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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)

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)?

reiver ,
@reiver@flamewar.social avatar

Some Lemmy servers on the threadiverse seem to have a theme (and are not general generic servers).

For example, programming.dev focuses on (computer) programming and other highly technical topics related to (computer) programming.

I think for a themed server, they would probably want to pick and choose which communities from other Lemmy (or Kbin) servers they syndicate to their home-page or wherever (in addition to their local communities).

I do think syndicating communities from other servers is beneficial — but I don’t think just all or nothing is a good approach.

I think Lemmy should let Lemmy sysops pick and choose which remote communities they syndicate on their home-feed or wherever.

Bebo ,

As a a casual lemmy user with accounts on a few instances, I can say that I never visit the local or all fields of any of my logged in instances. I only visit my subscribed field, which is identical over all my accounts. How much do the local and all fields really matter for users?

scottywh ,

I use all constantly, local occasionally, and subscribed rarely at this point.

That may change but that’s how I typically use Lemmy as it stands today.

MusketeerX ,

When I first joined I mainly used all to find communities I was interested in and then subbed to them.

Now that I have nearly 100 communities subbed, I mainly use the subscribed view, occasionally I’ll take a look at all, very rarely local.

Elevator7009 , (edited )

I do the exact same as you, with the exception of a few topic-specific instances, where the local communities are only about that topic. There I will actually use Local as default.

At least on my Kbin instance, going in All and Local opens me up to doom-and-gloom “big corporation and alt-right bad” news and outrage bait.

I agree wholeheartedly with “big corporation and alt-right bad” and that they’re the cause of too many of the world’s big serious problems. I’d also rather spend my time on Kbin enjoying what I see instead of getting mad. I can already find out what horrible thing a corporation or alt-right politician has done from the regular news, without the understandable but exhausting comment chain of outrage.

Even without an algorithm shoving it down your throat, outrage bait will rise to popular status on its own. Unfortunately, getting mad at and feeling superior to the idiotsincars, choosingbeggars, etc. is kind of crack to our brains. I’m no exception, which is why I have to only look at /sub. I have to keep it out of sight, because if it’s in my feed, I’ll click on it and get mad too.

So how do I find new stuff? There’s a lot of communities out there whose purpose is to advertise other communities. I subscribe to those.

Bebo ,

I too think the same way. I purposely stay away from all due to excessive doom and gloom. However I haven’t really found any topic specific instance where I would enjoy local content. Now I think finding interesting topic specific instances is a problem whose solution I haven’t found yet. Communities I can find using search function; I even created an account on lemmy world simply to find obscure communities I would be interested in. I wish there would be a simple search function to find topic specific instances.

recursive_recursion ,
@recursive_recursion@programming.dev avatar

if

instance protectionism

is occurring due to prisoner’s dilemma then there also exists a sustainable positive-sum solution as the fediverse and Lemmy is playing by the rules of the infinite prisoner’s dilemma:

How to outsmart the Prisoner’s Dilemma - Lucas Husted

blue_berry OP , (edited )
@blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

Interesting. And what would that mean for the problem at hand?

Maybe like that: Moderators would need to know that there is some consequence to protect their instance. For example, because then other instances would defederate or because users would join other, more open instances. That would be my suggestion for some kind of social pressure.

Fizz ,
@Fizz@lemmy.nz avatar

Its as simple as if I constantly see shit discussion I’m not gonna keep returning. Some instances specifically cause shit discussion and therefore instances don’t want to federate with them because it drives away their members.

darthelmet ,

The prisoner’s dilemma assumes an inability to collude and strong incentives for defecting from any potential collusion arrangements.

Moderators are free to talk to and work with each other and there’s no particular incentives to compete over. Everyone is here for good discussion. There aren’t any ads or anything at the moment right? So why not just agree on cooperation? I don’t see the problem here.

anonymoose ,
@anonymoose@lemmy.ca avatar

I’m very confused by this post. Maybe it’s because I’m using a client (Sync), but I was able to select my default post and sort for my homepage, so my instance owners had no say in it. I rarely ever go to my Local or Subscribed feeds because I have a very healthy blocked instance/user/keywords list, so I like to spend time on Everything since other feeds don’t have enough content to fit my needs.

