So far Lemmy is vibing. Everyone here is excited and optimistic and willing to put up with a few rough spots to be part of something.
When the Eternal September comes, which it will, how does a Lemmy instance deal with bad actors?
Some thoughts —
The original “Eternal September” (on Usenet) wasn’t an influx of abusers. It was an influx of new users who didn’t know how to do things properly yet.
Most of the new users were from the America Online (AOL) private service, and known as “AOLers”. (As it happens, I joined Usenet around the same time, but from a local dial-up Unix BBS in the Washington DC area.)
The AOLers didn’t know which aspects of the service as they saw it were due to the AOL custom client software, which were due to the AOL local server, which were due to the newsgroup (forum) they were looking at, and which were due to the global Usenet consensus. So when they had a problem, they didn’t know where to address that problem. They complained on public newsgroups about UI issues with their local client, because they didn’t know what was what.
And the existing users didn’t have the time or capacity to help them. The AOLers were added to Usenet en-masse without preparation. Nobody had signed up to help them. The AOLers were accustomed to AOL chat rooms that had staff helpers and moderators; most of Usenet did not have any — just regularly-posted FAQ documents, which the AOLers did not know to look for, and grouchy users who angrily told them to read the goddamn FAQ before posting.
Another consequence of the influx of new folks was that Usenet suddenly just had a lot more people. This made it a tasty target for commercial spammers and other abusers; which led to the eventual spampocalypse and a lot of people abandoning Usenet for web forums or other services.
It wasn’t long into Eternal September that the hardcore abusers showed up, though. That, I think, is the harder problem to deal with.
“Good” Usenet servers did not reliably disconnect themselves from the servers that were accepting and forwarding spam. It was not generally acknowledged that a good server needs to block bad servers: the free-speech ideal was assumed to mean “accept anything from anyone; let the client decide what to filter out” — which meant that new users who had not written any filters necessarily saw all the spam.
And because nothing was secured by strong encryption, forgery was rampant; with a little cleverness, anyone could pretend to be anyone from any server.
There were many, many efforts to fix the spam problem. Unfortunately, as things turned out, it wasn’t enough. Eventually folks noticed that the NNTP facility offered by their ISPs was a great means for sharing pirated porn …
this is worthy of a BestOf, do we have a BestOf?
We do now. https://lemmy.world/c/bestof
The fediverse is your oyster!
Agreed on all points! It turns out Lemmy has a mechanism for federating block lists. What will be interesting is when instances disagree about bans. If you get banned from an instance because - hypothetically - you disagree with the actions of one government or another, it’s not obvious to me that other instances should repeat the ban.
Will we end up with islands of trust?
It’s a damn necessity if you want to avoid a situation like Mastodon had with Gab joining the fediverse.
Imagine the absolute shitshow if a white-supremacist Reddit clone like Poal suddenly integrated their site with Lemmy…
I’m somewhere between libertarian and progressive, I vote for mainstream Democrats, and I’m not super thrilled with the tankie situation 'round these parts. When I get around to running one of these things, you better bet I’m not peering with the Klan.
I’m pretty far from Marxist myself, but I gotta say, I can’t see a system like Lemmy coming up at this point in the lifecycle of the internet except through that kind of ideology. I’ll gladly verbally bitch-slap a tankie for their pro-Putler bs, but the fact that an alt-right instance can (and probably does) exist is proof that true freedom of speech can exist only on a free and open platform like Lemmy. Fuck whatever Elon thought it was.
So much for the tolerant le–
Hopefully you’ve got the Paradox of Tolerance on hand, because you’ll end up quoting it a lot with every ‘free speech!’ person who shows up angry that you banned someone for throwing slurs around.
Yes, as we always do, digital systems should represent the real world, not be a distortion of it. Protocols are meant to standardize communication but the rights to re-distribution have never been guaranteed . Now many understand why this may not even be feasible in a real way.
