Mods can, but also lemvotes exists as a tool for anyone to see it.

Why? To cultivate a high-trust culture.

Well this stuff can just as viably happen on Reddit.

Well this is where lemmy being federalised plays out. On Reddit, a community is basically completely captured by the first-movers if it has the name people are going to look up first. Lemmy allows people to compete with the same name, on different instances - and even on the same instance as the display name can be different to the original URL.

I mean, yeah, some instances will have rules that community moderators must abide by. In that case you could have some recourse. Then if they still back them, you could go on a wide “defederate this instance” campaign!

But at a certain point, is it worth the energy?

I mean I’m quite liberal on it. I know a number of users in my community that downvote a bit, but those users also actually post and have some interest in the subject matter - so I accept it.

But there really are accounts that have zero posts but downvote EVERYTHING.

In regards to people piling on and using downvotes in a form of a brigade attack, similar to review bombing pieces of media… While I dislike this profoundly and find it enormously toxic, it is still within the realm of public expression. If one means to silence it, one means to suppress the freedom for others to express themselves as both individuals and as a group. As much as I find it despicable or toxic in a lot of contexts, I can’t bring myself to justify the act of banning this form of expression in showing discontent. Moderators of communities, particularly with particular topic focuses will need to ban people to deal with spam, abusive behaviour, trolling, off-topic conduct - to ultimately maintain the focus of their community.

It absolutely is in the form of public expression, but if I see someone downvoting all the posts on a community I run - and they never contribute, I will use the powers granted to me as a steward of that community to ban them. Mass-downvoting can be a problem for small communities as it can bury threads.

As for the rest of your post, I simply don’t believe it’s my responsibility in the communities I run, that have particular purposes, to play house to toxic and otherwise repulsive people with behavioural issues because of the societal impacts of social media engendering loneliness and maladaptive behaviour as a type of cope. Most communities will have a topic-focus and need to ban people just on that basis. Or for spam. Or for trolling. Or for abusive behaviour.

Are niche Communities correct for banning anyone who downvotes?

I’ll just speak to this point generally.

Depends on the communities specific focus. Downvote trolls can be a problem for small communities trying to build up as they can successfully bury threads. I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee communiy and when I banned them (about 5 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn’t all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and they had no contribution to their names. Some of the accounts in question literally had no posting history. These accounts just existed to downvote.

Now, I wouldn’t just ban random accounts for occasional downvotes - but if I kept seeing the same names on threads (and they never actually engaged with the community) with no discernable pattern of downvoting - I might.

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.

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.

Piefed and Lemmy can mostly communicate with each other. In any case, you can’t really compel Lemmy to update as fast as Piefed is.

There’s two factors to this. Lemmy has been slow on developing new features. Eventually people give up despite all the promises. This sort of competition was inevitable, and two - and this cannot be changed - there’s a lot of resentment and resistance to using their software for political reasons.