There is no digital community that can do better than my living room. When adults meet face to face in someone’s home, there is an automatic degree of dignity and respect established even when there are opposing views.
The fedi is on some extreme push to promote mass migration by folks in places like Facebook. It’s a kind of braindead paradigm to just grow without strategy. If your livingroom has culture of a couple dozen progressive freedom fighters who run free software and value things like privacy and human rights, all is good until you open the door to thousands of random normies. They flood in with shitty values and fuckup your missions by dilluting the rich culture that was there.
It is not smart to just cattle-herd masses into the fedi and think your work is done. The mess is just brought to our doorstep. Then what? Consider !ETS@europe.pub. It’s evident just from the voting that a large portion of readers inherently oppose the purpose of that forum. It’s ruined by adversaries because of open access to all while simultaneously coupled with ad hoc concealed voting (you can only see who downvotes if you run an instance).
In principle, we would still need an ETS outreach type of community which is open to all. But then we need a separate invite-only ETS community where we can cherry pick constructive accounts. Just as I would never approach someone wearing a MAGA hat and invite them into my living room, I would not invite an ETS-hostile account into an ETS activism/cult forum. The outreach venue would be used as a recruiting area from which we separate the riff raff from the favorable accts.
With no tooling changes, the only way to pull this off would be for the mod to selfhost, defederate from all, then invite people to register. It’s high effort for the organiser and the participants, it excludes non-self-hosters, and it’s overly isolated.
Lemmy needs to evolve more to solve this.
Moral purity beatings will continue until morale improves.
Seriously, I doubt that Lemmy will ever offer tools to foster such community support, seeing as how the authoritarian views of its dev team trend less towards the desires of an individual user and rather more towards the mantra of “I, as an admin/moderator, have decided what you shall know and like Ukraine and Hong Kong and South Korea and Greenland, your choice is to STFU and enjoy it”.
e.g. in Lemmy when a user blocks someone, that someone can still: read, vote on, and reply to your comment, send you DMs, and a later change to the Lemmy software further expanded these rights for blocked users to trigger notifications on behalf of the recipient. On the other side, the rights of the person wanting to do the blocking include: the ability to delete their account and move to some other instance where an actual admin has banned the people that you want blocked. Note that some of what I have said here relates more to “instance blocks” but also some applies to “user blocks” as well. Instance admins have supreme rights, but as an individual end-user, you not so much.
That said, I believe that PieFed offers a solution to what you are looking for. Both generically in terms of offering a far more democratic set of rights to end-users, and specifically in this case by restricting voting to only subscribed members of a community. The latter would help limit the impact of drive-by downvoters arriving casually from browsing by All, as well as more specific brigading attempts. I think another option (I’ve never personally tried to create a community on a PieFed instance, so this is all 2nd-hand info from just reading) is to limit votes to only be allowed from “trusted instances”, with that I think being defined by the instance admin.
And if you did need to spin up an entire instance, PieFed uses fewer resources and is a lot easier to set up and maintain as well (see e.g. https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed). I also love its philosophy of offering democratization of moderation features, providing more tools to increase the capabilities of the end-users rather than restrict it more to the hands of only admins. Learn more at https://join.piefed.social/.
It’s just a thought to consider!:-)
Thanks for the info! Piefed seemed to be resource intensive for the /user/, at least in the early days. I should have another look at it… esp. if users are more empowered. The /only subscribers can vote/ sounds more sensible for sure.
Ah I forgot to include this link (I even went to the trouble of looking it up and copying it:-P): https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed tells one story of an irl admin, and https://piefed.social/c/meta/p/1413365/scheduled-maintenance-for-server-upgrades-next-weekend another, both of whom are switching to PieFed, including your very own slrpnk.net sometime in 2026 it would seem.
Also, PieFed sends 25-fold less data per post to the users (though 5x more posts per homepage view, so only 5x less data total if measuring empirically and using that measure rather than a single post page).
So while I’ve never tried personally to run my own instance, either Lemmy or PieFed, everything I’ve heard suggests that people are saying that PieFed uses far less resources. Indeed that might not have been true years in the past (before those above links I posted were written).
