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.
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.
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 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.
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!
The old internet didn't have an all encompassing issue with bots and bad actors trying to gain your trust, a public post history is basically the closest thing a person can have to a trustable identity online, it's not a perfect solution but it helps
I am not sure I follow. I don't see where trust comes in when you're just reading random people's posts. I guess if you wanted to do moderation or something. But I know a lot of people including myself purposely delete their reddit account and start over.
if I’m unable to detect the tone or intentions of a comment I’ll check that user’s posts to get an idea, if someone has a history of not being an asshole I’m much more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt or want to engage with them. it also helps ID spam accounts
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.
Yeah I can see that. I am just struggling to understand why anyone would care. For social media like instagram I understand, but its an anonymous handle no one gives a shit about or recognizes, so I don't see why someone would be attached to it.
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.
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 ....
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.
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.
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 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.
It's not really a question of whether they can or not. They already do. Sometimes, though, they have opinions that conflict with each other and they defederate each other.
But extreme right-wing communities are already a thing in Mastodon and the most extreme ones tend to get defederated (the worst offender being poa.st), and among the most defederated, they often federate with each other (you will notice that poa.st still has a "vibrant community" of instances that are ok with being offensive).
Yeah, it's like the Nazi bar idea: that if you have a bar and there's one Nazi, you need to kick them out and show zero tolerance, otherwise they'll bring their Nazi friends and your regular patrons will leave and before long, you'll be running a Nazi bar.
The thing is, kicking the Nazi out protects your space and your community, but it doesn't stop them from finding another bar. There's always a Nazi bar somewhere.
I myself occasionally browse the "nazi bars" of the fediverse to get an idea of what the hell they're complaining about now. Similarly I go to the tankie places to get acquainted with which genocide they're denying today hahah, it's a fun hobby to do occasionally, too much and it gets irritating though.
Email servers work the same way. So far there's still one big email "community", while spamserver.ng is just pretty universally blocked. I think that's strong evidence the strategy works.
Now, a much more relevant question is how do you run your instance.
Well, a huge caveat to that is that there are world class Researchers who create constantly adapting intelligent spam filters to keep spam out of inboxes. Maybe the fediverse will have something like that someday! Who knows!
I think your underestimating how real the battle against spam still is in the email space. If you use Gmail you've got a huge company doing the work for you. If you work in IT and run a corporate mail server you'll see that we pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for anti-spam/phishing filtering.
Bot spam is totally separate and unfortunately I don't see how you'd be able to port the work over.
Yeah, I'm a bit worried because there was recently talk in my home instance of defederating lemmy.ml because the owners are apparently far-left... thankfully I think there was consensus against it but you do start to worry that the whole thing might descend into tribalism with rivalling echo chambers...
Administrators need to be very careful about who they degenerate because being too trigger happy could be disastrous as you said.
Since people like to use the geographic analogy of countries/cities, communities should be gathering areas like a town hall where people discuss similar topics but instances would be like a city/country/state or whatever.
You don't never speak to your neighbor again just because he's a leftist or a capitalist. You never speak to them again if he and his family all start throwing their dog's poop at your windows. We're forgetting how to converse with people and it's a big problem online and in real life.
We should absolutely be defederating instances dedicated to child porn and other illegal activities, and if there's an instance that's responsible for brigading or attacks then sure. But opposing viewpoints should not be a valid reason to defederate, IMO. If we go down that slope of not being able to tolerate someone else's different views then we are doomed.
we already see that in action with the american right wing communities, don’t we? I just hope the biggest fediverse manages to stay diverse, monocultures are no bueno
Is there an equivalent of "going dark" in lemmy? Like if there is some "global" or "fediverse" issue that communities want to protest, is there the same option as back on Reddit that they are using now?
Communities can unfederate themselves at the click of a button (by an admin, of course). Or they can blacklist “bad” instances. Or whitelist specific instances and connect to nobody else.
To make a link to a community, use the [link markup](/like/this) but with the URL being specifically /c/community@instance.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@lemmy.world is a relative URL that will show up correctly for anyone on any Lemmy instance.
idea: let each instance have a prepopulated blocklist
let the admins of each instance have a list of blocked users that gets inherited to members of that instance, but let users remove from that list as well as add to avoid abuse. and don't hide the comments from these users, just collapse them to let people know a comment has been hidden in case of mistakes
(possibly even allow regex to avoid RandomWord1234, which was common on reddit)
this is a rather extreme tactic though, only for if spam becomes overwhelming
It would be helpful if there's a reason why a user is on a blocklist, even if super short like "spammer" or "posting NSFW content without NSFW tag" etc...
Add comment