There will never be just “one zone” and there shouldn’t be, however control over your interaction with these zones should be up to you not brokered by a proxy. To a degree we do this out of necessity though IMO the larger goal would be to give the user the ultimate option even if deployed infra is helping make it happen.
Yes, as we always do, digital systems should represent the real world, not be a distortion of it.
It’s OK for online systems to represent a projection of the real world. Not every feature of the real world needs to be represented in every online system.
It’s OK for the furries to have their server where everyone pretends to be tigers and dragons.
its also ok for them to go to private residences and dress the part, im usually speaking of data, trust and execution realms. These need to represent the real world since things like giving up your ownership of your data and systems should not be a requirement to use a novel app. This is not how the internet was intended to operate and in the days of 6ghz silicon and ultrafast dram the cryptographic overhead of doing things in a way where you own your digital domain in the same way you might own a house is very real.
Where you want the technology to not represent the real world is in its abilities to scale, and that’s what’s really crazy where were are with technology today individuals can be companies and small teams are international orgs. This is not just a concept for entrepreneurs but a concept for anyone who wants to take more control over thier presence.
It’s still okay for people who don’t dress the part to pretend to be tigers and dragons online.
thats not what i mean either, just like in the real world you can wear masks and costumes or not. you can even wear masks that arent obvious simply pretending to be entirely different people. what else are you looking for, hit me with it.
The same Elder Internet that spawned Usenet also spawned furries, which seem to have become a standard test case for “so just how tolerant is your community?”
I’ve been on reddit long enough that I remember the mantra…
Do not talk about Reddit on other sites
Do not link to Reddit from other sitesThey understood the concept of “Eternal September” and wanted to hold it off for as long as possible.
I’m not sure that represents a good lesson from the original Eternal September.
One might hope for an echo of Lovecraft:
Do not call up newbies that you cannot calm down.
And also:
Do not permit automated posting that exceeds your capacity for automated filtration.
in their house at R’ddit, dead C’hatb’ots wait dreaming
It kinda worked for a very long time. Like a good 8-10 years. Sure, there was a slow decline but reddit was still pretty good up until new reddit was introduced.
I remember being embarrassed to discuss reddit irl in a way that I wasn’t embarrassed to discuss Facebook, for example. Reddit was the dirty little secret.
Agreed on all points! It turns out Lemmy has a mechanism for federating block lists. What will be interesting is when instances disagree about bans. If you get banned from an instance because - hypothetically - you disagree with the actions of one government or another, it’s not obvious to me that other instances should repeat the ban.
Will we end up with islands of trust?
Islands of trust, in an archipelago of less-trust, in a sea of no-trust, is probably pretty okay.
Real islands have coast guards and customs offices.
If Usenet newsgroups had come with default killfiles — which users could choose to override — the whole thing might have turned out differently.
It turns out Lemmy has a mechanism for federating block lists.
So if you get banned by lemmy.ml for “Orientalism”, you get a fediverse-wide ban? That doesn’t sound like a better system than reddit, that sounds like a worse system! At least reddit mods could only kick you out of their own subreddit, not the whole site.
Well that’s what I mean by “islands of trust”. If an instance has a habit of banning people for dubious reasons, other instances would have to just ignore their bans, and that makes it dicey to federate with them at all. It’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out over the next few weeks.
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Have you checked the link? We aren’t talking about racism here…
If anyone is curious about the history like I was, the Wikipedia article is quite well done:
I’ve just gotta know was that local dial up in DC Digex?
I worked with Tale@UUNET during the Eternal September, providing NNTP support to our customers. God that was hell.
I’ve just gotta know was that local dial up in DC Digex?
CapAccess.
That’s a name I haven’t seen in a long time…
(I’m also from the days of bang paths)
Posted to [/c/bestof]!(https://lemmy.world/post/89698)
Posted to /c/bestof!
Individual instances will have to moderate themselves. If they become chaotic, other instances should unfederate them. But as users, you should also subscribe to communities you think are behaving well and block users/communities that are not.
