As this #RedditBlackout accelerates the Fediverse experiment, I feel the urge… the need… to chime in with my 2-cents.
My summary of the current lay of the land: Beehaw saw a wave of pornography spam and decided to shut Lemmy.world off and Defederate from this server. I’m too new to this community to fully understand the wants/needs of each individual server, but I’ve been around the internet long enough to recognize that porn-spam is an age-old trolling technique and will occur again in the future. Especially as small, boutique, hobbyist servers pop up and online drama/rivalries increase, online harassment campaigns (like coordinated porn spam attacks) are simply an inevitability.
Lemmy.world wants open registrations. Beehaw does not: Beehaw wants users to be verified before posting. This is normal: many old /r/subreddits would simply shadowban all 1-year old accounts and earlier… giving the illusion that everything is well for 5+ or 10+ year old accounts, but cut out on the vast majority of spam accounts with short lives. This works for Reddit where you have a huge number of long-lived accounts, but its still not a perfect technique: you can pay poor people in 3rd world countries to create accounts, post on them for a year, and the these now verified accounts can be paid for by spammers to invade various subreddits.
I digress. My main point is that many subreddits, and now Lemmy-instances/communities, want a “trusted user”. Akin to the 1±year-old account on Reddit. Its not a perfect solution by any means, but accounts that have some “weight” to them, that have passed even a crude time-based selection process, are far easier to manage for small moderation teams.
We don’t have the benefit of time however, so how do we quickly build trust on the Fediverse? It seems impossible to solve this problem on lemmy.world and Beehaw.org alone. At least, not with our current toolset.
A 3rd Server appears: ImNotAnAsshole.net
But lets add the 3rd server, which I’ll hypothetically name “ImNotAnAsshole.net”, or INAA.net for short.
INAA.net would be an instance that focuses on building a userbase that follows a large set of different instances recruiting needs. This has the following benefits.
-
Decentralization – Beehaw.org is famously only run by 4 administrators on their spare time. They cannot verify hundreds of thousands of new users who appear due to #RedditBlackout. INAA.net would allow another team to focus on the verification problem.
-
Access to both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login – As long as INAA.net remains in the good graces of other servers (aka: assuming their user filtering model works), any user who registers on INAA.net will be able to access both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login.
-
Custom Moderation tools – INAA.net could add additional features independently of the core github.com/LemmyNet programming team and experiment. It is their own instance afterall.
Because of #2, users would be encouraged to join INAA.net, especially if they want access to Beehaw.org. Lemmy.world can remain how it is, low-moderation / less curated users and communities (which is a more appropriate staging grounds for #RedditBlackout refugees). Beehaw.org works with the INAA.net team on the proper rules for INAA.net to federate with Beehaw.org and everyone’s happy.
Or is it? I am new to the Fediverse and have missed out on Mastodon.social drama. Hopefully older members of this community can chime in with where my logic has gone awry.
My much simpler stance is: they don’t want lemmy.world users on their instance, I’ll respect that, I unsubbed from their communities and found the same elsewhere.
They’re not the only Lemmy servers in the world, Lemmy is still new overall, I don’t see any problem in “rebuilding” the 2 big subs they have somewhere else, I’m already putting my effort in contributing to make it so.
edit: typo
I think one thing that hasn’t been mentioned here is the huge gap in the size of the communities. The largest beehaw communities have almost 20k subscribers while the largest I’ve seen from other instances seem to cap out at about 5k. I think the problem is that most of the users who still federate with beehaw will undoubtedly end up there. This presents serious difficulties for growing competing communities.
Beehaw’s limited registration will turn off many users and eventually instances with open registration will catch up.
This comment is a month old so you will be happy to know that you are right. That is what happened.
Forgetting about beehaw, the idea isn’t bad at all, if it can be added as a module to Lemmy core code and admins of instances then gain the option to verify users allowed for posting and commenting on their instance, by reading a 3rd party verified userlist.
See my other comments on this post for more details about how I propose it could work. Would definitely keep out wankers from most instances if there is a buy in.
You are just describing joining any one of the dozens on instances that aren’t defederated from Beehaw or Lemmy.world - your INAA.net already exists in the form of all those instances which Beehaw didn’t defederate from.
But which of those servers are personal vanity projects, and which servers are explicitly going to try to stay on the good terms of even fragile communities like Beehaw.org?
Server instances need to be clear about their intentions. If randomserver.org gets defederated from Beehaw.org, do they help the Beehaw.org team at moderating themselves? Or do they say “Whatever” and not try to help out?
This isn’t clear. Servers, at least today, are still in the “Don’t care who you sign up for” phase, which is naive and obviously wrong already.
But what is the magical ability to achieve step 2? How do you filter and moderate users reliably at scale?
The fundamental issue is that Beehaw wants to eat their cake and have it too. They want their users to be able to read and comment on other instances, but not have to mirror their content, pay for image hosting, etc. or allow other instances’ users access to Beehaw’s content.
They want the benefits of federation without giving anything in return.
I listed Reddit’s “secret rule” amongst long-term moderators and subreddit communities. Just straight up ban accounts that are younger than a certain age. That’s already going to grossly clamp down on porn-spam and troll accounts, because it means that the trolls need to either buy a pre-made account, or the trolls have to wait a week with good behavior before engaging in troll activity.
EDIT: Is that enough for Beehaw.org? I don’t know. But lets say INAA.net is just a time-delay. All accounts less than 1-week are only allowed to post to lemmy.world. All accounts older than that are unlocked to talk with Beehaw.org.
