view the rest of the comments
New Communities
A place to post new communities all over Lemmy for discovery and promotion.
Rules
The rules for behavior are a straight carry over of Mastodon.World's rules. You can click the link but we've reposted them here in brief, as a guideline. We will continue to use the Mastodon.World rules as the master list. Over all, be nice to each other and remember this isn't a community built around debate. For the rules about formatting your posts, scroll down to number 2.
1. Follow the rules of Mastodon.world, which can be found here.
A. Provide an inclusive and supportive environment. This means if it isn't rulebreaking and we can't be supportive to them then we probably shouldn't engage.
B. No illegal content.
C. Use content warnings where appropriate. This means mark your submissions NSFW if need be.
D. No uncivil behavior. This includes, but is not limited to: Name Calling; Bullying; Trolling; Disruptive Commenting; or Personal Criticisms.
E. No Harrassment. As an example in relation to Transgender people this includes, deadnaming, misgendering, and promotion of conversion therapy. Similarly Misogyny, Misandry, and Racism are also banned here.
2. Include a community title and description in your post title. - A following example of this would be New Communities - A place to post new communities all over Lemmy for discovery and promotion.
3. Follow the formatting. - The formatting as included below is important for people getting universal links across Lemmy as easily as possible.
Formatting
Please include this following format in your post:
[link text](/c/community@instance.com)
This provides a link that should work across instances, but in some cases it won't
You should also include either:
or instance.com/c/community
FAQ:
Q: Why do I get a 404?
A: At least one user in an instance needs to search for a community before it gets fetched. Searching for the community will bring it into the instance and it will fetch a few of the most recent posts without comments. If a user is subscribed to a community, then all of the future posts and interactions are now in-sync.
Q: When I try to create a post, the circle just spins forever. Why is that?
A: This is a current known issue with large communities. Sometimes it does get posted, but just continues spinning, but sometimes it doesn't get posted and continues spinning. If it doesn't actually get posted, the best thing to do is try later. However, only some people seem to be having this problem at the moment.
Image Attribution:
Fahmi, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons>>
You're absolutely right to worry about this. This was one of my biggest concerns when I was setting it up. Lemmy already has a definite community vibe and consensus opinions to go with it, and I think censoring the "opposition" opinion is one of the quickest routes to turning any political community into a useless circle-jerk. Most lemmy.ml communities are like that.
My goal was to set the parameters broadly enough that people who disagree with the community are allowed to say whatever they want, but still strict enough that people who are outright jerks in any big fraction of their comments get removed. The current tuning bans about 1.4% of the community. You're still not banned. I don't think limiting it to 98.6% of the community will create too much of a circlejerk. There's only one user that I'm aware of that is banned, for which I disagree with the ban, and I talked to them for a while, and sent them some detailed examples of what the bot concluded about their posting. I concluded by saying that while I disagree with silencing them, I think amending the way they present their posts will help the bot's conclusions about them, and also for the same reason get their point across more effectively to any person who's reading them. The huge amount of downvotes they're getting doesn't necessarily mean they are wrong, but it does mean most people are putting them in that bottom 1.4%, which is a problem if they want to convince anyone or accomplish anything.
It helps that I sympathize with some viewpoints that are unpopular, so I get it if someone wants to have the right to speak their mind without some person looking over their shoulder deciding if they're allowed to, or if they're being civil enough about each individual comment. You're right. That's ridiculous.
Absolutely not. Part of what came through over and over again while I was tuning the bot, and looking over mod decisions to contrast with it, was that a lot of times the moderators are coming in and making snap judgements that are far less complete and accurate than can be gotten from looking at what the whole community consensus thinks is a problem.
This is the algorithm. It's not going to be clear what it's doing, since it's not commented well and it would be complicated to understand even if it were, but surely you can see that there is no "if my_llm_thinks_is_fascist:" block in it or anything.
Like I said, you're not banned, as of the current parameters. Part of the idea is to give people the freedom to come in and say what they want, instead of having an overworked mod decide by hand on the spot what is disinformation, what is incivility, what sources are reliable and not, important and not trivial decisions like that. I don't know how to duplicate for you the time I spent looking over what the conversations really look like, how to draw the line so that the people everyone thinks are clearly bad actors are removed, but the people who are simply unpopular or have a minority opinion are welcome, but that's what I tried to do.
One way to cut to the chase: Just try it. Come in, say some political opinions, see if it works. The bans are mostly static based on past behavior, so as long as you're not posting porn or KKK flyers or something, I think you'll be fine.
If it's something outside the realm of politics I will probably moderate it by hand. I'm not trying to offer a blanket "free speech safe space" for racism or anything else that anyone feels like posting. Sorry. If you want that, you can go to Twitter. It's up to you of course, but I think that this is a step closer to what you're saying here that you want, not a step away from it.