inb4 if you don’t like being modded by AI start your own instance
Personally I’m shocked that this isn’t more prevalent.
Reddit was already hard enough to moderate without AI tools. Now in the year of 2026 with what amounts to entirely volunteer-based “companies” or non-for-profits(atleast) running Lemmy instances for us for free you have to get AI help for moderating.
I’ve been working on a competitor to the activity pub protocol and I have a ready-made solution called userless and the only reason I’ve never deployed a demo server for other people to test and interact with is because I have no idea how I would moderate it! That’s encouraged me to work on the peer-to-peer version of the protocol so I don’t have to moderate it at all but still this isn’t easy.
And to address the privacy concerns about who is moderating you… This is the public internet, your data is shared because you share the data. How can you expect privacy in public.
I mean yeah you can totally do that but I don’t feel safe doing that