But in your example, everyone would have to sign up to INAA.net rather than lemmy.world. Like I couldn’t use this account, I’d need a separate one because accounts aren’t registered across instances like that (nor transferrable atm).
Theoretically, INAA.net could use ActivityPub federation to keep a database of user accounts from various instances based on their Fediverse address (i.e.
@BaldProphet@kbin.social) that Lemmy and Kbin instances can query to check for things like age and reputation. No accounts would necessarily have to be created there.Yes.
That’s why its become clear to me that the “Trust” of a server is important on the Fediverse. This is an alien concept to Redditors (where there’s only one server so everyone is at the same base level of trust).
Its not a perfect solution, but it seems to be the “Fediverse way”. The nature of the new set of rules that this community has.
After all the shit that has happened on Reddit to drive people to the Fediverse, I don’t think the concept of how important it is to be able to trust your server admins is a foreign one.
Correct me if I’m wrong but that’s not how it works. Beehaw users can’t read and comment on other instances, that Beehaw defederated with.
Indeed, but this was their request for the future. Mastodon has a similar option as instance-wide “silencing”/limiting - https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/#limit-server
Go and read their comments, they’re pretty open about it.
Yeah, that’s bad. But i guess they would still load and mirror all content from communities from those instances besides the content from users belonging to those silenced instances (but this content would then not be viewable).
So they are profiting from those communities, but they are also benefitig those communities as well, because all other communitiy members can see their content.
They want their users to be able to read and comment on other instances, but not have to mirror their content, pay for image hosting, etc. or allow other instances’ users access to Beehaw’s content.
This is a totally disingenuous take.
Defederating works both ways. Defederating from another instances also means that Beehaw users can’t access content from that defederated site. And, in fact, that’s exactly the purpose of defederating. They access remote content by having it imported locally, and what’s being imported doesn’t adhere to their site’s guidelines.
They’re not “having their cake and eating it, too”. They’re saying “this cake that keeps showing up on our table is full of turds, and so we’re just not accepting outside cake deliveries anymore”.
They do want similar features that are available on mastodon, that essentially allow their users to interact with the outside world but the ability limit what comes in. It’s still a disingenuous take though, as it has nothing to do with image hosting, not allowing people to view their content, etc. They just don’t want assholes.
Unlikely to occur. Beehaw’s admins hate dissent and anyone questioning them. Well before the blackout, they literally had a “no sources” rule because users kept questioning the mods. Likewise their current “rule set” states what they say, goes, and that everything is up to them, not the rules. They say that with all cases (except obvious trolls), that they will always warn first. I have yet to ever see any kind of warning from any of their admins.
They were being questioned on sh.it and on lemmy.world, so they blocked both. You can check their modlog to see just how little spam they had to deal with.
You can also pop in to look at their discord to see how much they dislike the criticism.
I personally got banned because I got into an argument with the admin there. They wrongly assumed that I was American and made a claim to counter my argument, I then pointed out their mistake that their claim doesn’t apply to my country, and then – Boom, banned.
Glad you stood your ground
I stand, for standing. Stanground.
But yea me too. Stand up to tiny kings.
I’m of the opinion that if you want a closed off, strongly moderated, safe space forum you probably shouldn’t be federating with anyone.
I read the “essays” the beehive have to “join” and take part. In my view they wanted to make a space for their own community and choose a fediverse where they should have picked a closed off forum/discord/redditcopy.
They picked a tool that was fit for purpose. Federation is an option, not a necessity, and not a right.
@Kichae @dragontamer @goat But was it the right tool for what they want?
Don’t see how they will be expecting growth without the aid of federation.
Yup
Has there been a point in time before where an instance was defederated for similar? ie, admins acting out of line with what’s generally considered “acceptable”, but short of stuff like alt-right and/or lemmygrad type stuff?
Just curious, for those who’ve been around longer.
Yeah, the creators of lemmy were removing content critical of communist talking points, like pro-ccp and pro-stalin content. There was a whole mob about it and so the admins splintered off and created lemmy.grad and said they’d be more neutral, though occasionally there’s some slip-ups in their supposed neutrality.
There’s a bunch of other instances. Like mine at discuss.online. Nothing new is needed.
Seems like you’re just suggesting everyone use beehaw with federated accounts.
Oh there’s plenty that’s needed.
The vast majority of users here are from #RedditBlackout and their eyes glaze over at that discussion point. They don’t know what a “federated account” is.
What’s needed is education? Community organization? Etc. etc. People are new to Lemmy and Fediverse. People are trying to figure out what the plan is. A lot of users are already feeling “betrayed” that they “chose the wrong server” when they registered here at lemmy.world.
The platform just needs to mature a bit. It’s new and discovered in desperation. It’s free and not monetized. Everyone is working in their free time to build something wonderful.
The Mlem team went from 2 people to 20. They’re about to drop a huge update to their beta app.
The lemmy team worked on front end improvements in the upcoming 0.18 front end.
I have a beta instance setup if anyone wants to see it.
Don’t feel betrayed. Have two accountants. Move to a new instance. Or just wait for them to federate again when the dust settles.
What do you need those 2 accountants for? ;)
So one can tell you that the other is costing you too much.
It was a reference to how they felt bee-trade by Beehaw. So basically have two accounts. First, at Beehaw and second somewhere else that doesn’t block federation.
Or two, so you have one for fun and one for… science.
At minimum, some form of simple Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse explanation would probably be a good start. It tends to be presented as a big, confusing blob of “here’s a bunch of software you can self-host, and then communicate to other instances”, or “here’s a bunch of servers you can join”.
