this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Instance Protectionism in the Threadiverse happens because of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (protecting one's own instance is currently more sensible than increasing overall discussion quality) (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by blue_berry@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/5110168

As a moderator of a Lemmy instance, you currently have two options to take: pushing users first to your local content or content from all instances you federate with. These options come with the costs seen in the picture. The moderator of another instance has the same choice. However, in this scenario, they will both always switch to promoting the local-feed. I don't want to say its wrong - it's just the most sensible way to act on Lemmy currently. However, if everybody does it, it is bad for the overall discussion quality of the Threadiverse.

Its a classical prisoner's dilemma from game theory, which sometimes happen in society, for example with supply shortage during lockdowns. A way to solve it is by making action B more positive and option A more negative. This would lead to more moderators choosing Action B over A.

Mastodon solved this with an Explore-Feed, which consolidates the Local- and All-Feed. I think this could also be a solution for Lemmy. It would result in less engagement decrease AND an overall positive effect on discussion quality.

Additionally, a general acknowledgement that instance protectionism is a problem and should be avoided could help to make A more negative. In other words: increasing the pressure by the community. This would put a negative social effect on option A. So: start talking about it with your moderators.

Do you think these two measure would do (additionally to more powerful moderation tools, which would only enable a working explore-feed in the first place)? Is this a problem on other services on the Fediverse too (at least Mastodon seems to have handled it quite well)?

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[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You just claim that this "decreases discussion quality". How do you justify that claim? It is clearly not self-evident and I would claim the exact opposite.

The ”global town-square” as some people like to call the by-gone era of social media is based on this IMHO false idea that the more interconnection the better the " discussion quality" or what ever you like to use as your metric for "better".

But I think Twitter even before the Elon induced melt down has pretty well disproven this idea, as such " global town-squares" seem to rather devolve into low quality shouting matches and are easily manipulated into outrage ("engagement") maximizing hell-sites.

Let's not try to turn Lemmy into another one of those please.

[–] blue_berry@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The ”global town-square”

I don't want that. I stand with the idea of federation. You would have that with one big instance on which everything happens but I'm not for that.

But if instances only push their users toward their own content, user engagment will center around instances. There are many problems to that, which negatively impact discussion quality: small instances don't work because no one sees their stuff, therefore they eventually shut down. Also, filter bubbles develop, users don't see content from other instances, which they might be interested in and comment on. So yes, I think a better distribution over the federated instances of an instance is healthy for the threadiverse.

[–] Mane25@feddit.uk 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't agree with you that small instances lead to poorer quality, if anything there's a better sence of community in a small forum.

I'd rather have more in common with old style unfederated forums than big social media.

[–] aka_quant_noir@hcommons.social -1 points 1 year ago

@Mane25 @blue_berry

In my experience, the problem with small instances isn't content quality or community, it's moderator/administrator transparency and competency.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 year ago

What is the difference between one instance with an "all" feed and multiple instances with the same "all" feed?

I don't agree with your assessment of problems with small instances. A healthy federation is exactly what makes small instances viable, compared to non-federated small forums. Small instances are still easily discoverable by searching for their communities or getting explicit recommendations by other (human) users.

Mixing their communities into an single "all" feed, or worse merging them in "multi-reddits" is what kills them as they loose their unique character.

[–] souperk@reddthat.com 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Highly disagree, if an instance is controlling the experience of a user, then that's a problem.

Each user should be making their own choice regarding using the all or local feed. That choice can be a net positive for the fediverse.

One could argue that even if the user makes the choice it's still a prisoner's dilemma. However, keep in mind that a user's interest does not (necessarily) match their instances, one could change instances or use multiple accounts across different instances.

[–] blue_berry@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Highly disagree, if an instance is controlling the experience of a user, then that’s a problem.

But that's so in any case. I'm speaking about which feed the user is pushed towards, which is currently the local feed.

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seems baked into the cake a bit. I think one solution is to allow user/ sublemmy migration.

[–] blue_berry@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But is that technically possible? I imagine it would be pretty tough migrating all that data ...

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Basic account information and subscriptions are easy to migrate and support for it (similar to Mastodon) will likely come sooner or later to Lemmy. And there are already 3rd party scripts to help with that.

Migrating "all data" is unlikely to happen, as it makes little sense to migrate isolated posts in a discussion, and for legal and ethical reasons you can't migrate other people's posts or full communities as those are not yours and people participating only consented into sharing them on that specific community on that specific server (because it is for example based in the EU where better data protection applies).

[–] blue_berry@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Interesting, I hadn't thought about the ethical and data protection issues for this problem before.

Could linking of communities solve it? You close a community, open it on another instance and link the two?

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm honestly on the side of "This is fediverse 1.0" right now. Its obvious to me that there are some fundamental issues with the design of both activity hub and lemmy that aren't clearly fixable in the current version of things. I also think that its 'somewhat' fine. I think of this as an opportunity to find those pinch points and hot spots, patch and glue in fixes, and then when its time for activity hub "2.0" or whatever, we can resolve them at a design level. Fixing the issues around discovery, toxic engagement, de-federation; they are tough issues to solve for and its clear that to some extent, the design of the system is to blame. However, its not worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. We should stick with the current system for as long as it take before it becomes very uncomfortable, mainly to continue to find issues and blemmishes. This will heavily inform "the next big thing" that comes from the fediverse.

Basically, do nothing other than have discussions like these. Collect the notes, have informed conversations, and maybe experiment a bit on fixes. But don't worry about getting it all perfect and right. Just try. We can incorporate the good ideas into a new version down the line.

[–] blue_berry@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I like that idea