On Reddit, subreddit moderators can comment as regular users by default, and only show the green MOD badge when they intentionally “distinguish” a comment as an official moderation response.
It got me thinking about Lemmy.
On Lemmy, mod comments are often immediately identifiable, even when the mod is just participating casually in a discussion rather than speaking in an official capacity. That can sometimes unintentionally shift the tone of a thread or discourage open conversation.
Do you think Lemmy should consider:
A clearer opt-in distinction system for mod comments
The ability for mods to participate by default as regular users unless explicitly marking a comment as “mod voice”
Or is the current transparency model preferable for federated communities?
Curious how other instance admins, mods, and users feel about this — especially from a trust, power-balance, and community-health perspective.
Is this something Lemmy should copy from Reddit, or is it intentionally different for good reason?
Oh ok, I now get what you mean.
Because of how federation works, that (or those, depending on what client you use,) badges or indicators can’t be completely hidden.
Lemmy devs could I guess hide it in the API, but it would be as hidden as votes are right now (e.g. if someone really wanted to, they could spin up a temporary instance to get that info). I mean, look at what https://lemvotes.org/ does.
And in this case, you don’t even need an instance, you can literally just use browser.pub on your browser right now to get the moderators activitypub collection: https://browser.pub/https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.world%2Fc%2Fasklemmy%2Fmoderators
This isnt really a matter of the API. Its up to developers of apps or frontends to show a badge for moderators on each comment, and this could also easily be hidden. This has come up before, but it seems no one really cares enough to push such a change through.