Your average new user isn’t going to be able to easily wrap their head around all of that at first go, especially if they’re not that tech inclined, or familiar with that kind of thing in the first place. Which server should they go for? Does the size of the server matter? Do they have to have accounts on all of the servers to see all the posts, etc.
Look at Lemmy’s home page, for example. It mentions a whole bunch of what the server runs, and that you can host one, which is neat, but also not what your typical new user is looking for when they just want to figure out the basics. It doesn’t really matter whether Lemmy uses Rust, PHP, or Scratch, since it’s all tech jargon to them.
Communities do effectively have to add their own “How to Lemmy” guides at the current time, since there is no guide for it, and that is entirely contingent on new users being on a server that has one, and being lucky enough/knowing how to use it.
A lot of users are already feeling “betrayed” that they “chose the wrong server” when they registered here at lemmy.world.
Many of those same users have been calling Beehaw admins snowflake dictators since before the block. These are people who want their cake and want to eat it, too. They want to not have to abide by Beehaw’s rules, but also have unfettered access to Beehaw. That’s not a tenable position.
They want “Free speech” but not to bear the consequences.
Ring ring, the world doesn’t work like that indeed.
Exactly. Their poor frozen peaches aren’t being forced on people, so that means someone’s overstepping, apparently.
They will just block that too. Let them be. They want to play in their own little sandbox.
Would they? Lemmy.ml is famously more moderated than Lemmy.world. They haven’t blocked Lemmy.ml yet.
Beehaw.org is clearly aiming to be on the stricter-side of things. That’s… fine. I don’t agree with it, but I welcome this era of experimentation. Why? Because I’ve been part of communities that tore at each other’s throats for the dumbest shit you’ve ever seen online. (XBox vs Playstation). I’ve been part of online guilds in video games where you’d launch DDOS attacks against other guilds.
This is just… internet troll tactics. What Beehaw has excellently done is step forward and start testing the new anti-troll tools available to them here in lemmy/Fediverse. I hope the best for them. Not because I agree with their leftist slant, but because I’ve been there. I’ve been part of communities that were systematically trolled by large, rival groups. Its not fun.
So we got defederated? I guess that explains the massive decline of activity here. It’s really not selling the fediverse for me if you can suddenly be cut off from the rest of the world just like that.
You’ve got it the other way around - Beehaw is defederating themselves from all the major instances, because they can’t enforce a safe space like they want to at any kind of scale on this Fediverse model. Lemmy.world is about twice the size of Beehaw in number of users.
That user is from sh.itjust.works, which is a 2nd server that Beehaw also Defederated from.
Sh.itjust.works is just as active as ever though, he might be using the wrong filter for his feed. Or he was primarily subscribed to beehaw communities.
Yeah, just saw that. Either way, I completely understand Beehaw’s goal but don’t understand how they think it’s going to work in the long run.
In the long run they are hoping for more flexibility. I think it is incorrect that they are separating from “all the major instances” but they are separating from (two) servers with open account creation. I personally think an instance admin should be informed when their users are being banned from other instances, so they have the option to review behavior and consider if they would like to do the same. Sh.itjust.works at least has instance rules that should be compatible with most of what beehaw doesn’t like.
In the long run they are hoping for more flexibility.
And my counter would be that they’re not buying themselves flexibility with their proposed approach.
they are separating from (two) servers with open account creation
And I still don’t see how anyone thinks that the manual account approval process solves anything. If I’m a bad actor, I can go out right now and create 50 accounts on every Lemmy server, come up with slightly different answers for the stupidly-simple “why do you want to join this instance” question, and have a veritable army of troll accounts approved and at my disposal within the week if I am so determined to be an asshole on Beehaw. In the end, the process is literally no different than an admin-driven manual Captcha that only achieves proving that you’re not a robot.
In my mind I view this like an IT security issue. If you are trying to prevent bad actors from entering your environment, you don’t just cut your connection to the internet… while leaving wide-open public access terminals in your front lobby for anyone to use as long as they verbally promise not to do bad things.
I don’t know what the answer for Beehaw will be, but I know they won’t accomplish it with their current plan of action.
I very much agree with giving source instances a chance to discipline/ban bad actors. Hopefully this will evolve in that direction. For now the Beehaw admins feel that the right mod tools are not yet available. They have a specific vision for what they want to build, and it is completely up to them how they go about that.
That doesn’t mean everyone external has to agree or like their decisions, but it’s their house, their rules.
You’re correct in the old world / Reddit way of doing things. But I’m not sure if that’s how it “should” be done here on Fediverse.
Even on Reddit, the mechanism of just shadowbanning young accounts is cruel. Especially as a “secret rule”, it basically cut off Reddit from the younger generation. Its why Reddit tilts to millenials, because we weren’t banned yet in 2008 when we made our accounts, while all accounts in 2019+ are basically shadowbanned by default. This obviously can’t work either for Reddit and is probably the reason they’re in decline.
The fact that we have new solutions available to us here, in the Fediverse, thanks to 3rd party servers and new server instances, is something to be celebrated.
I guess I should clarify - I don’t understand how Beehaw thinks their approach is going to work at scale, because any bad actors (trolls, bigots, racists, etc.) they’re trying to prevent can simply create new accounts on Beehaw and cause the same troubles directly on their server. Sure they’ll have marginally more control over those accounts, but nothing is stopping people unless they put “I AM A RAGING BIGOT” in their user application.
In the meantime they’ll only be preventing reasonable people who use other login servers from participating in Beehaw communities. In my mind, that’s only going to lead to more bad actors focusing on Beehaw and less general population from the Fediverse to drown them out.
