this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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founded 1 year ago
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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?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

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[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Self-hosting might be the only way to do this, I imagine any instance with enough users will have people wanting to post locally

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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Strongly agree. This could also be good if you join an instance and it winds up being toxic or not vibing with your beliefs.

[โ€“] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Woah, this is the first time I've pressed "all" on lemmygrad. It's... so much bigger!

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Lol yeah!. Default should be "all" imo. Also, the default sort would be "hot".

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

You can also do it in your instance profile settings on the web ui (at least for lemmy.world)

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[โ€“] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (23 children)

Some thoughts โ€”

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 โ€” 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" โ€” 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 ....

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

this is worthy of a BestOf, do we have a BestOf?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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?

[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

It was mastodon.lol. Great server early on but the admin Nathan went off the rails in a big way.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Why do people care about preserving their "identity" and posts so much? This was never a thing in the old internet.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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

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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

It's a planned feature if I'm not mistaken.

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The ability to block users, communities and instances is there, I think it will be easier than ever to manage out own experiences.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you go to the bottom of a lemmy instance it has a list of linked and blocked instances

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just from looking at some of those URLs in the blocked instances was enough to unsettle me... Big yikes some of those :(

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I checked out one of the blocked instances (exploding-heads) a little bit ago - no thanks! Extremist's haven for sure.

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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!

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

This is my plan. I have already blocked some nsfw instances so you can block more than just users as well.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How long until we start seeing tiktok/instagram/facebook/reddit reposts.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Then we'll know we've truly "made it".

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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).

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Will make a rule limiting number of communities per moderator or created per week or something like that. On the to do list.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There should be a limit on how many communities you can create in a given time span

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There should be a limit on how many communities you can run, period. This is how we got super-mods like GallowBoob on Reddit

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I upvoted this post and I saw a popup "report created" this is not what I intended, I completely agree with this.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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