lemm.ee has shut down at 00:14 UTC.
unfortunately I realized too late that I have had hundreds of saved links to posts and comments from there, so I did not have enough time to save them, but anyways it is interesting that maybe a third of the post links I could try were dead. I think linkrot is happening much faster here than on reddit, even if just counting deleted posts.
What do you mean? The authenticator instance could ban users, the moderators and the content provider instances could ban users, content provider instances could defederate from authenticator instances and viceversa.
Not sure I’m seeing the issue you are seeing, it’s just basically forcing lemmy instances to instead of being both to just be one or the other. The benefit is that the actions on one is free from the drama on the other. One would be dedicated to hosting users, the other would be dedicated to hosting communities, less burnout overall.
Complete bans (at the home instance level) would require synchronization between the content provider instance and the authenticator instance.
Mod actions are caused by users comments on content, so the two aspects are closely intertwined, you can’t dissociate the content from the users.
At the moment, admins synchronize in a group to deal with toxic users, usually leading to the ban of those users on their home instance. Having a split between two types of admins adds an additional layer that could actually increase the admins workload.
What are you referring to as a ban? Complete bans already require synchronization between different federated instances. Sometimes the home instance of a user is unable to entirely delete the content of a user because of it.
Not really. Mod actions are over a community, not user history. They are perfectly able to remove user comments within their community, and since they are the authoritative source that controls whom it is spread to that has greater influence. That never stops the same content by the same user from appearing elsewhere.
They would still do the same, but the “usually leading to the ban of those users” perhaps does more to reveal what your actual problem is than anything else. You and me will have to disagree, because admins should not be authoritarian figures, but should only have control within their domain.
If they want to administrate over a group of users, they can have control over which users are and aren’t allowed over that particular group. They can issue their own warnings to users.
If they want to administrate over communities, they can have control over which communities are allowed and how users are allowed to interact with those. They can remove users from those communities entirely.
The small but loud minority of toxic users can just have their authentication instances defederated if those instances refuse to do anything with them. If it is an authentication instance doing the defederation, then it will affect all of their users. If it is a content provider instance, it will affect all of their communities. In the current system, it does both because both are coupled into the same instance, so it’s even compatible with it.
It stops bad faith actors from trying to pollute communities to slur entire instances, like lemm.ee or blahaj, because of their problems with their userbase, by simply stopping it from being an issue. Administrators don’t have to worry about policing communities or users if they don’t want to, they would be able to better choose whom they are catering to without bad faith backlash elsewhere.
Almost nothing of the current structure changes, except that dedicated instances have the functionality they don’t need disabled. Both can still block each other to their heart’s content, and if your problem is having more “splits” - that is literally what federated instances are, there can always be more … Maybe your problem is with the fediverse and its distributed nature? You are making it out to be as if there is only ever a big bad group of toxic users and that all administrators always completely agree on all bans to make your argument work. At that point, just create your own reddit clone.
I addressed a few of your points in the parallel thread with @[email protected] (actually, it seems like you read it as you commented below)
As I stated in one of the comments
I had a second look, and instances not allowing sign up are either going to shutdown (lemmy.one) are false positives (https://bookwormstory.social/signup) or are single-person instances:
Your vision is possible now, but it seems like almost no one wants to implement it.
Why would people want to implement something they don’t know the benefits of? That’s what my comment and increasing awareness is all about, in a thread about an outcome that could have been prevented by the idea.
If admins goes missing like the feddit.de ones did, the same problem would still impact that instance, be it a user or a content instance
If admins just want to shutdown without willing to transfer the instance / domain like the lemm.ee ones did, the same problem would still impact that instance, be it a user or a content instance
Using instances with non profit like https://fedecan.ca/en/ (lemmy.ca and piefed.ca) seems a better way to mitigate that risk.
I think you are misunderstanding the problem being solved. Expecting all instances to become non-profits and manage even more responsibility exacerbates the problem and inhibits the fediverse growth. Non-profits also have their share of pitfalls and is an entirely different beast.
lemm.ee told you the reason they were shutting down - not enough people to keep the place running and burnout. I can’t force you to see how minimizing and distributing responsibility helps those issues if you don’t want to. Less responsibility, easier for people not to ditch projects or end them.
That has nothing to do about what they decided to do afterwards. I thank them for not transferring the instance domain to a completely different party without user consent, and people would have disagreed with that so it’s best everyone found their own solution. It would even have put their account information at risk.