The process is self-selecting, is it not?
I don’t think its much of a surprise that a ton of troll-behavior came from an instance called sh.itjust.works. People who find explitives funny and want to associate with that are a different cut from folks who just wanna hang out and casually talk.
I mean, you can’t really classify everyone from that server just because it has a “bad word” as part of the domain name. It’s likely that it’s getting as many new users as it is simply because it doesn’t require an approval process, which is something that many new Lemmy users probably find offputting when trying to sign up for the other servers.
Also I’m not sure how any of that invalidates anything I’ve said. I can appreciate their goal, but I see it rapidly meeting with the reality that all they’re going to accomplish in the long run is to isolate themselves inside of an echo chamber that will be constantly harassed by the same people they sought to keep out, without the rest of the Fedi/Lemmy-verse to combat it by drowning out the assholes.
(edit) - In short, people who want to harass, will. And will come to your server to do it if they really want to. If you cut yourself off from the rest of everyone else, all you’re doing is cutting yourself off… from everyone else. (All “you’s” in this comment not pertaining to you, specifically.)
Not sure I agree that it’s “cruel” but it is definitely heavy-handed. It’s really just a way of enforcing the “lurk more” attitude of old forums at scale.
Telling 20 new accounts each day to read a few posts before making their own gets old fast. It also prevents harassment from day-old troll accounts. It’s not perfect but it is a better solution than doing nothing at all.
Accounts were never shadowbanned for year long periods. I remade my accounts multiple times and never had to wait more than a few weeks before being fully active, minus a few niche subs with oddly strict rules.
Only from beehaw.org, right? I’m still seeing this from sdf.org.
Am I misunderstanding or does this not just mean you’ll have to choose your registered instance to match your needs, and if some instances you like are too widely considered problematic to access from a broadly useful instance you may have to have another identity there.
Somewhere like beehaw.org appears to be an instance that’s likely to exclude fairly aggressively, so that’s a consideration for whether you want that to be your home.
an instance that’s likely to exclude fairly aggressively, so that’s a consideration for whether you want that to be your home.
Sadly, it’s more complicated and far-reaching.
You might also consider if you want to invest in communities hosted on an excluding instance. If they exclude your instance in the future, you will lose access to that community. Everybody should be interested to have communities of common interest outside of excluding instances.
And you might want to consider the reputation of the instance you make your home. If other instances decide to defederate your instance for whatever reason, you lose access to their communities.
So it’s not just a decision of which home instance aligns with my goals, but also do my goals align with the instances who host communities which I hold dear, and how is my home instance seen by other instances to prevent problems in the future.
The character creation of most RPGs is less sophisticated and has better graphics. Fascinating and saddening at the same time.
Yep - the nature of hosts needs to become clear and stable, and many people are going to need multiple identities if they want to access anything that anyone else objects to.
You have it all exactly right.
Beehaw has a code of conduct that’s relatively strict. People who sign up on Beehaw do so because they are looking for a more controlled atmosphere.
They’ve been trying to host a dinner party, and the college kids on spring break keep trying to crash it. So, they just closed their door. This isn’t a problem. This is how freedom of association just works.
People clutch pearls over defederation every time a major instance gets defederated. It’s always the same thing, too: “Why am I even here if I can’t see everything??” But you can’t see everything from Reddit – it doesn’t federate with Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram… And you can’t see averything from any of the other centralized social media sites for the same reason.
They’re all defederated from each other.
It’s only a problem here because people conflate the websites they’re using with the server software used to run them, and then feel entitled to direct access to anyone and anything using that software. Which… Is a mood, I guess.
To use a Reddit analogy, it’s basically a subreddit that’s decided to go private.
I don’t see how one out of 160+ servers not connecting to sh.itjust.works would cut you out from the rest of the world.
I think of it more like being cut off from 1/160th of the fediverse. Unfortunate, but in the end a type of community I don’t think I’ll miss since our values don’t align.
Beehaw is in the top 3 Lemmy instances, so I wouldn’t say it’s 1/160th. Probably more like 1/5th. Or maybe even 1/4th because of how much better established the server was before the reddit exodus.
I know what you mean, and from that point of view I agree. I have different values and so I use different measurements; A connection to a small instance is equally valuable as a connection to a big instance. It’s not about the amount of content but building a new paradigm of social media.
I feel the same
This is your first comment in 3 days since making the account, and you want to discuss a “massive decline in activity”.
I hate when people make this accusation but I’m seriously detecting a paid reddit shill. Why did you only save one of my posts and then comment this defeatist shit, in the past 3 days?
Truth is, it would cost almost nothing for reddit to pay a few trolls to come here to both spam and post divisive messages. Better a few million bucks now than a few billion down the road.
Anyone else think this is weird or am I tripping? Like the one and only comment in 3 days is just perfectly engineered to discourage people from the fediverse.
I visited a few different times and even lurked for a bit before figuring out how sign up - doesn’t mean someone is a shill if they did the same.
…but I also didn’t understand enough to verify if traffic is lighter or heavier since I am just now getting how the underlying pipes and tubes work.
In that case I apologize, I had sent you a private message earlier about the sorting algorithm but you must have missed it.
I’m still keeping my eye on you though…
I’m not the original one you responded to, so keep a closer eye haha!
Bruh I need to go to bed 🫠
Lmao! 🤣
I’m keeping my eye on you, but only in the hope that you post nudes.