Seems to work well enough, I don’t see my instance taking over my feed at all.

DmMacniel ,

What main page? How does local,local negativly impacts discussion quality? Actor A and Actor B are on the same instance for a reason.

I also always switch to federated when there is nothing new on my subscribed communities.

blue_berry OP ,
@blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

No, they are on different instances.

If you promote the local feed, your posts get attention, which means user engagement. So, user engagement would have a trend to stay in its own instance, which results in bubbles and is certainly not good for discussion quality.

Subscribed feed is great, I have nothing against that. I also don’t have anything against the other two. I just think there should be another one.

DmMacniel ,

why should there another? the federated feed on my instance shows me not only the federated posts, but also subscribed and communities I haven’t ignored on my instance. Which is pretty great.

blue_berry OP ,
@blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

That also the case for me, but for smaller instances, they will never see their posts in the federated feed, therefore, they will only advertise their local feed. It would be cool to have an explore feed, in which you have both

Spzi ,

If you promote the local feed, your posts get attention, which means user engagement. So, user engagement would have a trend to stay in its own instance, which results in bubbles and is certainly not good for discussion quality.

I think this is too much of a generalization. Certain discussions even benefit from a certain amount of shielding from the outside world. I think there are mechanics working both ways, and to generally equate local feeds with reduced discussion quality is a poor argument.

Also, how would the addition of another feed (read: the selectable option for another feed) change anything about that? Instance owners who “push users” to their Local feed (as you unecessarily dramatize it) could still choose Local as their default, even if you requested new feed was implemented.

In both scenarios (with and without the new feed), users can freely select another feed anytime (because no one actually pushes them), or even define one permanently in their settings, overriding whatever default the instance owner had selected.

The new feed would do nothing about the situation but give instance owners another option to “push users”, and users another option to select from.

blue_berry OP ,
@blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

I think this is too much of a generalization. Certain discussions even benefit from a certain amount of shielding from the outside world. I think there are mechanics working both ways, and to generally equate local feeds with reduced discussion quality is a poor argument.

I’m not saying Local feed in general, but showing users the Local feed first. Because I’m speaking about the average user, who will usually go with the default settings. Then this user will only see content of their instance and that’s bad.

Also, how would the addition of another feed (read: the selectable option for another feed) change anything about that? Instance owners who “push users” to their Local feed (as you unecessarily dramatize it) could still choose Local as their default, even if you requested new feed was implemented. In both scenarios (with and without the new feed), users can freely select another feed anytime (because no one actually pushes them), or even define one permanently in their settings, overriding whatever default the instance owner had selected.

I’m always speaking about the average user. Not even the average Lemmy-User currently but let’s say: non-nerdy users that will be more present in the future. They don’t tinker with settings and maybe switch instances if they don’t like their experience. Choosing default settings is therefore important.

The new feed would do nothing about the situation but give instance owners another option to “push users”, and users another option to select from.

Every admin has the motivation for their instance to survive. They need to have some handle to ensure that. As long as it is transparent and applies to basic rules I’m fine with it. The rest is handled by federation.

cwagner ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    blue_berry OP ,
    @blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

    I get posts from other communities in my home feed

    noride ,

    I kinda disagree, /r/all was amazing way back before they started fuckin with it. That was the best way to discover new communities once upon a time.

    But I do admit the firehouse approach isn’t for those looking for a refreshing glass of water.

    harmonea ,
    @harmonea@kbin.social avatar

    I almost never used all on reddit.

    On the fediverse, I use it every day. There isn't enough content in my subscribed feed, so I check the "good stuff" first and then pop over to see what's interesting elsewhere.

