Do you notice a pattern?

Every single one of those is either SF or Fantasy.

There are a lot of artsy lovers of literature out there who hate exactly those genres, and who have a burning passion to fix all the (perceived) flaws which (in their view) come baked into them.

As I see it, that’s a big part of the problem: For the last century “a writer” was always “the literary type”. There were some nerds who pretended to be writers. And those wrote pulp, SF, fantasy, and comics. Those were not real writers. You wouldn’t hire one of those, if you wanted to have a real, well crafted story. At least that has been a rather common prejudice for the last 100 years or so.

And now, all of a sudden (over the last 20 years), the most popular franchises, generating the most income, all turned into SF and Fantasy, while eating everything else in their path.

In that context, I don’t think the current situation is all that surprising. If you want to hire “a real writer”, there is a good chance that you will hit one who despises what writers were taught to despise for the last hundred years. In an unlucky twist for everyone involved, that also happens to be what they now have to write.

I think all an individual entity can do to push a protocol into irrelevancy, is not using it…

Yes? Have you ever tried shoving something back from being on the internet?

I think the situation of a server admin here, is not that different from the situation of a subreddit moderator, back on the other site.

With the big difference that there is no central instance, which has a final say over things: On reddit the mods of big subs arguably do a lot of similar work. In exchange for having to host and pay for a server, the instance admins here get additional powers which make things easier to manage.

And yes, of course a lot of servers will end up copying what big instances do. But they don’t have to. That’s the critical difference.

While on good old reddit as a mod, you often just don’t have the power to do what you want to do: If you want to get rid of that annoying racist Trump community and its members? You are out of luck, because reddit admins like their traffic. And on the other hand, reddit mods will ultimately have no choice but do what the admins decree, without any recourse whatsoever. We are seeing that now: “You will not label your sub NSFW! If you do, we will boot you, and take over your community!”

Instancing solves those two flaws quite well, because the option to do something else remains open.

And even if there is… I think the main benefit of this architecture is that it’s easy to split off and regulate instances with problematic content. You choose your instance. And with that you choose your admins.

I am not even sure that needs to happen to lemmy as a whole. Server level consortia can be made by the people hosting servers. As I understand it, the vision would be that there will be hate groups and spam on lemmy. But that everyone who doesn’t want it, will easily escape it by simply being on a “normal instance”, which is not associated with any of the finge content by anything but the name “lemmy”. Everyone who wants to move on the fringe can also do that, by joining an instance which includes all the bad things which normal instances defederate.

My go to scenario for thinking about difficult situations, is the “reddit 2016 situation”, where you had the annoying trump sub, with the annoying trump people annoying the fuck out of everyone who was even remotely normal. And you couldn’t get rid of them, their spam, and their shit, because admins didn’t want to do anything (Free speech!), you couldn’t engage with them on their turf, because you would get instabanned (Free speech?), and everyone just had to tolerate them spamming the frontpage with their worthless shit. Because they were a community on reddit, had every right to be there, and nobody could do anything. That kind of problem will not appear here. There will be instances which allow the annoying Trumpers. There will be instances which defederate them. And how much split you want, will depend on the instance you use. There is no central “lemmy”, which contains hate speech, or does not. And that’s the difference to centralized solutions.