It took me a while to figure out how to make an account here but I’m more of a lurker than I am a commenter. I originally tried to sign up with beehaw but never heard back about my application so I was happy to see that I could still access their fairly large community from here. Can you not see how someone might be disappointed that a large chunk of the community is now gone from here?
As another commenter suggested, my feed settings were limiting me. Hot and Active constantly show posts that are 2-3 days old, making me think everything went stagnant. I was also using Mlem and didn’t know I had any replies until I opened up shitjustworks in my browser. I mostly switched to lurking on Squabbles now.
Although I could see Reddit being scummy and hiring some trolls, that doesn’t mean that everyone with some concerns about the fediverse means they’re automatically a Reddit shill. I was an Apollo user and won’t be going back to Reddit once the app dies for good. Currently I only open it to check RedditAlternatives to see where most of the community is going.
In that case I stand corrected, my apologies. I would still encourage you to comment more because you need to contribute if you want this platform to succeed. Sorry for coming off so aggressive.
I think the browser is best for now, it still has its own glitches but more functional than the apps for me. Sorting by new or top day and subscribed. Yeah I’m still looking out for trolls and shills because it definitely seems like a possibility. If I were spez I’d be hiring some off the books to protect my job. If this whole shitshow takes a chunk out of reddit’s IPO, he’s done there.
As for being disappointed about the loss of Beehaw, have a look at the relative size of the major instances.
Notice how we have about one third of the total users and posts/comments that beehaw does. And this server is less than two weeks old. They were only a large chunk of the community before the reddit exodus. Right now, they’re at best a medium chunk. In a month, they’ll probably be a small chunk. Onward and upward my friend.
With Lemmy there’s actually a use case for user-only instances, which host no communities. Moderating well is tough and it makes sense to prevent brigading.
This. And also, converselly, there’s a use case for instances meant to not allow any users to sign up directly to them, and that could be used just to host a community forum for users coming from other instances.
I was also thinking this, having content instances and user instances.
I remember reading Bluesky’s blurbs about tagging services (that’s apparently a thing with the AT protocol). For example, the SPLC could operate a tagging service, which can tag instances, communities, individual users, threads, etc. with an SPLC-certified “HATE” tag, and server admins could set their instances to automatically delete or block anything with that tag, and users can automatically block anything with that tag.
Nice thing is that in accordance with decentralization, if a tagging service gets overzealous, or gets compromised by bad actors, it’s easy for users to move elsewhere.
can’t users from any other instance already do this?
beehaw blocks world so they can’t see each other but users from other instances can still see both. I’m currently on lemmy.one and I’m subbed to comms at both beehaw and LWorld.
they only problem i see is for users in those specific instances as they can’t see one another, but everyone else can see both.
i think the result here is that beehaw will be limiting itself. probably fine as they are overwhelmed right now anyway. it seems that’s what they wanted to do from the start as well. if they begin blocking even more instances things will get smaller for them.
but hey, that’s the beauty of the fediverse. if you want an instance that does exactly what you want then go for it. make your own. link to whoever you want and block whoever you want
speaking of that, are users getting more ways to block instances and communities? I’d like to have all the tools to customize my feed. there’s no AI doing it for me (which is good) so i need the ability to do it myself
can’t users from any other instance already do this?
Intent matters.
Lets say INAA.net has an invite-only Lobste.rs model, and engages in “Tree-bans”. (If I tree-ban you, I tree-ban all your invites, and all of the invites-invites, etc. etc. The entire branch is culled). Lobste.rs is famous for its overly strict invite-only procedures, but it is clear that they have far more control over their community than other communities. (Not in the fediverse, but their model is interesting to me).
Similarly, if I create INAA.net with a message “I’m planning to recruit 100,000 users to my server, and all 100,000 users will be friendly”, then someone like Beehaw.org will be willing to federate with INAA.net. I can enforce this through Lobste.rs-style tree-bans, or any method I want because its my private server with my private rules running my private code. As long as I’m in the good graces of Beehaw.org, my users will be happy.
With a stronger curation model than most other servers (ex: lemmy.world), my users should enjoy more freedoms than most other instances.
I think we’re describing the same thing. I’m saying the ability is already here and you’re saying perhaps someone should purpose-build this because the other instances that this applies to are only doing it by chance.
I’ve been a proponent of having Lemmy instances that have only a couple of communities that are specific to admin things for that instance. Then they are just filled with users who interact with content on other instances. Personally, I was thinking about this from a performance standpoint, but it also makes sense from a social gathering standpoint as well.
I’m planning on giving a go at making my own instance over the summer (hopefully soon) and exploring what things I might want to do after that. I’d love to make some medium-sized instances assuming I can gather enough funds to support 1 or more servers for the project. Your idea does give me new things to think about in terms of organizing and attracting an instance user base. I was initially thinking it would be based on topics, but being based on something like reputation would likely be even more valuable to many.
I think you’ve got the gist of what I’m saying perfectly.
I don’t know what the long-term implications are for Lemmy, the Fediverse, or whatever. But at least at this juncture, this idea of “User-based curation” and “Servers/Instances that focus on the user-contract” is something that simply wasn’t possible in the Reddit-model at all. Its worth looking into at a minimum, and probably well worth experimenting with.
I don’t know what kind of rules a user-focused instance should have. Lobste.rs is a fun one but it has its downsides. Worst case scenario, you run 2 or 3 instances each experimenting with a different user-model / user-contract.
i think it will take some experimenting in order to get the right mix. i also think that whatever choice becomes popular isn’t likely to be the best.
still a good idea to say least be open to having an account at more than one instance. make one early, because if they get backed up or change the rules you might not get into a server later on as it seems some people are experiencing right now
I think we’re in the stage where experimental instances will rise and fall, and collapse. The community will understand these growing pains, though we should try to minimize the disruption.