There is a Blog with several articles of interest here, if you want, including:
- https://join.piefed.social/2025/11/22/reducing-piefeds-dependence-on-cloudflare/
- https://join.piefed.social/2025/09/11/how-to-use-really-simple-licensing-rsl-to-block-all-ai-crawlers/
- https://join.piefed.social/2025/07/09/tuning-piefed-for-scale/
- https://join.piefed.social/2025/03/19/tuning-postgresql-for-piefed/
- https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
- https://join.piefed.social/2024/03/12/piefed-privacy-control-your-search-visibility/
- https://join.piefed.social/2024/03/07/moderation-the-design-of-social-platforms/
- https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/ - this is wherr I got the 25-fold less data stat from (again that’s 5x less data, but with 5x more posts, hence 25x less data per post)
PieFed really restores my hopes that a Threadiverse platform will be usable in the future, without having to subscribe to authoritarianism!
Just had a look at the Cloudflare article. CF dependency would be an absolute mission-defeating show-stopper for anyone who doesn’t lick corporate boots and values digital sovereignty.
I’m glad they kicked the CF dependency. But we need more progress than that. We need a platform that is Cloudflare-incompatible. That is paramount to decentralisation.
Just to clarify a bit - PieFed was only ever dependent on Cloudflare in the sense that running any kind of busy website is very difficult without a CDN. Also ActivityPub is quite chatty which makes it worse than usual. PieFed was never built in such a way that you absolutely needed Cloudflare to get it working - I agree that would be a grave mistake.
The Cloudflare article was written after I improved the way PieFed works so that the need for any CDN, including Cloudflare, is greatly reduced. That week there was a lot of hate for Cloudflare around so that was the angle I took with it.
But here, you ‘can’ set up your own and control it as such. That is the advantage. It may not be perfectly easy, but that’s what we’ve gained for now.
Set up my own /what/, exactly? I have created communities on slrpnk, but I only have a blunt choice between announcement community or completely open.
I could do announcement, then populate it with dozens of moderators. Might be worth it to experiment. Then there’s still the problem of open voting by outsiders, but I guess another hack would be to choose a no-downvote instance. But then trusted participants can’t downvote either.
You very likely know more than I do about this, but I did mean setting up an instance. It is indeed extra work, but then you do have the ability to have specific communities. I think that’s the spirit of what you are after. I also think that’s probably for the best of what decentralized media can offer. We do need our own, known communities of people, simulating the living room. Otherwise, yes it seems you would have to deal with many moderators from what I can see technically.
I agree Lemmy has gone to liberal hell. The goal with herding people into the federation is that the prefiguration of this infrastructure will automatically improve people’s experiences because the community takes the shape the tools suggest.
Unfortunately, I think upvotes inherently produce populist bullshit, for whatever the lowest common denominator of your community is.
However, if you do think an upvote-based community is good as long as you’re the gatekeeper, you’re being lazy. The solution is what you dismiss in the last paragraph as “too much effort”. Your complaint that it’s overly isolated is entitlement to an audience’s attention.
The point of federation is to share a community that you respect. You do not respect the community of this federation so you should not want to be connected with them.
The point of being a mod on someone else’s instance is that you trust them to make infrastructure choices like federation on your behalf. If you don’t like their choices then don’t work to maintain their communities.
Maybe the question you want to ask is if there already are federations that have a nicer culture that you can move to.
However, if you do think an upvote-based community is good as long as you’re the gatekeeper, you’re being lazy.
Good tools enable us to be lazy. Whether I am personally “lazy” is irrelevent. I tend to be motivated when the tools, protocols, and infra are well designed. OTOH, I become lazy when tools are lousy. I try to avoid poorly designed tools as much as possible.
The solution is what you dismiss in the last paragraph as “too much effort”.
Machines should work for humans. Not the other way around. If I were highly motivated to labor over blunt unsophisticated tools, every single invitee still has the extra labor of registration. To understand how that is a recipe for disaster, just look at MS Github. A vast majority of FOSS projects are jailed in Microsoft’s walled garden because all the users are too lazy to register more than one account.
I do not have access to an unlimited WAN uplink. I am often offline for long stretches of time. So it’s not just a matter of investing time but money as well. A good infra doesn’t limit community builders to those with deep pockets.
Your complaint that it’s overly isolated is entitlement to an audience’s attention.
It’s not entitlement. It’s opportunity. Shutting off visibility is a missed opportunity for exposure. It’s another recipe for disaster.
The point of federation is to share a community that you respect. You do not respect the community of this federation so you should not want to be connected with them.
That’s another very blunt lever. Every community has adults and children; philosophical deep thinkers, and clowns; civil people and hotheads and trolls.
