To be fair, the idea that Ofcom even know Lemmy exists is unlikely.

I doubt it. This is Ofcom you’re talking about. “What’s a Lemmy”? (Said in the voice of Sandor Clegane)

Feddit is actually (presumably) hosted in the UK, so if Ofcom actually knew what the Fediverse is they could start trying to demand they do age verification.

I very much doubt Ofcom knows what Feddit is, let alone Lemmy.

The OSA bill in the UK has caused a hamster forum to shut down over concerns of not being able to follow it (or the risks associated with non-compliance). It’s an unbelievably wordy and excessive bill that is a bureaucratic nightmare for small communities.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/18/hamster-forum-local-residents-websites-shut-down-new-laws/

Look at what Reddit is saying. It’s absurd:

For UK users under 18, Reddit said it has to restrict sexually explicit content; content that promotes suicide, deliberate self-injury, and eating disorders; content that incites abuse or hatred against people based upon protected characteristics; bullying content; content that promotes violence or “depicts real or realistic serious violence against a person, an animal, or a fictional creature”; content that promotes challenges or stunts that are likely to cause serious injuries; content that encourages people to use harmful substances or substances in harmful quantities; content that shames people based on body type or physical features; and “content that promotes or romanticizes depression, hopelessness and despair.”

WTF? How is this supposed to work? A system that auto-blocks all NSFW tagged content itself as a blunt instrument is viable - but half the stuff on here, on Reddit here isn’t even necessarily tagged as NSFW when its posted. Are extreme mountain biking or skiing or skateboarding or other similar types videos going to be age-gated because they could be content that “promotes challenges or stunts that are likely to cause serious injuries”? How do you verify whether or not content specifically romanticises “hopelessness” or “despair” exactly? Are Giles Corey songs now 18+? What does that even mean? Even the writing of it is Orwellian.

It also adds “depicts real or realistic serious violence against a person, an animal, or a fictional creature” ???

Are action movie clips now going to be age-gated? Or video game clips? From TV shows and films that are PG-13?

Well I don’t know of any social media platform that’s somehow free of that.

Truth be told, I don’t want this place, or the Threadiverse, to be considered a lefty safe-space any more than I’d want it to be considered a right wing safe-space. Honestly, I just wish people would leave their political ideology at the door and just interact as people.

Sure, I’m just noting its wider reputation.

It’s not considered extreme really (*excluding some instances). I know you’re referring to calls for violence to certain political figures but it’s as nothing as to what you’ll see on Twitter or 4chan.

As it stands, I’m embarrassed to tell people what I do in my spare time (run an instance and interact on Lemmy). You get a “normie” coming in off the streets, and what are they going to think jumping into this place? Are they going to want to stick around?

I don’t think telling anyone you moderate a community on Lemmy and interact on Lemmy is somehow more embarassing than telling them you moderate a community on Reddit (for comparisons sake). People who would mock you in some way for that would do so whether or not its Reddit or Lemmy, and likely would just view all of it as inherently nerdy anyway.

Lemmy, from my observation has more of a reputation to outsiders as being a lefty-safe-space (closer to Bluesky) than anything else. It’s really not that close to 4chan at all given the sheer gore and overt racism and hatred on there. I know what you’re getting at here, but the dredges of 4chan and Twitter have outright open nazi apologetics in front of everyone. Also, given how unpleasant Reddit can get at times (at least just as bad as here) - I don’t think the type of conduct you’re referring to is inherently a problem for budding social media sites. Not excusing it, but just that it doesn’t seem to be an existential factor.

What “normies” want, if anything, would be non-political communities taking more of a focus. Which I am certainly trying to do.

In terms of Lemmy Dev admins being the mortal enemies, piefed is up and kicking (I’m sure you know this)

EDIT: I see you do based on another reply by you.

!television@piefed.social should make it to 1000 subscribers by tuesday, or wednesday. Also, it’s now the most active piefed community and brushing up on the frontpage of active communities per day/week as seen on lemmy.world.

Yeah, it’s not where it should be. But I’m quite confident that such is the end-goal.

Instances will always come and go in many cases.

Maybe the instance model isn’t the right one for long term federated communities.

The primary problem here is community mobility. If any community could be, with a few key presses, decoupled from an instance and essentially plopped onto another maintaining all of the posts, comments and subscribers - it wouldn’t matter as much at all. Piefed has community migration, and I assume that is ultimately the end-goal. It just needs all the major instances to read and recognise such moves.

I think your grievance is beyond Lemmy and more just a grievance with people in our current culture currently, at at the minimum those inclined towards social media sites. Lemmy isn’t magic software that makes people behave in a particular way.

He had changed his position after I wrote that comment I believe.

That would be the case if most instances operated like that but most don’t. Most will ultimately have it enabled, and if most of them have it enabled it will affect users even on ones where it is turned off.

I feel like this is speculative. I don’t think karma systems across the fediverse are popular enough for that.

Is this a piefed.social change or a piefed software change.

Both.

If it’s the former it’s still a big trust issue because it can presumably be turned off and on at will, by making it hardcoded it can still be disabled but it’s more work, requires maintaining a fork and basically guarantees that 99% of modlogs will be there and be recording.

You could say that about a lot of things that Lemmy instance admins could do, but choose not to.

People need to be the change they want to see. I came here because I wanted to run some communities, but ultimately it was impossible on Reddit. All the names are taken, all the aging mod teams set in stone. You essentially have no meaningful opportunity to build anything new on there. In contrast, and especially with federation, the Fediverse is a completely different system. A fresh start - still after 2 years. And it has way better internal advertisement of communities than Reddit does.

And to be clear, on Reddit you can easily just shout into the wilderness at no-one. Big audience means you can get drowned out.

Apparently, reading the details on there - he might not shut it down.

No idea, but it’s not an active instance so idk what happened.

Disagree. If I run a metal music community, and someone who doesn’t like metal continually goes in there and downvotes everything because, well, they don’t like metal music. What use are they to it? Why wouldn’t I ban them? All they’re doing is hurting the visibility of the community. This is the context in which I would ban downvoters from my community. Serial mass downvoting by people who never otherwise engage with the community, don’t like the topic of the community, and in some cases - the accounts have zero comment history and purely exist to downvote.

I think this is quite different to just ‘wanting an echo-chamber’.