A good example is https://lemmy.world/c/documentaries
One of their mods, https://lemmy.world/u/sabbah, currently mods 54 communites despite only being on Lemmy for about a month and has never posted on c/documentaries (except for his post asking for people to join his mod team).
The other mod, https://lemmy.world/u/AradFort, has one post to c/documentaries and moderates 18 communities.
Does Lemmy.World have a plan to remove this kind of cancer before we start getting reddit supermods here too?
Edit: This comment shows how this is even more dangerous than I had thought.
Edit2: Official answer from LW admin is here
Final: Was going to create an issue for this on the Lemmy github, but I browsed for awhile and found that it had already been done. If anyone wants to continue the discussion there, here it is - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3452
Perhap we need another issue for the problem in the original edit (It being impossible currently to remove a ‘founding’ mod without destroying either the community of their account)
I knew this would happen and that’s why I am FOR hardcoded community limits per user unless an admin, in individual cases, allows the user to open additional communities based on past handling of other communities the user has been (or was supposed to be) modding.
Letting a user create 54 communities, especially those that were some of the biggest communities on Reddit is dangerous. Powermodding is a serious problem on online platforms and letting individual users create unlimited communities leads to it. Imagine how much money this person might want to sell their Account(s) for when the platform grows further and interest might accrue?
It is humanely impossible to mod more than a handful of communities alone anyways. The users you mentioned are powermods.
As another good example against freedom of creating unlimited communities is user LMAO whom most of you will probably at least have heard of by now, or even found when searching for a community that has numbers in its name.
I will stand by this position.
Couldn’t someone make alt accounts?
Should we just keep the door open with an advertising sign or should we at least take the advertising sign away?
That’s not an argument not to introduce hardcoded limits, it is a problem for sure, but leaving them the opportunity without at least making it a bit of a hassle is just going to invite opportunity assholes.
Admin owners can see IPs, which will grab most of the abusers who do this.
There are other less direct techniques that major social media platforms use to identify users with multiple accounts even on separate IPs, which Lemmy will certainly need one day.
For now though, simply using IPs is good enough until those more sophisticated algorithms are developed.
They absolutely could. I don’t know if there’s a good technical solution to that. Maybe requiring IP registration or some other identity verification for mods over a certain number of communities.
Residential IPs change on a regular basis, you can’t do anything by IP.
They don’t change fast enough.
You can’t ban by IP, but you can sure tell what accounts are owned by the same person or coming from the same network.
It’s not perfect, but it’s another step that will catch many.
There are millions of people in the same network, lol. IP doesn’t tell you anything.
Then they would use VPNs
Ok, I think you have a point. But where do you draw the line?
IMO, it shouldn’t be a hard limit - that’s asking the dev team to deal with arguments on the topic indefinitely.
I think per-instance limits make more sense in the short term, but that still just mitigates the reason not to do it, it doesn’t solve it.
Ultimately, I think we should experiment with novel strategies, such as various democratic spins on moderation that decentralize authority. The fediverse is all about decentralization and trying stuff without missing out on the larger network after all.
You seem passionate and you have a solid argument - you should post an issue on the GitHub. This shouldn’t be hard to actually implement - the majority of the work on this one is convincing everyone this should be done and what the rules should be
I agree that a global hard-limit is problematic since every instance (admin) will want it to be how they see it, of course.
A per-instance limit was what I had in mind (not originally, this point has come up before because of the user I mentioned in my last paragraph and someone convinced me; There also already is an issue regarding that or something similar as far as I remember and I gave my opinion on it in a reply).
I think in that sense we both agree, it should be per-instance, and as you mentioned, the fediverse is all about decentralization, which is why I think something should be done about it.
And I think unless we have further methods to maintain decentralized moderation, this hardlimit (per-instance) is the first step, or at least a step, in the necessary direction.
Best case scenario, we’ll get other methods of maintaining decentralized moderation and get rid of the softlimit (?) later down the line.
Of course democratic spins like subscribers voting mods every now and then would be an interesting solution (that opens up new problems, of course, but that comes with every solution).
Hope my ADHD didn’t hurt the readability.