The mod seems to be a fellow Lemmy user (edit: oh they seem to be a mod of this community) and they’re encouraging Reddit users to migrate to Lemmy, among other open-source software. Given the lack of care about dis/misinformation campaigns on Reddit on the part of the site admins, migrating seems like a good choice. If Reddit ever does take action, it’ll only be when the bad PR outweighs the revenue that these misinformation people bring to Reddit. It’s obvious Reddit doesn’t care about its community, or really the massive role it plays in the current Web. If they’re not going to take responsibility for the social damage they’ve caused so far by harboring and encouraging awful communities, then it’s high time Reddit stopped existing.
If people on /r/linux do take the mod’s advice, then there may be an influx of new users on the site. I think it may be a good idea to encourage them to shop around for different instances on https://join-lemmy.org or make their own, just like the Lemmy devs always encourage. Also, the !linux@lemmy.ml mods should be prepared in case we do get an influx of new users.
As a Lemmy supporter myself, I am not sure why “inability to control disinformation” is a valid reason for wanting to use this. Like, you do know how open, decentralized platforms work, right? A centralized service run by a company like Reddit can control disinformation if they want. On Lemmy, we can’t control that even if we want. It’s just not how the technology is designed to work.
There are better reasons to dump Reddit, like tracking and stuff like that.
Federation is a halfway point between centralization and purely decentralized/peer-to-peer networking, in which the burden of maintenance and moderation is spread amongst several instances. Instance admins have the ability to control bad behavior on their own instance, and can blocklist other instances that refuse to do so. Under this model, any instance that proves to be particularly problematic will find itself collectively blocklisted by the wider federation.
This, one instance wont be able to handle a massive amount of daily users, but the fediverse is designed with ahem… federation in mind.
Mastodon dot social is an example of when there is an over centralized instance, but lemmy ml, although centralizing it’s still relatively small.
It’s not quite black and white in terms of disinformation control. While it’s not possible to control misinformation globally, it is possible for individual instances to moderate it and choose what instances they federate with. Since Lemmy isn’t being run for profit there aren’t any ulterior motives for keeping misinformation on the site either which has been a problem with Facebook in particular, and likely Reddit as well to a lesser extent. I think the community can keep itself honest as long as misinformation is seen as a negative by majority of the users.
Yes, but I think the crux of the issue is that Reddit chooses to not do anything against it despite being able to so so. I guess if there was a serious effort but the end-result would be imperfect because of technical reasons (as in the case on Lemmy) then no-one would complain.