Lemmy search works pretty well on larger servers, and they’re indexed by major web search engines.
The microblog side of things is worse, with Mastodon long having near-useless search because it might “encourage negative social dynamics” or some such. Some other software, such as Akkoma has had better search, and Mastodon has recently improved somewhat for accounts that opt into being searchable. Mastodon directs search engines not to index most pages.
Some people get very upset about attempts to build general-purpose fediverse search tools.
I think it’s a small, but very loud minority who have unrealistic expectations about how other people will use data they share in a manner that’s inherently rather public. I kind of see where they’re coming from, but ActivityPub with open federation doesn’t work that way.
The history of the internet is full of examples of companies taking data about or creative output from people and trying to make money from it without permission, in ways the original creator might not like. Nobody has gone there with a Fediverse scraper or search project that we know of yet, but it’s going to happen if the Fediverse gets big enough.
Some people want to be able to easily share things with a certain audience without them being easily discoverable by a different audience. There are of course privacy settings to control visibility and software like Matrix that provides not only access control by cryptographic security, but those add friction. It’s only possible for this group to have it both ways if nobody develops good search tools, which turns some of them into bullies.
The proposed solution of an intermediate server caching embeds is needlessly complex. The first server a link is posted to can fetch the embed, then push it out to every server receiving the post.
In this case, generating fake excerpts is not something a user on a server controlled by someone else can do; they have to operate a malicious server themselves. Defederation is a good solution to malicious servers.
Certainly someone very determined could spin up a bunch of malicious servers and put out a bunch of posts containing fake excerpts, but they’d need followers to get any reach on the microblog side of the fediverse. They could spam Lemmy communities, but users would notice and downvote/report the posts.
So I think “just defederate” probably is an adequate solution here, at least as things currently sit. Were the fediverse to grow by an order of magnitude, I think it would need a reputation system to add a bit of friction to a brand new server or user getting a lot of reach quickly.
I think they mean like IRC, Matrix, or Discord: real-time chat rather than asynchronous. They may mean such a thing integrated into a Lemmy client, but it’s pretty unclear in the original question.
If she switched to Android, I guess there’s Google Chat, but you know how Google is with their chat apps.
That’s far from the only option. I can think of half a dozen relatively mainstream options off the top of my head (Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, Discord, Matrix, Skype), though I think the first three still want a phone number. There are many more.
Have the admins of lemmy.world ever given a reason for this decision?
Yes. This post gives their thoughts around the time Threads started talking about federation and it’s pretty much “let’s wait and see if this results in problems”. They note a high probability of problems leading to defederation if a significant number of Threads users start posting to Lemmy communities.
I am happy with this approach. I want my Lemmy server to federate with every compatible server unless and until that server becomes a source of problems. I do not want it to preemptively or transitively[1] block anything. The great thing about federated systems is that people who are not happy with that approach can join a different server with policies that better match their preferences.
[1] A transitive block is blocking a server because it doesn’t block a third server.
If Lemmy.world denying Meta potential access to its 18600 monthly active users was likely to have a meaningful impact on Meta’s revenue or even hurt Mark Zuckerberg’s feelings, maybe I’d feel the same way.
I’ve found NPR to be pretty good at that. It’s particularly apparent when it comes to Trump’s lies about the 2020 election; they are consistent about pointing out when claims have been conclusively disproven, and often use the word “lie”.
That said, I agree with Berliner’s fundamental point; I’ve noticed an increasing slant in the stories NPR emphasizes. It’s not that their reporting is unfair, but their choice of what to cover aligns pretty closely with the positions of the progressive left.
NPR talked a lot about investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign while investigations were ongoing, but was “sparse” in its coverage of the Mueller report’s finding that there was no credible evidence of such collusion.
Hunter Biden’s laptop, containing evidence of influence peddling was deemed non-newsworthy; Berliner believes it was newsworthy.
NPR dismissed the SARS-CoV-2 lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory and failed to report on it seriously. While it is not the leading hypothesis, there’s credible evidence for it, and at some points in the past the evidence looked fairly compelling.
These examples are very different from ignoring someone who claims without evidence that strawberries cause cancer, that the 2020 election was rigged, or that wildfires in California were started by Israeli space lasers.