I think the best plan would be to create instances with a rough set of rules. Ex: TimeLockedUsers.net, and InviteTreeBan.net, etc. etc. and all the other recruitment/curation methodologies that exist.
Then we consider the tools needed to make these users trustworthy on a large number of sites. Ex: InviteTreeBan.net could create user-accounts for Beehaw.org that helps them create lists that match the TreeBan structure and help them mass-ban poorly performing trees of the recruitment tree. These tools wouldn’t make sense in Lemmy-in-general, they’re just specific to the trustbuilding website.
Your hypothetical 3rd server already exists as basically any other federated instance. I don’t like the idea of having a central authority that controls user accounts though.
Maybe an alternative would be some sort of circle of trust type system that doesn’t rely on a central authority?
So yes. This “already exists”, but no instance is actually optimizing for this use-case yet.
INAA.net would ideally be a “zero-community” instance. Its pure purpose is to create and curate a list of users that creates a wide-spectrum of trust throughout the Lemmy-Fediverse.
I don’t know quite what kind of rules, moderation, and banlists are needed to build instances with “High-user trust”. “Zero-communities” would be one such element, indicating a user-focused instance. A strong admin-team (without communities, moderators are useless), admin-level bans that work to police the group and keep everyone on the same page across other servers. Etc. etc. But too many rules creates stagnation and cuts off growth, so a balance needs to be figured out.
I’m hypothetically thinking of an implementation of the Lobste.rs model of invite-only recruitment and tree-bans of entire sets of invite-trees. (If Alice recruits Bob who recruits Charlie, a tree-ban against Alice would ban all three of them). You can see how Lobste.rs style rules can build trust compared to a completely free server like lemmy.world (where I’m posting from).
You’re basically describing how the fediverse works I think.
How is it different than the current situation where both lemmy.world and beehaw.org are connect to lemmy.ml?
Given my perspective as part of the #RedditBlackout wave, I think its needed for me to explicitly point out this perspective this week. I recognize that you folk who have been hanging around the Fediverse longer than me already recognize this as reality. But this is a new world for a lot of the folk joining up Lemmy.world.
The issue, is that we were sold on “It doesn’t matter which server you sign up for” on https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. See this quote:
Don’t overthink this. It doesn’t matter which instance you use. You’ll still be able to interact with communities (subreddits) on all other instances, regardless of which instance your account lives 🙂
This oversold the community, got a bunch of former Redditors signed up here, and now a bunch of people are feeling kinda-sorta betrayed by the values already.
Yeah that should have been explained more clearly. It definitely matters which instance you use, and it’s wise to check out a few of them and join one that fits your values. Perhaps what they meant is that it doesn’t matter in the sense that if you end up disliking the leadership within one, you’re free to find a better one and can easily reconnect yourself that way.
It’s not like this was intentional lying to mislead anyone. I don’t think people should feel betrayed because of what looks like a combo of growing pains and a learning curve. It’s still early days and things like this will be become more apparent and sorted out in time.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame the entire Fediverse for one person’s explanation that oversimplified things in a way you don’t appreciate. The quoted advice makes sense if you are trying to get less techincally savvy people to join. If you wanted to know more about how federation between instances work, you can certainly do additional research.
Neither parties were really ready for this, so there’s going to be problems as things grow. Better to have things happen now while it’s all new rather than later when users have settled down for a while and established names, connections, and subscriptions.
I think my point is that this problem cannot be solved with 2-parties.
Adding the 3rd party, the hypothetical INAA server (I’m not an asshole) solves the problem. The key is creation and curation of these 3rd party servers.
The link also refers to
BB: The number of instances that this instances is completely Blocked By. If this number is high, then users on this instance will be limited in what they can see on the lemmyverse.and lists how many other instances every server on that list are blocked by.When it comes to the overselling of Lemmy and the interconnectivity, what can I say? I’d word it very differently.
Anyways, from a technical point of view I’d say it’s close to what you describe - With third party instances working as an intermediary in some way. The issue is that there’s no “sync” for communities and historically we end up with three different versions of i.e. !gaming, one on each instance. What Lemmy need is some sort of multi-reddit/funneling/taggins system so you can just post to a !gaming community - And then it’d be rejected by those who’ve blocked you. But everybody else would get it.
The issue is that there’s no “sync” for communities and historically we end up with three different versions of i.e. !gaming, one on each instance.
I don’t expect this to be a problem.
Over on /r/Reddit, there was /r/AskElectronics, /r/Electronics, /r/embedded, /r/microcontrollers, and /r/DIYElectronics. Because the moderator at the big /r/Electronics instance needlessly clamped down on discussion. Forcing community members to start up other subreddits (with a less popular name / get less traffic).
As the various instances settle down, the community will organize and recognize which discussion forums to centralize upon. We always had multiple subreddits for the same subject on Reddit. And now its a bit more fair that everyone can get a good name (ie: !gaming), albeit on different servers.
Well, we will end up with 160+ !gaming communities and no way of finding them other than word of mouth or actively checking every single instance and subscribe to !gaming - If they even have one.
It’s been a big issue for the two years I’ve been on Lemmy and I don’t believe the most used argument, “It will sort it self out, the community will balance it out”.
I’m not too bothered, I have mitigating procedures. I would be very interested in having this discussion again in a year, I feel this is one of the matters that only time will tell if one or none of us is right.
