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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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