this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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[Announcement] New set of communities made hidden (self.meta)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by UlrikHD to c/meta
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We have over a period of time gotten repeated reports of unmarked NSFW posts in certain communities. All of these communities share the same singular mod, who have shown indifference when content has been reported. As leaving NSFW posts unmarked is against our instance rules, we have moved to set the rule-breaking communities to hidden.

Those of you who subscribe to hidden communities will continue to see them as normal, for everyone else these communities will look empty and hidden from c/all.

The newly hidden communities are:

We would also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that programming.dev's policy is to by default hide political communities, pornographic communities and communities hosting bot spam. Users seeking such content can subscribe to hidden communities so see them as normal.

Just recently we also went ahead and hid communities from lemmygrad due to the politics clause.

As always we encourage our local users to report content that break our instance rules. All content you report are seen by the admin team and helps inform the team of what's going on across the fediverse.

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[–] grudan 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

So I’m confused by the whole community hiding thing. Since I’m local to programming.dev, the owner of programming.dev can hide communities from other instances for me? I get that these communities aren’t moderated well, but it seems like the instance owner that those communities are in should be the one on top of that or risk defederation. I don’t really love that my local instance can just hide things from other instances.

[–] UlrikHD 8 points 2 months ago

Hiding communities outside our predefined rules (politics, porn and bot spam) isn't something we take lightly, and we are only hiding them now after several months of reoccurring reports that break our instance rules (3.4).

We will do our best to be transparent about when and why we hide a new communities, and be aware that subscribing to a hidden community will unhide it for your feed.

If you do have concerns and suggestions on how to alleviate those, please know that we are happy receive feedback.

[–] Die4Ever 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

hidden just means it won't show up in the All feed, but you can still subscribe to see all the posts from them

so this is much softer than defederation, and it's per community instead of an entire instance

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Neat thing is, you can just join another instance, or even setup your own. Instance admins can and already do defederate entirely from other instances, you won't ever be able to see that content without leaving the site. Hiding on the other hand means you can still see it if you subscribe to it, they just aren't having it show up on the default feed. This should result in less severe action, like defederation, it's a great improvement. Downside exists, but it comes with more upside. Join an instance that appears to align with your ideals and you will get the benefit of a feed that allows for content discovery. NSFW content discovery is probably better done on an NSFW centric instance anyway.

If you are trying to compare this system to something like Reddit, lamenting the added effort of picking an instance and needing to move around sometimes, this is just one of those things people need to accept and start pushing for changes that make the process easier. The alternative is going back to big tech and eating whatever shit they decide to serve.

[–] grudan 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah that is neat and a huge improvement over having Reddit as a dictator over content. At the moment, I think it’s a barrier of entry though. Maybe that’s a good thing too. I actually like Lemmy more because my feed is slower due to having less people posting on the communities I follow than the subreddits I follow.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

They can't. They can only hide things for their users, not other instances.

The local home admin of a community could entirely remove it, but they cannot hide it for other instances.

For off-instance communities, an admin can either hide them (visible to local subscribers) or block that one community (visible to no-one on the instance). But this again only affects the one instance, and has to be done by each instance that wants that community to be hidden or blocked.

Even if a community is hidden on its home instance, it would only become hidden on that one instance.

[–] grudan 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, this is what I meant. I think it’s kind of odd for an instance to be moderating other instances for its users, if that makes it clearer.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I don't think so at all.

I am on sopuli.xyz mostly because it's run by finns, but also because they defederate and block pornographic instances and communities, which I do not want to see.

Given that there is transparency, then, this type of instance-level curation, means each user can choose on what instance they would like to create an account, and get a starting-point for the kind of content they would like to curate.

This decision makes programming.dev a perfect home for users that were going to block these communities anyway.

Yeah, you can just block everything you don't like, but if theres an instance with a policy that aligns with what you want, you can cut down on that work a lot by just setting up your user there.

[–] grudan 3 points 2 months ago

Thanks for the explanation, I think I’m understanding better now. Part of my confusion is just me still not fully understanding the structure of these federating platforms. It makes a lot more sense now.