    Unaware7013 ,

    Using m/all is how i find a lot of the content I like. There's a lot of magazine blocking to get rid of the trash I don't want, and that allows me to get a moderately different feed than my main subscription page.

    machinin ,

    Interesting, I agree with OP in that I never cared for browsing Reddit’s All, except for rare occasions. But your post made me think about the possibility of setting up multiple subscription lists:

    1. Subscribed
    2. All with some blocks
    3. All
    scytale ,

    It’s partly FOMO. The feeling that even with extensive subscriptions, there might be interesting content that the user would miss because they aren’t subscribed. That and some users just want to discover new stuff that they might not otherwise know they were interested in just because they never had the chance to see it.

    Bebo ,

    That makes sense. For me, I am very sure about what topics/communities I am interested in; other things I am not interested in checking out. My subscribed field takes up the time I allocate to lemmy anyway.

    Bebo ,

    I never browsed all on reddit all the years I was on it.

    Spzi ,

    I’ll never really understand why people want anything but a subscribed feed.

    You got lots of answers in favor of All, so here’s my contribution for Local: It makes sense for themed instances. Examples:

    The Local feeds of these instances basically act as a merged view of all their individual communities. Which is a frequently requested feature in another context.

    Personally, I almost exclusively use Subscribed (since I’m also not interested in themed instances), but there are reasons for All and Local.

    ithas ,
    @ithas@artemis.camp avatar

    Mastodon solved this with an Explore-Feed, which consolidates the Local- and All-Feed

    Can you please explain what that means for non-mastodon users. As far as I know about lemmy, which granted isn't much, local posts are not hidden from all, meaning it already is a consolidated local and all feed.

    Personally, I didn't agree with your previous post and I don't agree with this. I believe instance owners can run their instance however they wish, they're the ones paying and maintaining it. If it's not suited to your tastes, there are other places to look at. If an instance wants to federate with no one or hide all remote posts or anything, that is their choice to run the software that way. People aren't locked in jail cells making decisions with no information of the outside world. Nor are the defaults they set locked either, I just bookmark "hot" and "sub" and go to those every time, regardless of what the homepage has set.

    blue_berry OP ,
    @blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

    Its not like I want to force them. It’s just criticism. If they are part of a federated network, they also get some merits out of it (user engagement) and so they should give something back in return. This will become more pressing if Threads joins the Fediverse. It could flood the fediverse with its own posts while putting the posts of their network front and center in their UI eventually draining the Fediverse off its energy (which of course we could prevent by defederating in the worst case …)

    ithas ,
    @ithas@artemis.camp avatar

    I do think your heart is in the right place trying to find and discuss engagement issues in the threadiverse. That's obviously been a common complaint people have posted about and I can see you believe strongly about this.

    I think I just disagree with the issue at hand, or at least that there is a single one and that this solves it. To give an anecdotal example: I make a post around every day on kbin.social that gets 0 likes, 0 dislikes, and 0 comments, in other words no engagement. You might say this is due to it being difficult to find! Well, it actually is! So much so because it doesn't even federate out to lemmy.world, lemm.ee, fedia.io, etc. I check remote instances and my posts never federate anywhere. If you look at my profile from your instance, lemmy.world, it would seem I barely have any posts, but on my home one I have quite a few.

    This is just one example of course, but from my perspective, the major issues we have right now are technical ones, and I'd like to see those fixed before trying to focus on social ones.

    blue_berry OP ,
    @blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

    I check remote instances and my posts never federate anywhere. If you look at my profile from your instance, lemmy.world, it would seem I barely have any posts, but on my home one I have quite a few.

    Mmh, true, I shows only two posts for me. Thats weird … something similar happened to me with Mastodon, posts never reaching other instances or only very late …

    This is just one example of course, but from my perspective, the major issues we have right now are technical ones, and I’d like to see those fixed before trying to focus on social ones.

    Yeah, thats definitly so. But I think these technical ones are mostly known and I don’t feel like I can contribute much to them … so I think about the social ones.

    blue_berry OP ,
    @blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

    Can you please explain what that means for non-mastodon users. As far as I know about lemmy, which granted isn’t much, local posts are not hidden from all, meaning it already is a consolidated local and all feed.