Also, I have seen some users who are “grabbing” as many communities as possible, namely @Hurts@lemmy.world. Dude is moderating 60 communities, in an instance that started a few days ago… He is not building the communities, he is just power tripping it seems. @ruud@ruud@lemmy.world, something might have to be done about that in the future. I suggest some sort of “requestcommunity”, in which you can apply to become the mod of said community, if community is being badly run (or not run at all).
There should be a limit on how many communities you can create in a given time span
There should be a limit on how many communities you can run, period. This is how we got super-mods like GallowBoob on Reddit
I upvoted this post and I saw a popup “report created” this is not what I intended, I completely agree with this.
I’ve seen spontaneous “report created” moles¹ as well. It’s not clear to me that a report is actually being created; it seems like a UI bug.
Mole? What’s the difference between a mole and a toast?
I’m not sure. I’m not a frontend dev myself; “mole” was the term I heard from people who were.
Oh. I think they are most commonly called “toasts”. Called such, because they pop up from the bottom like toast from a toaster. I’ve also heard them just referred to as “alerts” or “notifications”, but I think that’s a bit ambiguous. Android likes to call interactive ones “snack bars”, which is kind of silly. “Moles” is new to me as a term for them, but I think it’s quite fitting too, yeah, I like it
Oh phew, that happened to me earlier - I thought I had accidentally submitted a false report
And how does that stop them creating multiple accounts to multiply the limit? It doesn’t.
Agreed on both of these. I made four within my first day or so, with three being pretty niche to very niche, and one with the potential to get large if Lemmy continues to grow. After I made that, I called it quits; I made new homes for my favorite Reddit communities and I know that’s all I can likely handle if they take off.
There should be a limit on how many communities you can create in a given time span
Yes, I thought of that, but then I am sure they would just create alt accounts to create as many communities as possible. I think the requesting of communities is still the best way. If one wants to be the mod of a community that already has a mod who is moding 50 other communities and is not doing jackshit…
this. Ihateany “verification” or “request” process as somebody has to do it. But saying that you cant create more than x communities per month or y communities per yearwould pretty much solve the problem.
Will make a rule limiting number of communities per moderator or created per week or something like that. On the to do list.
Thanks for that - that’s a big concern in any forum, and it’s fantastic to see it addressed here :)
Thank you!
Unfederation should not be used so cavalierly. Instead, community blocks. I know many people that chose lemmy.world because it doesnt block anything and hope it stays that way.
Agreed. I’d rather avoid individual communities instead of instances.
Yeap chose lemmy.world because of the server experience. But I’ve already blocked the communities I don’t want to see at a user level.
What about the ability for users to block instances? I’m sure there’s a way I’m not thinking of that this would be problematic.
Seems best to me
Yeah, I was going to say. I want to create communities from reddit that are not yet in here. But I don’t want to be the one running it. On the other hand. I don’t want a guy like that running a community I like. I would gladly create these communities and hand them over to proper mods later on if that’s possible.
I’m not mod material.
It’s absolutely possible. I already have a hundful of mods helping keep an eye on TIFU just a day after creating the community. There’s definitely people willing to help things run smoothly.
Same, I want r/collapse and r/climatechange to come to lemmy but I also do not want to be the one running the show. I’m way too inactive regularly for that.
Isn’t this the situation on Reddit, all the big subs moderated by a handful of people? I remember blocking them all years ago.
This is such a good find and 100% something that should be look at. Sorry, I’m also not mod material and can’t chip in (with time)
Yeah we don’t need supermods here
Hopefully all the assholes are attracted to one shitty instance and then that instance gets defederated.
Srsly tho, the assholes are kind of apart of the whole experience, but I think the people being drawn over here right now are not really the asshole type, at least so far.
Typically assholes like to be in an echochamber and won’t stay in a community where they get downvoted and reported. Just downvote asshole posts and they’ll naturally leave to an instance that allows assholes.
If that were true, they’d be happy staying in voat or truthsocial for example.
Voat was shut down by admins in 2020.
