbitrary restrictions for voting and posting
      • jetAEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        That’s really great! I look forward to it

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      ability that doesn’t require a ban, but to unsubscribe someone from the community,

      remove a user from a community if they only have negative interaction with the community, like only down votes

      Those don’t really make too much sense to me. The first one just ban them if you don’t want them participating in the community. You can do a temp ban and hope they chill out, and perm if they’re that bad. But unsubscribing them just seems weird.

      Some automod like functionality could handle the second one, but the lack of overall karma is what I like most about lemmy vs reddit. Plus once again you could just manually ban them. IDK if lemmy ignores votes from banned users though so they could just continue downvoting everything if they’re petty.

      • jetAEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        Currently banned users cannot vote in the community

        My main issue is if you ban somebody from a community, it goes into the mod log, kind of like that person’s permanent record. It’s harsh to ban somebody for just voting negativity