Every server publishes this info at /instances. https://lemmy.world/instances

For the latest version of lemmy, hot sort works in the new fashion. There is a pull request with further implementation details linked in the GitHub issue.

Ah, fair enough. My response doesn’t apply then.

You misunderstand what the Hot rank is doing. It’s not balancing newness vs hotness, it’s scaling hotness according to community size. This might feel like newness if you’re focused on vote counts as a proxy for post age, but it’s a different approach. See https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3622 for details.

There’s a couple ways to think about this:

1. There are a handful of Lemmy communities that are just WAY more active than everything else. The main feeds are kind of lame if you have to scroll 300 posts it to find anything other than a shit post from the same 3 communities. Scaled Hot rank shows a greater variety of communities by making it easier small communities to get ranked hotly.
2. Or you can consider Hotness to be a rough measure of what percentage of people who have seen the post interacted with it. A post with 500 upvotes in a community with 10,000 active users is kind of popular, but only 5% of the people likely to have scrolled passed it cared about it. A post with 50 upvotes in a community with 200 active members is much MORE popular relatively even though the absolute numbers are smaller.

At any rate, this preference toward smaller communities in hot is a recent change and deliberate. While they might further tweak the scaling factors, I wouldn’t expect it to be drastically different. It sounds to me like what you want is Top, Active, or Most Comments. All these are unscaled according to community size and will get you top posts by their absolute metric rather than posts that are doing well relative to their community size.

I dunno how to hotlink, but if you scroll to the active users graph at https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy you can see there’s been like a 25% dropoff in active users since the peak in July. Lemmy has still grown 50x since May, and it’s much MUCH more active than it was then. But we’ve definitely crested a peak and not everyone who gave Lemmy a shot then is sticking around in a monthly basis.

This isn’t necessarily bad. Lemmy is still young and has many rough edges, it wasn’t realistic to win all the users that tried it on ease-of-use in a head to head with reddit. And Mastodon has had multiple growth waves interspersed with periods of declining usage, but with the spikes has grown ie remained stable overall. Early-stage commercial social media have big ups and downs in engagement and growth as well, and just like lemmy those ups and downs are often externally driven… when competitors mess up, when a big global news story hits, when a major sporting event happens… these can all be catalysts for one-time growth. It’s not a straight line.

Time will tell what user level we stabilize at in the short-term and what events spur new growth, but it’s normal to have a big expansion be followed by some degree of contraction.

Have you emailed admin@lemmy.world to try to get reinstated? This all seems like a pretty reasonable explanation if it isn’t repeated behavior.

1. If there are clear spam posts, report them. Save their links so you can track whether the mods respond. You may find here that they’re not inactive after all, in which case the problem is solved.
2. Reach out to the mods, in a post asking to be added to the mod team. Again, save the url to track whether the mods respond. You may find here that they’re willing to accept help and add you as a mod, again problem solved.
3. If reaching out to the mods as described above fails, you need admin help. Post in !moderators@lemmy.world or email admin@lemmy.world with the results of 1 and 2, along with any violations of the moderators guide pinned in the moderators community.

The admins generally won’t intervene until you’ve made a good faith attempt to coordinate directly with the mods and documented a clear case that they’re unresponsive or malicious.

If no one responds here, post in !moderators@lemmy.world (also read the mod guidelines there if you’re a new mod) or email info@lemmy.world. You need the help of an admin to make this transition, but if the only mod is banned it should be a pretty simple request.

I haven’t been moderated a lot, but I believe the user gets no indication they’ve been moderated unless the mod replies to them or DMs them to tell them.

I agree that auto-notificiation would be beneficial. Despite the easy availability of the modlog, this kind of question is pretty common. Not everyone knows it exists or how to search it.

Mod actions are public on Lemmy, here’s the modlog of actions related to your account: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&userId=1589367

The comment on these actions is:

reason: Please stop calling people pedophiles

The ban will expire in 3 days.

1. …create a sidebar with some contents… At least some of these communities have empty sidebars.
2. Every community needs enough moderators. A single-mod community is not “enough” for a healthy community because things can blow up when you’re asleep or away, even in a community that was previously inactive. If a community member reaches out to offer to join a single-mod team… that contact warrants a response from the existing mod. Not necessarily to immediately accept the offer, but at least to discuss the possibility of extra mod coverage.
3. It’s just not at all true that if others aren’t posting there’s no moderation work that could be done. Mods of inactive communities can jumpstart them by soliciting feedback on proposed rules, advertising them elsewhere, making scheduled discussion posts, and more. Some of these things can be done by a “regular” community member as well, but if community members try to include mods in discussions about how best to promote the community and the mods ignore them… that’s a sign that the community is abandoned.
4. If a mod is notified that they’re their community is about to get reassigned and they don’t respond… the community is definitely abandoned.

All of which is to say, there are lots of way to detect abandoned communities when post volume is low, and the process I highlighted is the standard way to request a takeover.

The more normal transfer path is to offer to take over a specific community or communities by:

1. Reaching out to the existing mod and asking to be added to the mod team.
2. Documenting their lack of response after a few days or a week.
3. Documenting the failure to abide by Lemmy world moderation guidelines: https://lemmy.world/post/424735 by linking spam or off-topic posts and to communities that lack rules/useful-sidebar-content, etc.
4. Posting this info in !moderators@lemmy.world and offering to takeover moderation.

