Fediverse memes

Originally I meant that the Lemmy ecosystem is generally speaking more authoritarian than the PieFed one. This is in large part due to the preferences of the devs.

I will now also add the new related point that I think the coding design of Lemmy lends itself more to authoritarian control. It seems geared and marketed more towards instance admins, then mods, then users only last. Tbf PieFed is the same way here, but with a different focus due to the preferences of the main designer.

Lemmy is even more authoritarian than Reddit itself in many ways: Reddit at least sends a user a notification whenever their content is removed, plus users (and anyone who commented or otherwise has a direct link) can still see their content even after that. Reddit users may also contact the moderators via mod mail. In contrast, despite how Lemmy has the modlog, again there are no notifications for removal, and the modlog just says that the action was done by a "mod" (it used to always have the username, but now it can just say "mod", so over time Lemmy has actually moved in the direction to become MORE authoritarian than it used to be, not less).

To be fair, PieFed also lacks a mod mail or notification upon removal of content, but I feel like for Piefed it is simply because it is new and new features being added monthly, even practically weekly. Whereas for Lemmy it gives an impression at least that it is a design choice that seems unlikely to ever change towards more democratic principles. We will see how they each develop over more time I suppose.

For now, many Lemmy instances are very free and open, subject to the software constraints, while others are extremely closed down, most especially lemmy.ml that the main Lemmy developer seems to spend an inordinate amount of time moderating rather than tweaking the codebase. That's fine btw, it's his code and he can do whatever he wants with it, although for me I choose PieFed instead, for all the above reasons and so much more.

Speaking of, none of what you said sounds to me like it should result in someone receiving a visual icon due to poor reputation. I've had some massively downvoted content myself, but if the system is implemented properly then it will consider more like a median downvoting rather than maximum or even average. Theoretically someone who only made 10 comments and >=9 of those were downvoted heavily, yeah they would get that icon. However, the icon does not cause filtering of their content (there are other things that can but those are entirely separate and not based on the user account), it's merely a visual display. I've upvoted, downvoted, and replied to people's comments even when I can see that icon - so it in no way blocks me from doing so or from seeing it in the first place. But it does (helpfully imho) label it, so that I have a better indicator going in what I am getting myself into.