anathema_device

abff08f4813c, 11 months ago

Folks, it's not that Reddit is undeleting comments or anything. I fought this all day today (see https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/45417/Anyone-have-experience-with-deleting-comments-to-see-older-comments#entry-comment-190482 ) and I figured out exactly what is happening.

Reddit is so dumb! They have an 1000 limit (on posts, comments, saved, etc). See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17647915 and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42940262/getting-more-than-1000-search-results-upper-bound-with-praw and even in PRAW's own docs, for example in https://praw.readthedocs.io/en/v3.6.2/pages/getting_started.html

Any single reddit listing will display at most 1000 items.

So what happened is that redact.dev can only delete the most recent 1000 comments of OP. But those subreddits have comments from OP beyond the limit, which no longer display in OP's own profile/comment views.

https://shreddit.com/ reports the same thing but they are more open about it.

They explicitly say that you need to give them an archive upload (from reddit's data retrival request) in order for shreddit.com to delete everything.

0110010001100010, 11 months ago

Mod of /r/homeautomation and /r/homeimprovement here. Yeah we are all done. The subreddits are staying private until we are removed forcefully or reddit changes their stance on the API. Chances are it will be the former. It's really sad but we just cannot realistically moderate without third-party apps. And with the way spez has been acting it's likely more mod tools/bots will be on the chopping block making our "jobs" many times harder. It's hard, it's sucks, I've been on reddit for some 12 years now (under various accounts). We love our communities but just can't operate this way. :(

buffaloseven, 11 months ago

So when beehaw says they're degenerating from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world, the way that works is that any content from those specific servers will not be ingested into beehaw's view of the fediverse. That includes content and comments. It's identical to how if a Mastodon instance setup for LGBTQ communities and a Mastodon instance set up for far right extremists decided to defederate from each other, they would just never see any content that originated from each other's servers. Since kbin.social is not sh.itjust.works or lemmy.world, we should be fine in sharing back and forth with those communities, and because kbin.social hasn't defederated from those servers, content will flow back and forth between them fine. beehaw users should be able to see content from kbin.social minus any contributions from the defederated servers.

It's a very powerful tool in toolbox for the Fediverse, and one that absolutely brings an eye to the moderation of servers when it's used. I think it's a bit of a bigger deal in this part of the Fediverse right now because there aren't a ton of options yet for federated link aggregators; it's pretty trivial now to move to a different Mastodon server if you disagree with the instances being defederated from the one you're on. That said, it's very much a "with great power comes great responsibility" thing; I think that it's fantastic that servers are able to engage or disengage with whomever they want. Most will get along just fine and it's not really an issue.

I also think that as part of a "community taking back the internet from billionaires" movement, defederation is one of our most powerful tools. If Meta comes into the scene and starts scraping the Fediverse and building marketing profiles and training their AI chatbots on our data, it'll take about 3 minutes until people are maintaining a blocklist on git* for all server administrators to simply block Meta from accessing the majority of the Fediverse. There is a challenge in deciding what the scope of "generally acceptable behaviour" is, but we did it before centralized social media and we can do it again. If anything, I think some of the challenges of the last 10-20 years was this idea that diametrically opposed communities should occupy the same "space" on the internet. Get a big general pool, and give flexibility for communities to push in a direction they want if they want to go outside that space.

Some of these things will iron themselves out as more instances of lemmy or kbin or whatever decides to interoperate with these two spin up. In the end, I think these are tools that allow us to develop healthier communities. In the long game, it won't matter for any one server if they can't access beehaw because good content will be distributed amongst a ton of servers. And if the people from lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works really want that beehaw content, then they can work to address some of the issues that beehaw feels are worth defederating them for!

buffaloseven, 11 months ago

Oh, definitely understandable. It takes a little while to wrap your head around how all this actually works. I learned most of it with the Twitter exodus when I moved to Mastodon. Once you do get it, though...it's kind of like taking the red pill and realizing how railroaded the internet has actually been for the last 15 years. I genuinely think the Fediverse and ActivityPub will be a massive turning point in how we use the internet, and over time (think a decade time of time-scale) will redefine how social engagement occurs on the internet.

Technology -- and the efforts of open source developers -- got to the point where we can make Facebooks and Reddits and Twitters and GoodReads and Instagrams and more that can run on a server anyone's willing to spin up, and content no longer needs to be gated to one community thanks to the ActivityPub standard.

And think of it this way: a piece of content on kpub is really no different than a piece of content on Pixelfed or Mastodon. They're all embedded within an ActivityPub "container" that has a standard form. All these websites exist now not because you have to be super-specific in how to read the content, but rather to craft experiences that are optimized for different types of content. kbin has microblogs, which is really just Twitter/Mastodon. Some will like it here, others will find the experience that a dedicated microblogging client like Mastodon far more favourable for viewing that kind of content. When sharing a photo on Pixelfed, you can assign licenses, attributions, and locations, which makes sense given its intent to be a photography website. You don't really need that for a lot of images shared here or on Mastodon , but all that info is stored inside the exact same ActivityPub "container" as a link you put on here; nothing is stopping kbin or Mastodon from reading that data, or being able to write it if they wanted to. At the end of the day, it's all the same stuff, and you just need the application you're building to interact with the right parts.

That's why you can do things like follow people from entirely different "platforms" on other Fediverse platforms. For example, here's someone I saw trending on Pixelfed who had some nice pictures: Charlie as viewed from kbin. It may not be ideal following them here -- it might not be the optimal experience for photo sharing -- but you can do it. Likewise, you can boost content from one "platform" into another.

The more I learn about it all, the more I find it impressive how forward-looking and comprehensive the ActivityPub standard was. And I'm sure it will flex and expand as needed heading forward.

Last thing I'll say because I'm way too wordy...one of the things I did when I was learning all this was set up a similar username on multiple accounts. I'm on here, Mastodon, Bookrastinating, and Pixelfed. I put a 💬 after my display name on Mastodon, a 📖 after my display name on Bookrastinating, and a 📷 after my display name on Pixelfed. From my Mastodon account, I followed my Bookrastinating and Pixelfed accounts. Now I post content into the relevant platform that's optimized for it: Mastodon for microblogs, Bookrastinating for reading stuff, and Pixelfed for photos. Those communities naturally develop interest for those specific types of content. But now, if I post a picture on Pixelfed that I really think my followers on Mastodon would like, I can just boost the content into my Mastodon feed. Not a link to the content, but the actual content itself. And it can move on into that community as well. I'm content right now having these different places optimized for different types of content, but on a technology stack that allows that content to seamlessly transition between applications. It's great!