All of the assholes moved to gab, telegram, (back) to twitter, and on tiktok.
Until those sites go down, there’s little worry (I hope)
It is dangerous to throw stones in a glass house.
in mastodon there were instances only to assholes, and other instances blocked them as a whole, so i think it’s gonna be easier
Just waiting for the lemmy.circlejerk to pop up lol
The story of gab in a nutshell.
I read that as “…asshole migration plan”. 😂
Already here. I made it. Thanks for the concern all.
Yeah, like if you miss /r/AmITheAsshole, just make a community for it.
There already is aita c/AITA I think? I’m not sure I’m doing this right…
To make a link to a community, use the
[link markup](/like/this)but with the URL being specifically/c/community.name. For example:[this](/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world)to make this.(If it’s unclear, view source on this comment.)
If this seems weird, look up “relative URLs”.
/c/lemmyworld.worldis a relative URL that will show up correctly for anyone on any Lemmy instance.hmm u can also make it twice
[/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world](/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world)- /c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world, easier to copypaste. Wish they’d automate this on the backend.I feel like a lot of optimisations like this just may not have come up as a priority previously, because there hasn’t been much activity on Lemmy to require streamlining this stuff. At least, that’s what I hope; I’m crossing my fingers that once the Reddit hug server explosions have settled down, they’ll be able to start improving features like this, now there’s people here to use them.
oh for sure, and once I’m done being so busy with work I plan on jumping into the frontend code and optimizing, I hope we won’t be needing a RES-like thing because open source allows us to just plug it into the code directly.
Good to know. Ty.
Ahhh, been trying to figure this out all day! Thanks for this
Or put “!” instead of “/c/”
Me too, but I didn’t realize it wasn’t until I read your comment, kinda works either way as a title
Same!😂
I think it’s important to enable account portability across instances, like what Mastodon has. It should be easy for people to move to a different community, back up their data so they can re-substantiate their known persona if their instance goes poof, etc.
definitely. account migration and maybe community migration (unsure how that’d work exactly) would be great. losing history every time an instance shuts down isn’t very fun
Could you potentially export your preferences and list of subscriptions to a JSON file, which you could then supply to a new instance?
Almost definitely, but no guarantee a new instance will have the same communities 1-1 though. It would be really useful for resubbing to non-local communities thought
I was thinking about this, actually. Wouldn’t it be better to have users-only instances and content-only instances? That way you can have an instance with a policy towards certain subjects (e.g.: bigotry, racism, sex openness), but you chose the content you want. Just like if it were a cable or streaming service. You choose the content you want.
BTW, is there a place to discuss this? How to improve Lemmy and next steps? Also as a way to know how to contribute.
Self-hosting might be the only way to do this, I imagine any instance with enough users will have people wanting to post locally
Not necessarily. Again, having content and users separated and the instances with different concerns seems like a good way to simplify operations for users and server admins/mods. And from the instance POV is just what kind of features do you enable.
Content generation only? Users creation only? Both?
It’s also easier to make a service out of it.
Strongly agree. This could also be good if you join an instance and it winds up being toxic or not vibing with your beliefs.
It would be nice if everyone were to be excellent to each other but that’s just me talking with rose tinted glasses and a belly full of pizza.
Be excellent to each other.
My new motto for the time being.
If a server admin turns out to be a giant asshole (present company excepted, of course), is there a way to migrate your identity to another instance?
If a server admin gets hit by a bus and their instance goes away, do all the users just cease to exist?
Mastodon has that feature, but Lemmy has not added that feature yet. From a technical perspective, I don’t think there’s anything preventing it, the developers just need to code it. I’m sure they have their hands full dealing with the reddit explosion right now though.
My understanding, based on what I’ve seen with Mastodon, is that, yes, all users will just cease to exist if an instance admin decides to pull the plug. There was some stupid drama with a particular Mastodon admin for a really popular instance a while ago (I forget which server exactly), and they decided to just kill the server. Poof, 100k+ users gone
It was mastodon.lol. Great server early on but the admin Nathan went off the rails in a big way.
that’s…really unfortunate
It’s part of the reason I chose to host my own rather than depend on another server somewhere. That way when I do fuck it up at least the only person to blame is me
Yay federation and activitypub!
