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?
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. This will help a lot with encouraging people into communities that suit them and with people who might stay in a community they are unhappy with because they don’t want to start over.
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.
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
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.
Woah, this is the first time I’ve pressed “all” on lemmygrad. It’s… so much bigger!
Lol yeah!. Default should be “all” imo. Also, the default sort would be “hot”.
You can change your default for both in the Jerboa app (hamburger menu, settings, account settings). But you’re right, both of those should be defualt.
You can also do it in your instance profile settings on the web ui (at least for lemmy.world)
I mean most of the time I’d still prefer to stay in local. It’s mindblowing how many libs got through.
I kind of wanted to downvote you, but I suppose ecochambers are kind of a feature in Lemmy? I’ll have to wrap my head around that.
Like reddit, it’s by design. That’s the price we pay for participating in a consensus-driven frontpage aggregator that’s divided by interests/politics/ideologies etc…
My stance is leave them alone to talk shit about me so I’m left alone to talk shit about them. Block and move on if I find the person disruptive, report them if they break server rules. And then block them and move on.
In total I think I’ve blocked more people than I’ve downvoted on Lemmy.
I hardly ever used downvotes on reddit and will probably use them even less on lemmy, though I’m still very glad to have it if I need it.
Even the most principled Lemmitor has a special downvote for that special asshole. I’ve heard.
Downvote they ass
on your instance you shud ban but
haha evil wins again!
Jokes aside, most offensive posts mostly originates from different instances with vastly different user culture. Downvoting posts works in the way that it lowers the visibility on your server but the offending poster might be on an instance that disregards downvotes so they “won’t get the message”.
It’s much more effective to just block the poster, or the whole community if one so desires.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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?”
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.
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 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.
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
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
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 @[email protected]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
There are accounts which farm karma artificially in order to raise the price of the account and sell it to another user. Accounts with a lot can be used for branding/free marketing, as they have legitimatcy and can gain followers through having a backlog of activity. I’ve also heard that people can use this legitimacy for propagandistic and misinformation reasons, although I don’t think that can be confirmed.
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?
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.
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.
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.
.
It’s a planned feature if I’m not mistaken.
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.
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
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 @[email protected]. 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@[email protected], 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).
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.
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
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.
¹ “mole” : a pop-up div that appears from the bottom of the page.
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
And how does that stop them creating multiple accounts to multiply the limit? It doesn’t.
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.
I’m wondering the same, I would guess grey listing and shadow banning to be the most effective.
Shadow banning is Orwellian . something you might expect from the CCP instead of a supposedly progressive online forum. If you’re going to ban someone at least have the decency to let them know they are banned.
All these American tech firms shadow ban people. The practice is very abusive, but it is also very American.
How long until we start seeing tiktok/instagram/facebook/reddit reposts.
Then we’ll know we’ve truly “made it”.
Lol at creating a new open source platform with free speech and immediately asking how to eliminate it.
In the older, better days of the internet, “assholes” were just a part of it.
Learn to deal
In the older, better days, we used kill files, and our choice of platform was eventually overrun by spam.
What makes you think this platform has “free speech”? It has a bunch of tools for suppressing or excluding undesirable tools. Most obviously, moderation can be used to remove comments or users from an instance, and federation can be used to remove whole instances from the network.
I value free speech. But not every platform has to support it, and Lemmy explicitly doesn’t - unless people just don’t just those levers.
You can run your own instance or join an instance that tolerates that speech, and federate with other instances that tolerate it. So, the “platform” is not supressing you one bit. Go forth, and be an asshole if you wish.
However, administrators and users on other instances also have the freedom to participate without being forced to listen to assholes ad nauseum. “Free Speech” does not mean “Free (from the consequences of your) Speech” or that other people should be forced to listen to you.
No, assholes need to learn to behave within the context of the instance / community they are posting to or get downvoted / moderated. Ideally they go away to their own instance where they can be assholes to each other and be defederated.
you don’t know do you
I read that as “…asshole migration plan”. 😂
Already here. I made it. Thanks for the concern all.
Me too, but I didn’t realize it wasn’t until I read your comment, kinda works either way as a title
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.Ahhh, been trying to figure this out all day! Thanks for this
hmm u can also make it twice
[/c/[email protected]](/c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world)- /c/[email protected], 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.