No?
The “Search for community” button shows !gaming and sorts them by size within the instances you can access. Here at lemmy.world, I can see that [email protected] is the next largest after we’ve been cut off from [email protected].
Yes, the !gaming-communities already federated to your home server.
There is most likely a lot of !gaming-communities you’re not seeing.
Make a dummy account at a different instance, create a new community, search for it on your home server and see if it shows up or if you have to search for the community with an URL and pull it to your instance.
we will end up with 160+ !gaming communities and no way of finding them other than word of mouth or actively checking every single instance
This lacks a good solution yet, that’s right. It’s less of a problem for people on big instances. People on small instances will often have to discover communities first before they can be found by search.
The next best solution I know is https://lemmy.directory/search (which seems to be down currently). lemmy.directory has the mission to subscribe to all communities in all instances to replicate something like /r/all. So they did the discovery for you, and you can search from their point of view to see what exists. Once found, you can discover it from your home instance in order to subscribe.
The next best solution
Interesting, I’ll check it out once it’s back up.
If it’s automatically connect to “friends-of-friends” instances and subscribe to all communities, that’s a great idea! It would basically crawl the known network as long as there was a single link between instances. It would particularly be a boon to smaller instances that would be much easier to connect to.
If it’s a regular instance ran as a community server with the aim of manually subscribing to everything as an emergency solution to this problem then eh… I literally did that a year ago with like 20 instances. I think that’s not feasible, or even worse - exclusionary without intending. If it’s all manual and everybody goes there because we think it’s all-encompassing… If one is not on the list they don’t exist to the world.
Consider it the equivalent of how subreddits used to ban members that used to participate in subreddits they don’t agree with. Instances will by default federate with each other when their users interact, unless one of them opts out of it. Another analogy how email servers block those servers that have been the origin of too much spam etc This is a feature, and not a bug, and is the same way problematic servers are kept out (not saying that Lemmy.world is problematic).
But the good thing is that you can change your profile easily to any instance that has not been defeferated and interact with beehaw again, if you really want to. I am not sure if Lemmy has a back up and restore option yet like Mastodon, but if it does, you could move all your data along with your profile to the new instance.
Consider it the equivalent of how subreddits used to ban members that used to participate in subreddits they don’t agree with.
What subreddits did that?? I don’t think I so much as got commented on subreddits I visited, let alone got banned for being in one.
I don’t remember specific subreddits but it was mainly left leaning subreddits banning anyone who had ever commented on e.g. r/theDonald, even if they’d gone there to debate in good faith (lol)
You’d likely never know you had been banned from a chunk of subreddits since it was shadowbans
Several of the politically conservative subs would do that to redditors who commented in other subs with opposing ideologies. You didn’t even have to comment in the conservative subs to get a ban.
And as petty as I think that is, I still think it is their right to run an unchallenged echo chamber with completely homogeneous opinions. Similarly Lemmy instances are free to federate or defederate as they see fit.
I’ve been using both lemmy.world and beehaw.org from kbin.social. From what I can tell, I can see most posts/comments, though not immediately after they are posted on their original instances. And they can see my posts/comments.
I actually thought about starting my own server with very strict user verification, but I don’t really have hosting capacity other than a personal server with like… One 9 of uptime. Nor do I care to change that.
But I think there would be serious draw with a user base that was guaranteed to be a real person, like through phone or face picture verification. Not everyone would go for it because not everyone wants to trust a random with that kind of information, but it worked on some subreddits like /r/fatfire for guaranteed proof of wealth. Think of it like having a public Facebook or Twitter account. Nothing stops you from having a bunch of anonymous alts, but certain servers might only want people from that vetted list. I’d certainly do it. If someone else wants to physically host the server, I’d be happy to vet people. But who would trust me?
I’d say that phone/face verification is an overkill. Moreover, as you have already mentioned not everyone would go for it. Especially the kind of people who like Fediverse and open-source software in general will be more wary of such practices in general, I suppose. I’m not a fan of such practices myself because I care about privacy and the proposed tactic really reminds me of mainstream social media.
I think that so far the verification system works just alright. Being verified by a small text while signing up works. Using the same pseudonym and contributing to the community with quality content and decent comment history to build yourself a positive reputation also does.
Face-verification is overkill.
The strictest I’d be willing to support is Lobste.rs model. Invite-only with tree-bans.
If Alice invites Bob, and Bob invites Charlie… when Alice is Tree-banned, then Bob-and-Charlie are both part of the ban (as well as everyone else Bob And Charlie invited).
That is: you’re fighting the wrong battle with verification. People don’t want real life identities in practice, what they want is bans that actually fucking work. When tree-bans ban your entire invite list, people pay attention and change their behavior.
I kind of like the idea behind that, but how do you even kick off a server like that? It would have to be a local community of people who knew each other in real life. Otherwise if some early user ends up being an asshole, suddenly a third of your instance is gone because he’s a digital Genghis Khan in terms of prolific progeny.
Lobste.rs has a great model of invite-only tree-bans. If Alice invites Bob, and if Bob invites Charlie… all three of them would be banned if Alice were Tree-banned.
This provides us with multiple benefits.
-
Exponential growth – Invites exponentially grow as the server becomes more popular.
-
Exponential moderation – Instead of having to ban 100 people from a troublesome instance, a Tree ban allows one-moderation action to exponentially affect far more users. This cuts off the bulk off spam / troll / bot accounts. Now spammers / trolls / bots have to have recruitment campaigns that try to comingle “legitimate” users with their spam/troll, increasing their level of effort.