Smart choice, do you have it set to private? The only thing I’d worry about is people trying to join my server and bogging down my internet lol
I don’t have it set to private because when I tried that before it seems to break federation entirely. I do however have to approve anyone who wants to join. At this point I’d probably allow my close friends to join if they wanted, but that’s about it.
Mostly because I am nearly 100% positive I will either lose my ZFS array, try to move the server to different hardware and bork psql, or what have you…
My homelab is mostly duck tape and bubblegum.
I’m gonna set mine up to where everyone has to be approved and approve nobody since it’ll be running on a Raspberry Pi
I’m really interested in running my personal instance. Can you point me to a tutorial on how to go about that?
Here is the official documentation: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/administration.html
Pardon my ignorance, I’ve only just started to figure out federated sites (I think, probably not though), what’s activitypub?
It’s the protocol all the different federated services, not just Lemmy, communicate over.
The potential for accounts to vanish if the instance they started on is, to me, the single biggest hurdle that Lemmy will face with casual users. I think that the devs need to really consider figuring out a way to make user logins global.
I said this the other day, but I think it may, unironically, be one of the first times I’ve ever seen a genuine use for a blockchain, but I have no idea how to implement it.
The reason that the big social media companies came to exist is precisely because people didn’t like having to have a dozen accounts for all their different communities. Lemmy fixes that problem through federation, which is great, but introduces a new problem of “your account could just disappear, making all your contributions vanish.” I know that was technically a problem before big social media companies appeared and everyone was using forums, but it’s a big plus of the current social media giants- you don’t have to worry too much about the company failing so completely that the website gets shut down, which is the only way you’d lose your account, any time soon. People are used to that stability, and will not be happy if they join an instance in the fediverse only to have the rug yanked out from under them.
If we want this to be a true alternative to big social media, it needs that stability.
The other consideration is that impersonation might be pretty possible by making your own server called lemmy.mi or something and then stealing peoples username’s verbatim. IDK if that’ll ever become an issue but I do think its an avenue of attack for bad actors.
Oh it’ll definitely become an issue - Help help my local community! A calamity has befallen me and I need cash now! - Posted by @0zymati@beehaw.0rg
Yeah, it’s basically like email. Though I imagine an instance like that would get defedded pretty quick
Your contributions won’t vanish, I can still see comments from people from dead servers on Mastodon because it’s cached on my server. The bigger issue is when you set up a new username on a new server, how can you show that you’re the old person. So ideally pick a server that has policies in place about offline notices, multiple admins, a funding plan, backups, policies about Nazis, etc.
Not fully on Lemmy. While text posts are cached across all federated instances, medias such as images and videos aren’t…
Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but media uploaded to a community from another instance is uploaded to the users’ instance, not the instance of the community.
This may change in the future, and I hope so.
Why do people care about preserving their “identity” and posts so much? This was never a thing in the old internet.
The old internet didn’t have an all encompassing issue with bots and bad actors trying to gain your trust, a public post history is basically the closest thing a person can have to a trustable identity online, it’s not a perfect solution but it helps
I am not sure I follow. I don’t see where trust comes in when you’re just reading random people’s posts. I guess if you wanted to do moderation or something. But I know a lot of people including myself purposely delete their reddit account and start over.
if I’m unable to detect the tone or intentions of a comment I’ll check that user’s posts to get an idea, if someone has a history of not being an asshole I’m much more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt or want to engage with them. it also helps ID spam accounts
Hey this person is talking about this subject I have just heard of. I will at some point need to go validate their information but as a shortcut I can go look at their profile and see that they are well respected in communities dedicated to that subject. Therefore I can trust their information.