This is better than mass deletion because it keeps whatever small list of existing subscribers and post content intact across the transition. For moderation, Lemmy world admins will get notified of reports and can address anything that violates instance rules.

Is there an issue for this in the GitHub project? It sounds like you’ve done the hard work of diagnosing the issue and an upstream fix seems likely a modest effort given this info.

No, Beehaw defederated your instance. The open-source community on lemmy.ml someone else already mentioned is your best bet.

I feel like you’re combatively advocating for a specific vision and not collecting and processing feedback as your OP suggests, at any rate… you don’t seem to be understanding what I was trying to say at all… but it’s not something I’m going to fight about with someone who is questioning if I know what a multi-reddit is and dismissing client-side techniques as nonsense without seeming to understand why they were being discussed in the first place.

I’ll leave with these thoughts, do with them what you will:

1. I’m not interested in any multireddit feature that reduces sub privacy. I’d consider it a net loss for lemmy.
2. On Reddit, multi-reddits personal in nature. Such a personal multireddit for lemmy doesn’t require interaction with federation or privacy changes.
3. I realize that a shared super-community feature is frequently requested on Lemmy aimed at addressing duplication of communities across instances. I don’t think that’s more than superficially similar to actual multireddits, and I don’t think it’s a good idea because it creates moderation problems that are far worse than the community duplication problems it purports to address.

What you’ve described is one way. It could also be a filtered view based on the subscribed/all feed which provides a single API call that can return material from multiple communities. I’m not suggesting that a client-side only solution is a GOOD solution. But from an information-flow perspective, I’m suggesting that multireddits are a “local” function. Theu are so local that they’re possible without server-side support at all, and especially local enough not to require representation in the federated feed… which is a more significant change with potential impacts to other federated projects like kbin and mastodon… and shouldn’t require relaxing privacy constraints in any case.

Anyway, what’s the feedback on privacy issue with allowing any user to have read-only access to your community subscribe list…

I wouldn’t want this in exchange for multi-reddits. You can a little bit infer the communities someone subscribes to from their comment activity, but as it stands one can choose to privately lurk and this would eliminate that… silently for existing users in the absence of some big series of announcements to make it well known.

Why are multi-reddits a thing that involves federation at all? Multi-reddits as they exist on Reddit itself could be implemented entirely client-side, the server side stuff just syncs the behavior of multiple client apps. Why does the concept of a multi-reddit need to extend outside of the user’s instance?

OP is claiming that they agree with lemmy world’s defederation choices driven by CSAM, which is unquestionably nonsense. Lemmy world admins have made several in depth posts explaining defederation decisions and none of them had anything to do with CSAM. In some jurisdictions, it would likely be illegal to give such an explanation as it would amount to creating a pointer to a source of CSAM that hasn’t yet been taken down. By and large, these things are reported directly to law enforcement and cleaned up quietly, without showing up in modlogs… and in many jurisdictions the law REQUIRES handling CSAM in precisely that fashion in order to prevent it from being archived before it’s taken down.

Is there a non-zero amount of CSAM in the Fediverse? Sadly yes. Once you achieve a certain scale, people do all the things… even the bad ones. This research paper (from Stanford, it’s reputable and doesn’t include or link to CSAM) discusses finding, in a sample of 320k Mastodon posts, over 100 verified samples of CSAM and something like 1k-3k likely adjacent posts (for example that use associated keywords). It’s pretty likely that somewhere on Lemmy there are a non-zero number of such posts, unfortunately. But moderators of all major instances are committed to taking appropriate steps to respond and prevent reoccurrence.

Additionally, blahaj.zone defederated from lemmynsfw over the adorableporn community. The lemmynsfw admins take reports of CSAM very seriously, and the blahaj admins stopped short of accusing them of hosting actual CSAM. But they claimed that models of verified age “looked too young” and that the community was courting pederasts. These claims were largely baseless, but there was a scuffle and some of the secondary and tertiary discussion threw around terms like CSAM loosely and incorrectly.

I think OP is probably hearing echoes of these kinds of discussions 3rd hand and just not paying attention to details. There’s certainly no well-known and widely federated CSAM communities, and all responsible admins would take immediate action if anything like that was found. CSAM doesn’t factor into public federation decisions, because sources of CSAM can’t be discussed publicly. Responding to it is part of moderation at scale though, and somewhere some lemmy admin has probably had to do so.

If this is true, what is the admin of the reporting user even supposed to do

Decide what instances to defederate. They can check up on:

• Mods of other instances to see if they take appropriate action on reports.
• Admins of other instances to see if they take action against bad-faith mods.
• Admins of other instances who generate a disproportionate number of reports per capita, to address structural, cultural, or policy issues that lead the offending instance to be a bigger source of pain/reports than others.

And finally they can defederate if they don’t like what they find.

New communities don’t automatically federate. Someone who is logged into the instance has to interact with them to cause their instance to discover the new community.

1. Someone needs to search for the community in a specific way for the community itself to be discovered.
2. Someone needs to subscribe for posts/comments to get federated.

See https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/61827 for more details.

But your community will show up on lemmyverse.net, and will show up for people on your instance. Beyond that you have to advertise it in new-community communities and in juggling adjacent communities where interested folks might hang out.