-
Rescue operations – For the ‘innocent’ users who got banned from tree-bans, they can be rescued by reassigning them to a trusted sponsor after the tree-ban. Tree-bans aren’t permanent, they’re just entries in a database entry like everything else.
-
Curation of communities – Slows down the community growth to help keep a tight feel, but not so much that spammers become hard to deal with.
-
Is one 9 of uptime 9% or 90%? lol
.9% if you ask my wife when she’s trying to watch something on Plex, haha.
Or 19%?
It’s a great idea, but how do you propose verification on the INAA.net site? Using their current instance account details and seeing how many upvotes their comments and posts have received or something? Essentially developing a Karma tracking system that’s seperate to Lemmy.
Like you say a staging post, but then account elevation which allows it on more sensitive instances? I don’t know how we could guide new users to these staging instances though, unless every popular instance, where most content is created, draws up the bridges together and makes them read-only to the staging instances.
If beehaw didn’t want to get involved, it’s up to them, but I can see other instances who would want to use the service. Tbh the beehaw admins do sound like they a tad powermad so screw them anyway.
Lemmy needs a governing body, based on a democratic election system, to handle all this in all in sync between all instance admins. That body would also be in control of the master blocklists.
I don’t know how we could guide new users to these staging instances though
Read-only access to Beehaw.org, but with a message “Beehaw.org has a user-treaty with INAA.net. Only users older than 1-week can post to Beehaw.org instances”
I admit that these features don’t exist yet. But why not? Lets first come up with the idea and try to figure out what is easiest to code.
If it was natively part of the Lemmy project, the problem is I don’t know rust. Python yeah but never even attempted rust myself.
We need buy in from all admins of the most popular instances with a central authority in place managing it all. It can be done, I’d put my name down to assist but it’s a learning curve for me but sounds really fun and something to add to my CV
I mentioned this in a different comment, but you’d need to do legit identity verification. “Send me a picture of your face and 4 fingers” since AI can’t do fingers well, or a blanked out picture of your driver’s license. It would be extremely mod intensive to get set up, but it would entirely prevent bots. Sure you’d still get assholes, but banning someone whose actual identity is tied to their account is way more damaging and would get you slightly better behavior.
Being honest, I don’t like the idea of giving personal info including my face to an unknown 3rd party which are not really bounded by any laws or regulations since they have no audit trial and not a registered corporation.
Building a time-based karma tracking system seems much better to me and could be automated.
- user puts in their account name and which instance they are on
- the automated bot checks scrapes all their comments and posts , then calculates a sum of total karma. On the backend we code in a threshold of karma that needs to be attained before they become a verified user.
- the bot also checks how long the account has been live for, as an example let’s say we code in a threshold of 2 weeks
- bot adds user to the whitelisted user database
It’s these rules that should be defined by a central authority which has buy in from the Lemmyverse as a whole.
In other comments I made, I mentioned I like the fact that karma doesn’t exist here. But iv changed my mind, I can now see its uses. To be honest a system like this would give us the best of both worlds. Would still have an effect on stopping karma wh-or-ing but also allow that extra layer of security.
I totally agree, and I’m not sure I would do it either if I weren’t proposing it, but I think late-stage Reddit showed us that time-based accounts don’t really work. Bots, sold accounts, state-based agitprop and astroturfed corporate ads were rampant, especially compared to a decade ago.
All of that is fine for the servers that want that, but some kind of “guaranteed” userbase at least lets other communities limit themselves if they want to. I wouldn’t suggest Lemmy as a whole use it, but it certainly seems like it could be a good addition.
I’ll try to knock something up in python over next couple weeks and will start a GitHub project to share with you. We would also need to think about database costs, I can’t see it being a massive database though since it’s just a list of usernames.
We would then need to add in a module to the Lemmy project, (which I can’t do as I don’t know rush) so admins have the ability to use our whitelists.
My Python (and all programming for that matter) is pretty basic, but I am at least on Github and can look at it.
I’m still not sold on time-based though and would push for some other kind of stricter verification. If every community starts banning any big community but a list of people “guaranteed to not be assholes” is always allowed, that would make a lot of people sign up to be based in that community - even if the signup is onerous or invasive. But the nice thing is it doesn’t require anyone to do so - it just becomes a good first choice if as a user you want to be guaranteed to not be banned from some section of the fediverse. And for the other communities, it becomes a really easy list to allow even if they ban everyone who didn’t create an account on their server. It’s all about incentives.
Sorry, just so I’m clear, I’m proposing karma and time based rules together in one. So they have to pass both before becoming verified. It’s a start anyway, I’m getting to work right now to see what can be done
Sorry, not trying to be a debbie downer, just trying to think things through: What stops bot armies from upvoting new accounts and giving false karma? I’m trying to think of scalability.
And that is why it’ll never happen
So this is against the point, but I do wanna point out that AI can do fingers these days. Plus you can just try again if it makes a mistake. Finally, Stable Diffusion with Control Net lets you basically fit a new image to some existing shape with fine grain control. You just give it an outline of what the picture should look like and it’ll fill everything in. That is effective at dealing with tricky poses. You can even just take a picture and pass it in.
Similarly, photoshopping stuff like a fake driver’s license has always been easy. It’s not like server admins can verify license barcodes and security features are often crippled in image format.
All good points, but that makes the effort for bots and spammers a way higher threshold at least.
I thought I saw something that would verify Fediverse accounts. I think it’s maintained by the same folks who do press.coop that rebroadcasts news twitter accounts to mastodon.