Alt
This person is asking questions that sound reasonable on the surface - but when I look at their post history I see they are active in some much more extreme communities and I’m able to form the conclusion that their apparently reasonable post may not be in good faith.
As for the moderation comment, I’m trying to mitigate this slightly by having an account with the same nick on 2-3 instances and modding myself on my communities on all of them. My hope is then if one of the identities goes away, I still have access from another one.
Because social media exists. There is identity attached to your online presence for the vast majority of people.
Really? I had my reddit account for 10 years, I dont think a single person remembers/recognizes my “identity”. With smaller communities people actually knew eachother. Your name actually meant something.
Sometimes when I am unsure about a post/comment I click on the user profile and if I see 10yrs / 100K karma, it helps forms my opinion and trust of the user.
And that’s how you end up cutting off your toes because Gallowboob said so.
.I blocked them on Reddit as soon as I learned you could block people and I guarantee if they come to Lemmy they’ll be the first people I block here.
I’m using they/them not for gender reasons but because there’s no chance it was just one person running that account. Either multiple people or someone in tandem with a bot. And bots are people.
I think what your_mind_aches is saying is that the mindset has changed. People who didn’t know the internet before social media are more emotionally attached to having one single identity online. Even if in the case of reddit it’s not necessarily linked to your real world identity.
Yeah I can see that. I am just struggling to understand why anyone would care. For social media like instagram I understand, but its an anonymous handle no one gives a shit about or recognizes, so I don’t see why someone would be attached to it.
Well it is not old internet anymore. It’s new generations and a lot more poeple here with lots more identies and wishes.
I don’t understand either. Not having any “social media features” like a profile site or “karma” is a big plus for me. I use my account for access and saving links, that’s all I expect.
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Some of us have friends online and we’d like to be able to do things like continue conversations while still being identifiably the same individual.
Also there’s consideration of privilege schemes where the access is based on karma, activity, or account age. That’s aside from the potential issues that could arise if someone with high privilege (supermod for example) has their identity vanish leaving a community minus whatever function they might have been performing (this user is allowed to send the bot commands, etc).
On a personal note, not having to jump through a bunch of hoops intended to screen out bad actors just to access a community or group where you were already a member in good standing.
Beyond that, there’s some people who really want to express their particular identity or brand online - for example I sometimes write using a particular name. If I could no longer use that name and not even access my account to tell people that, it would not help my audience find me or my back catalogue.
Beyond all those things, having access to my post history means I can look back at things - have you never sat and looked at old diaries or photos from when your were a child? Or been reminded of some event you enjoyed? Or even just wanted to check something went down like you remembered it?
It’s a planned feature if I’m not mistaken.
I’m not worried about assholes. I’m more interested in being free. As long as the community mods are nice enough, I’m optimistic.
The ability to block users, communities and instances is there, I think it will be easier than ever to manage out own experiences.
Is there a way to hide (not block) a single post?
Live free or fucking die
Some people interpret it as, “If I can’t do the things that are important to me, I might as well be dead,” vs. “If I don’t have the option to do anything whether I want to or not, I might as well be dead.”
Regardless of the interpretation, as long as it pushes them to fight for the things that are important to them then Im okay with it.
Their own way. If they don’t control their shit, they get defederated. Such is the way. Keep your nose clean and you’ll be right as rain.
But I do wonder about the possibility of two Lemmy communities, one right-wing and one left, with the right created in protest of being defederated…
Well, we can’t think about that all the time, can we?
we already see that in action with the american right wing communities, don’t we? I just hope the biggest fediverse manages to stay diverse, monocultures are no bueno
We’re already seeing a fracturing between communist and non-communists on Lemmy.
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Administrators need to be very careful about who they degenerate because being too trigger happy could be disastrous as you said.
Since people like to use the geographic analogy of countries/cities, communities should be gathering areas like a town hall where people discuss similar topics but instances would be like a city/country/state or whatever.
You don’t never speak to your neighbor again just because he’s a leftist or a capitalist. You never speak to them again if he and his family all start throwing their dog’s poop at your windows. We’re forgetting how to converse with people and it’s a big problem online and in real life.
