[Meta] Currently 3 upvotes, 13 downvotes. Interesting.

What do up/down votes mean? On a post, I always figured an upvote to mean “This is relevant to the community and should be posted here.”, and a downvote to mean “This is irrelevant to the community or should not have be posted here.”. [/Meta]

I’m not really sure what to make of the linked blog post – I think x-compasses are an oversimplification, that the fediverse has moved and diversified since the post was written, and now lemmy instances are quite a prominent mode of engagement in the fediverse; but some of the problems and stereotypes they painted in the post are still recognisable today, however inaccurate the depiction may be.

I somewhat agree with the author on how inter-instance politics can often feel like an endless, self-referential hellscape, but I feel like it’s not really that different between two separate forum communities that have beef with each other. It’s a problem as old as online communities. The only spot I kind of disagree on is the political compass thing; I do think that each quadrant represented is very much a sliding scale, and the user communities are much more variable than given credit.

That being said, I think a big chunk of the problem comes down to the fact that user-level moderation still isn’t a first class citizen in fediverse platforms. Things are a lot better than before, but I think users deserve to have the ability to easily filter and curate their online experience without being tedious.