Lemm.ee had the option to close their registration at any time. But registrations are only one source of user management.
In a scenario where Lemm.ee would have become a content instance, but kept their federation policy, they would still have received all the reports about posts on the communities they hosted, wherever the reported user comes from.
Lemm.ee was the instance with the most active communities after LW, there’s no way to avoid a certain level of responsibility.
Since he said that the authenticator is the one that handles the communication & access, I expect banning the person from the authenticator would already automatically prevent anyone using that authenticator (or any other authenticator federating with it) from seeing the content.
As I understand it, the only thing the content provider would do is hosting the data. But access to that data would be determined by the service doing the access control, in the same way current instances are doing it.
Hosting involves removal of content, which is triggered by actions performed by users.
At the moment, if a Lemmy.world user spams CSAM content everywhere, other admins can reach out to the LW admins, they ban the users and purge the content.
In a users/content model, with Lemmy.users and Lemmy.world still being the content, other admins have to reach out to the Lemmy.users instance, get them banned, then to the Lemmy.world admins to trigger the purge of the content on the communities.
On top of that, it is currently recommended to mod from local accounts, as report federation will be fixed in Lemmy 1.0, not released yet: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3781
The main part of the “admin burnout” comes from the management of users. There isn’t really that much to manage on the content part that isn’t linked to users.
Exactly. That means instances would not longer have that responsibility. That would be on the hosting service, meaning less pressure for the instance. Once they ban the user, the content would not be shown, it would be purged from the federating network of that instance, regardless of whether the hosting service actually deletes it or not (but I expect it would be better if the protocol makes it so banning a user sends a notification to the hosting service).
It’s more complex than that, at the moment, because the purge also involves mirrored content in other federating instances. The interesting part is that after it’s triggered, then the process is pretty much automatic. When purging, Lemmy.world admins don’t have to manually go around asking to all the other instances to delete the content. The purge request is currently being notified automatically to instances federating with it. Why would it be any different for a content hosting service?
At that point, the content instances would be merely storage. This model is already possible now, but the vast majority of instances host both users and content, because it is more interesting to have users to build a local community than just being a storage server.
If some admins were interested in only being storage servers, you would see more instances not allowing user registrations, but all the 35th most active instances allow them: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
There have been cases where federation deletion was not processed correctly, so it would add an additional layer of potential issue
As I stated above, it is currently recommended to mod from local accounts, as report federation will be fixed in Lemmy 1.0, not released yet:
What that means is that on top of your Lemmy.user account, you would need a Lemmy.content account that would be able to fully moderate the community as a local account. Users don’t like to juggle between different accounts to moderate and participate.
Imho, it comes down to how much you care about the content of the community you are building. The reason I’m in lemmy.ml and not some smaller instance is because of problems like the ones showcased here.
If I could self-host my own content I would not mind being somewhere else. In fact, I’m considering setting up something through brid.gy. The fact that there isn’t a separation of the hosting means that if I want to secure my content I need to have my own 1-person instance which is not something the protocol is very well suited for. Plus it’s likely most lemmy instances would not federate with it anyway since, understandably, they may prefer an allowlist approach rather than blocklist. The only sane way would be to have the instances have full control of the access as they are now, with storage being in a separate service that can be managed separately, the hosting service.
Would this change at all if there was a hosting service?
I expect you would still be recommended to mod from local accounts (the “authenticator”), even if the content hosting was a separate service. The local account would continue being the primary source of access to the content… note that having a separate hosting service doesn’t mean that the hosting service must be the one managing access to the content from the fediverse.
Quite a few instances are managed by non-profits which are much less prone to service disruptions, like https://fedecan.ca/en/ for lemmy.ca.
Isn’t that contradictory with the users - content separation?
That seems contradictory with the previous point. My understanding was that
Is this correct, or am I missing something?
Then I think we had a different understanding. My understanding was something akin to what bluesky does with the PDS, the data service just hosts data and hands it over to the other service which is the one actually doing the indexing of that data and aggregating it into communities. The data of the community might be hosted in the hosting services, but it’s accessed, indexed and aggregated through the authentication service.
The access management, the accounts, the distribution of data, etc. that’s still in the server managing the federation. That’s the way I understood it, at least (I’m not the person that originally started this train, that was @[email protected] ).
This allows the content to potentially not be completely lost if an instance dies because it would be easier to carry your data to another instance without losing it. It’s the same principle as in bluesky but applied to the fediverse.