We should absolutely be defederating instances dedicated to child porn and other illegal activities, and if there’s an instance that’s responsible for brigading or attacks then sure. But opposing viewpoints should not be a valid reason to defederate, IMO. If we go down that slope of not being able to tolerate someone else’s different views then we are doomed.
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we need a vanguard party of non-partisans
Sooooo like an anti-fediverse then? Is it possible for multiple defederated instances to federate only with each other?
A forked fediverse?
Do not want!
It’s not really a question of whether they can or not. They already do. Sometimes, though, they have opinions that conflict with each other and they defederate each other.
But extreme right-wing communities are already a thing in Mastodon and the most extreme ones tend to get defederated (the worst offender being poa.st), and among the most defederated, they often federate with each other (you will notice that poa.st still has a “vibrant community” of instances that are ok with being offensive).
Re: the “vibrant community”
Yeah, it’s like the Nazi bar idea: that if you have a bar and there’s one Nazi, you need to kick them out and show zero tolerance, otherwise they’ll bring their Nazi friends and your regular patrons will leave and before long, you’ll be running a Nazi bar.
The thing is, kicking the Nazi out protects your space and your community, but it doesn’t stop them from finding another bar. There’s always a Nazi bar somewhere.
I myself occasionally browse the “nazi bars” of the fediverse to get an idea of what the hell they’re complaining about now. Similarly I go to the tankie places to get acquainted with which genocide they’re denying today hahah, it’s a fun hobby to do occasionally, too much and it gets irritating though.
the Negaverse! in the most 90’s cartoon villain way possible
With so many goatees
An instance can both make a black list and an allow list. If there are any instances on the allow list, only those instances are federated. So yeah, that is possible.
Instances can choose to federate specifically with a group of other instances already. If I wanted to turn mine into a right-wing circlejerk or off the rails conspiracy group, all I have to do is find some other Lemmy instances and add them to the Allowlist, which tells my instance to only connect to those I’ve listed.
Email servers work the same way. So far there’s still one big email “community”, while spamserver.ng is just pretty universally blocked. I think that’s strong evidence the strategy works.
Now, a much more relevant question is how do you run your instance.
Well, a huge caveat to that is that there are world class Researchers who create constantly adapting intelligent spam filters to keep spam out of inboxes. Maybe the fediverse will have something like that someday! Who knows!
I imagine a lot of it could just be ported over.
I think your underestimating how real the battle against spam still is in the email space. If you use Gmail you’ve got a huge company doing the work for you. If you work in IT and run a corporate mail server you’ll see that we pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for anti-spam/phishing filtering.
Bot spam is totally separate and unfortunately I don’t see how you’d be able to port the work over.
I’ll take your word for it. That’s too bad.
So how would one get defederated? Say someone creates an instance for questionable material, does every other instance have to manually add it to a blocklist?
When the Eternal September comes, which it will, how does a Lemmy instance deal with bad actors?
i’ll bully them away >:3 !!!
On the real I feel like Lemmy/the wider linkagg fediverse will prob be good at self-moderating somewhat like other fediverse software’s communities are. It’ll probably be easier for admins to noice bad actors on their instance than it was for site admins on Reddit to notice bad actors there because the admins-to-users ratio on here will probably be better, even if things are kinda concentrated on lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and beehaw right now (people will probably spread out as they get a grip on how things work), and the average user will probably grow a stronger connection with their instance admins for that reason too, making it easier to address things like that since more people will be able to comfortably contact their admins directly. And if said bad actor is from another instance, and the admins of that instance refuse to deal with them, there’s always community-level bans (I think anyways? I’m still not familiar with the comm mod tools) and, if more drastic measures are needed, defederation.
If you go to the bottom of a lemmy instance it has a list of linked and blocked instances
Just from looking at some of those URLs in the blocked instances was enough to unsettle me… Big yikes some of those :(
I checked out one of the blocked instances (exploding-heads) a little bit ago - no thanks! Extremist’s haven for sure.
