TLDR: 3 people working together can gatekeep content on the “active” and “hot” feeds on smaller servers/communities.
After some playing around, I noticed posts disappear after reaching a threshold. A quick search later and I’m in the Lemmy docs reading about how this all works.
In plain English, any three people working together (or one person with three accounts) can stop posts from appearing on the default feed. Once a post reaches -2 it will only appear to people who browse “new.” Edit: Of course, it reappears after it climbs above -2, but it’s a race against the clock.
As a smaller server, we’re vulnerable to this. But we also have some extra mitigations - namely, @seahorse@midwest.social has to approve everyone who joins, and that might weed out bad actors.
So what can you do? Upvote content liberally, downvote sparingly.
I feel like this could go either way, depending on moderation. A good response to something you don’t like can make an interesting and nuanced convo for third parties to read. A bad one can just lead to arguments.
I think in a large anonymous place like reddit you end up with arguments because there’s no built-in good will and not enough moderation. Lemmy communities might be able to mitigate some of that to encourage substantive disagreement.
I think right now that’s easy, but when the servers get too big (as some of them already are), moderation becomes increasingly difficult. I’m not convinced the instanced strategy will solve that problem in the long run, but so far so good I guess.
I can already tell the difference from some instances on my feed from just my smaller local.