I often use a commercial VPN service, which I suspect is not rare among Lemmy users. Most of the time, I’m able to post to lemmy.world, but on occasion I am not. The default web UI provides zero feedback, just a spinning submit button forever, but if I look in the browser dev tools, I can see it’s being blocked....
Thanks for the explanation. It seems I should be proposing improvements to the Lemmy software since the software doesn’t currently support the policy I’m suggesting.
We are NOT a dark web service where everyone needs to be under tor, vpn, proxy, and back again.
ISPs in some parts of the world spy on users to, for example sell their browsing habits to advertisers and data brokers. That’s a good motivation for some people to browse via VPN by default, not to enable it only when accessing specific sites.
Proposing changes like this is how open source projects work.
Account age and reputation metrics are a pretty good way to limit abuse because the supply of established accounts is limited, making them difficult to replace when they get banned.
That’s definitely a concern. I selected my provider (Mullvad) because I know someone who worked there, and I have fairly high confidence they don’t do that.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the legal situation at least for the US and EU. Platform immunity and safe harbor provisions are pretty strong in those jurisdictions, and the fact that the trail goes cold with the IP address (because it’s a non-logging VPN) does not shift liability back to the platform operator.
An investigator asking a question is not liability, and I don’t believe any of the safe harbor or platform immunity laws in the EU or USA condition their protections on denying service to users from IP addresses belonging to providers that don’t provide a certain level of assistance to law enforcement. I’m nearly certain you can’t get in any kind of legal trouble for not blocking privacy-protecting services like Mullvad.
That’s separate from the operational concern: you don’t want people to post CSAM. I don’t want people to post CSAM. Nearly everyone else doesn’t want people to post CSAM, and most of us are willing to accept some level of inconvenience so that you can prevent or limit it. That said, once Lemmy offers more fine-grained tools, I hope lemmy.world will adopt a more fine-grained policy.
It makes some sense to me in that some media might contain any actual abuse, e.g. images generated and shared publicly by underage teenagers without any coercion. I think most of us would still consider it exploitative for other people to share and view that media.
I don’t know if this is something people say in other countries, but in my country, there’s this common cliché or “wisdom” where adults will assure you that the people who picked on you in environments like school will universally develop lives of hardship later on, one way or another getting into mayhem....
When we were both five years old, I knew one of my classmates would end up in prison.
Most kids can be jerks on occasion, and I can think of a few examples where that applied to me as well as it could to anyone. I haven’t generally kept track of people who bullied me in school; I imagine most of them grew out of it, and a few didn’t. This guy was something else, as if cruelty was the only thing that brought him joy.
At 19, he and two others beat a taxi driver to death. He was convicted of manslaughter and spent more than a decade in prison. A quick web search suggests he’s out of prison and working as a car salesman now.
I certainly didn’t have an adult understanding of what prison is, but I knew people who committed really serious crimes like murder went there. I expected this person to do something like that, and I wasn’t far off.
is there a search engine for the fediverse?
Since big part of the web is drowning in AI junk, including Reddit, is there a good search engine to find answers in the fediverse?
Alan Wake just doesn't work if flashlight technology is adequately represented (lemmy.world)
The Fediverse has a DDoS problem (aumetra.xyz)
I was recommended to share this article I wrote a few days ago on here, too; so here we are!...
Is there an app available that allows chatting with people about technology or various other topics?
FTC fines Razer for every cent made selling bogus “N95 grade” RGB masks (arstechnica.com)
How RCS on iPhone Will Make Texting Better for Everyone (www.cnet.com)
Show off your copper and brass! (lemmy.world)
NPR editor who alleged left-wing bias at network suspended (thehill.com)
Please stop blocking VPNs for established accounts
I often use a commercial VPN service, which I suspect is not rare among Lemmy users. Most of the time, I’m able to post to lemmy.world, but on occasion I am not. The default web UI provides zero feedback, just a spinning submit button forever, but if I look in the browser dev tools, I can see it’s being blocked....
So today I finally deleted the bird app
It not only have problems with CSEM (the real-life stuff), but there are now bots spamming it and Twitter made reporting it a chore....
What happened to all the baddies you knew growing up?
I don’t know if this is something people say in other countries, but in my country, there’s this common cliché or “wisdom” where adults will assure you that the people who picked on you in environments like school will universally develop lives of hardship later on, one way or another getting into mayhem....