We still have voting, mods, and admins. Mods can take action for bad content, admins can take action for chronic offenders, or if mods aren’t taking care of a community. And worst case scenario, if an instance is causing trouble as a whole, it can be defederated.
Down the line, I think we’ll see spam lists to help deal with people creating lots of spam instances, like email has.
We’ll live, we’ll see. Meta is showing its interest in mastodon, so we have a reason to worry. But I think, lemmy will change according to the situation, when situation will be present, not before it.
How can your comment have minus 1 downvote?
Lmao I was wondering too. Lots of bugs in the system still happening clearly.
I know it is part of the Fediverse, but I wish bots were a not thing or allowed. I know they are not ‘assholes’ but I just think they take away from having real human connections.
I think we just collectively need to learn how to act better.
Choose not to respond when people are agressively onesided, you won’t be changing their minds.
We cannot control assholes or trolls, but we can control our behaviors. Stay kind as long as possible, disengage when you can’t. Don’t let these idiots turn YOU into an asshole.
There were a lot of very useful bots, and you can’t block bots anyway without blocking APIs, and we can all see how well that goes.
Yeah, I cant see a real argument against bots like that Auto TLDR bot for articles or that summary posting bot for Wikipedia links.
The unit conversion bot is also really useful (almost necessary) for everyone outside the United States.
Wouldn’t a browser addon be a better option?
I don’t want to get an addon just because people occasionally use Fahrenheit
I don’t think I can install browser extensions on Jerboa :P
Alright. I know they csn be use for good. I will just need to learn to like them.
I think some bots are good. I could personally go without seeing the bots that reply to comments when something specific is said, but many subs had helpful bots in them.
I am not into automatic memes. I do enjoy bots with specific callable functionality like looking up the Wiki, IMDB, whatever, or the reverse video bot.
I just don’t want to see the “good bot” reply everytime a bot does something.
Correct me if I’m wrong but the whole ‘good bot’ thing was to help the bot to improve and moderators to remove bad bots? I’m easily wrong on this but that was my understanding. It helped with the pruning of bad bots and the growth of good ones.
Something I enjoyed is how, during the rise of /r/transcribersofreddit transcribing image content into a comment, because of their standardised formatting, people often assumed they were a bot, so would comment “Good bot”.
However, they were human posters, and this was often revealed by another bot that would look out for “good bot”/“bad bot” votes on (seemingly) human posts and say “are you sure [user] is a bot? Because I’m 97.84% sure they’re not”.
Eventually, it was common to see people replying to the image transcribers’ comments with “Good human.” and that always made me smile.
Oh, I had no idea about the culture surrounding bots. I just thought it was a memetic response. Makes sense.
Exactly, that was so annoying. Or bots coming to correct grammar, or make haikus. They’re fun at first and then they’re just spam.
Yeah, this is what I mean when I say I want human only interaction. To extend to the future, I never want to have a conversation with ChatGPT or whatever crap comes along. AI can be useful but the way it is used for deception disgusts me to the core.
I loved a good haiku bot. Some places even had Wikipedia bot. But yes, bot users are not cool on the whole.
Sure, some were welcome and cute, but I just find automated responses to be antithetical to online discussion boards.
Automod has deleted your response, see rule 36.1.16
Ban them. Honestly if it’s egregious the admin staff takes care of it. If it’s just some asshattery then the mods of the communities are left to deal with it.
I don’t think mastodon has had this issue and it has been a while. Since we are not on Twitter, you can just block whoever is an asshole.
Yup. Then it doesn’t hurt the asshole because they can just move to a different instance with like-minded people, which is not a problem because of blocking instances!
This is my plan. I have already blocked some nsfw instances so you can block more than just users as well.
Yeah, it’s a beautiful system. When all the banned Twitter Nazis moved to gab and then gab moved to Mastodon everyone immediately defedded them, it’s like having a pre-curated blocklist of most of the worst people on the platform