    Right, but you are on lemmy.world I presume, which is the biggest Lemmy instance. Their posts get much attention that’s why they also appear in your all-feed. But let’s say you are on a very small Lemmy instance with only two communities. These posts will almost never appear in your All-feed, which is why the admin will prevarably put the local-feed as default, which makes total sense to me, but is not ideal for the overall network.

    On mastodon, you have an explore-feed, on which you have popular posts from federated instances and your local ones (I at least think that it works that way).

    subignition ,
    @subignition@kbin.social avatar

    No offense, but I think the solution is to start expecting slightly more from the end-user again. Fifteen minutes to look over the options in whatever new software you're using (in general) and you can determine whether the defaults work for you. It should be as normal as switching to dark theme IMO.

    blue_berry OP ,
    @blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

    That would also be fine.

    Edit: an explore-feed would still be nice though …

    fubo ,

    Remember, there’s no revenue to compete over here. Analyses that depend on standard capitalist competition should be expected to not only be inaccurate here, but incoherent. They simply don’t describe the actual incentives for people’s behavior.

    From a game theory perspective: You have no reason to believe that this specific payoff matrix actually describes the situation here. There are lots of other games besides the Prisoners Dilemma. Are you really sure you’re not looking at a Stag Hunt, or a Battle of the Sexes (terrible name, but that’s what the papers call it)?

    blue_berry OP , (edited )
    @blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

    Remember, there’s no revenue to compete over here. Analyses that depend on standard capitalist competition should be expected to not only be inaccurate here, but incoherent. They simply don’t describe the actual incentives for people’s behavior.

    Maybe, but its just a model. You need to be more specific. I want at least a counter-example ;)

    From a game theory perspective: You have no reason to believe that this specific payoff matrix actually describes the situation here. There are lots of other games besides the Prisoners Dilemma. Are you really sure you’re not looking at a Stag Hunt, or a Battle of the Sexes (terrible name, but that’s what the papers call it)?

    Oh, I think you are right. Stag Hunt does fit better … But I think it doesn’t change anything about the overall argumentation (I think I actually accidentally used the numbers of stag hunt in the picture)

    cre0 ,

    it seems you’re being excessively critical of the defining feature of the software.

    you can go back to reddit if that software meets your needs better.

    changing the federated nature of lemmy et al would just make it a different product. that product already exists and you left it for this one.

    it’s like you quit the police force to join the firefighters and keep telling the other firefighters they should be stopping more crime instead of fighting fires.

    blue_berry OP ,
    @blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

    I’m all in for federation. Thats what I’m actually trying to improve

    Where am I critical of the underlying software?

    blue_berry OP ,
    @blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

    Oh, shit, I actually got the numbers wrong. For the prisoners dilemma, it should be (-1, -1) in the bottom-right corner

    blue_berry OP , (edited )
    @blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

    Here are the updated versions.

    This one is if you look at one moment in time:

    https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a6b4a129-5af9-4ba0-b1f1-f91dff3402ff.png

    This one includes future development of the Threadiverse and the consequence of the action for that:

    https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2742b120-002e-4109-ad02-36de2fd3649e.png

    The second one isn’t prioners dilemma but battle of the sexes (yeah really dump name). I removed the All-Feed option, because for smaller instances it has really no merit to promote it (why should you promote a feed, in which your instances is effectively never present and therefore just drains away your user engagement to other instances?).

    As @recursive_recursion suggested, this would resemble the infinite prisoner’s dilemma and models the overall situation better.

    blue_berry OP ,
    @blue_berry@lemmy.world avatar

    The explore-feed here is simply to put a probablity on local and all-posts. So its a feed that randomly picks post from local or all. Let’s say you get three out of four posts from all federated instances and one from your local instance. This would direct user engagment to the threadiverse but not drain an instances user engagement all together (especially for smaller instances).

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