Conversation ongoing over there, inviting anyone who wants to participate to please consider sharing their thoughts if they are willing to. If you wanna post in the original thread from your instance copy and paste the link into your instances search panel

As I said in the thread, if you aren’t comfortable posting feel free to DM me here or on matrix and I can post anonymously for you.

  • jarfil@beehaw.org
    3·
    1 year ago

    The constant mention of hentai as a “hobby” is one weird manifestation of this on Lemmy, and the amount of porn featuring heavily-edited thin young women. For anyone going to one of the main instances right now for the first time, there’s a good chance that’s a large portion of the feeds.

    Calling sexual preferences a “hobby” is weird AF… but I wanted to point out that the “feeds”, as in the “All” of any instance that’s federating with Lemmynsfw or similar, is likely going to be full of porn… not because the instance itself is full of porn, but because it’s a huge fail on Lemmy’s part to make a feed which is a bundle of all subscribed communities by even a single user on the instance, so if anyone subscribes to porn, it goes straight to “All”.

    This single point, can have a technical solution.

    • fiat_lux@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      This is true, and ultimately I think it captures the problems with all social interaction including this topic. How do we determine what is acceptable or even welcoming behaviour/content? Frequently by majority. And if the majority has started heavily skewed to one demographic, then anyone coming in afterwards starts as an outsider in some way. And if the tools are built by a skewed majority, the tools will fix what the skewed majority considers important.

      I have no solutions for this, I’m just thinking out loud and you got me on this path. Sorry for the notification!

      • jarfil@beehaw.org
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yes, of course, but this is the beauty of federated systems running on open source platforms, isn’t it? No matter the bias, both the tooling can be changed, and instances with a different bias can be set up. There is always going to be a bias, but there is no lock-in to a single one.

        In this particular case, there are some possible technical solutions:

        • The simplest one, would be to just allow instance admins pick which communities they wish to feature in their instance’s “All” feed. Not an “all as controlled by users”, but an “all as controlled by admins” (this in itself is a “curious” bias introduced by the upstream developers, given their political views… but let’s not delve into that)
        • A more advanced solution, but equally desirable, would be adding support for custom feeds (see: multireddits, Twitter timelines, Mastodon), with “All” being just one of them that happened to be controlled and promoted by the instance’s admin, configurable through the same interface as any other.

        It may not be possible, or even desirable, to remove all bias, but it can be left to the user to pick which one they like more.

        (And don’t worry, I’m also thinking out loud… since right now I’m unable to get hands-on to adding any of these options, and it’s eating me alive 😅)