what's the asshole mitigation plan?
So far Lemmy is vibing. Everyone here is excited and optimistic and willing to put up with a few rough spots to be part of something.
When the Eternal September comes, which it will, how does a Lemmy instance deal with bad actors?
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.
definitely. account migration and maybe community migration (unsure how that'd work exactly) would be great. losing history every time an instance shuts down isn't very fun
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.
Strongly agree. This could also be good if you join an instance and it winds up being toxic or not vibing with your beliefs.
If a server admin turns out to be a giant asshole (present company excepted, of course), is there a way to migrate your identity to another instance?
If a server admin gets hit by a bus and their instance goes away, do all the users just cease to exist?
Mastodon has that feature, but Lemmy has not added that feature yet. From a technical perspective, I don't think there's anything preventing it, the developers just need to code it. I'm sure they have their hands full dealing with the reddit explosion right now though.
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
It was mastodon.lol. Great server early on but the admin Nathan went off the rails in a big way.
that's...really unfortunate
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.
Why do people care about preserving their "identity" and posts so much? This was never a thing in the old internet.
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
Because social media exists. There is identity attached to your online presence for the vast majority of people.
I don't understand either. Not having any "social media features" like a profile site or "karma" is a big plus for me. I use my account for access and saving links, that's all I expect.
Well it is not old internet anymore. It's new generations and a lot more poeple here with lots more identies and wishes.
Some of us have friends online and we'd like to be able to do things like continue conversations while still being identifiably the same individual.
Also there's consideration of privilege schemes where the access is based on karma, activity, or account age. That's aside from the potential issues that could arise if someone with high privilege (supermod for example) has their identity vanish leaving a community minus whatever function they might have been performing (this user is allowed to send the bot commands, etc).
On a personal note, not having to jump through a bunch of hoops intended to screen out bad actors just to access a community or group where you were already a member in good standing.
Beyond that, there's some people who really want to express their particular identity or brand online - for example I sometimes write using a particular name. If I could no longer use that name and not even access my account to tell people that, it would not help my audience find me or my back catalogue.
Beyond all those things, having access to my post history means I can look back at things - have you never sat and looked at old diaries or photos from when your were a child? Or been reminded of some event you enjoyed? Or even just wanted to check something went down like you remembered it?
It's a planned feature if I'm not mistaken.
I'm not worried about assholes. I'm more interested in being free. As long as the community mods are nice enough, I'm optimistic.
The ability to block users, communities and instances is there, I think it will be easier than ever to manage out own experiences.
Is there a way to hide (not block) a single post?
Their own way. If they don't control their shit, they get defederated. Such is the way. Keep your nose clean and you'll be right as rain.
But I do wonder about the possibility of two Lemmy communities, one right-wing and one left, with the right created in protest of being defederated...
Well, we can't think about that all the time, can we?
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
Sooooo like an anti-fediverse then? Is it possible for multiple defederated instances to federate only with each other?
A forked fediverse?
Do not want!
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).
the Negaverse! in the most 90's cartoon villain way possible
An instance can both make a black list and an allow list. If there are any instances on the allow list, only those instances are federated. So yeah, that is possible.
Instances can choose to federate specifically with a group of other instances already. If I wanted to turn mine into a right-wing circlejerk or off the rails conspiracy group, all I have to do is find some other Lemmy instances and add them to the Allowlist, which tells my instance to only connect to those I've listed.
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.
So how would one get defederated? Say someone creates an instance for questionable material, does every other instance have to manually add it to a blocklist?
I read that as "...asshole migration plan". 😂
Already here. I made it. Thanks for the concern all.
Me too, but I didn't realize it wasn't until I read your comment, kinda works either way as a title
Same!😂
When the Eternal September comes, which it will, how does a Lemmy instance deal with bad actors?
i'll bully them away >:3 !!!
On the real I feel like Lemmy/the wider linkagg fediverse will prob be good at self-moderating somewhat like other fediverse software's communities are. It'll probably be easier for admins to noice bad actors on their instance than it was for site admins on Reddit to notice bad actors there because the admins-to-users ratio on here will probably be better, even if things are kinda concentrated on lemmy.ml, lemmy.world and beehaw right now (people will probably spread out as they get a grip on how things work), and the average user will probably grow a stronger connection with their instance admins for that reason too, making it easier to address things like that since more people will be able to comfortably contact their admins directly. And if said bad actor is from another instance, and the admins of that instance refuse to deal with them, there's always community-level bans (I think anyways? I'm still not familiar with the comm mod tools) and, if more drastic measures are needed, defederation.
Individual instances will have to moderate themselves. If they become chaotic, other instances should unfederate them. But as users, you should also subscribe to communities you think are behaving well and block users/communities that are not.
Also, I have seen some users who are "grabbing" as many communities as possible, namely @Hurts@lemmy.world. Dude is moderating 60 communities, in an instance that started a few days ago.. He is not building the communities, he is just power tripping it seems. @ruud@ruud@lemmy.world, something might have to be done about that in the future. I suggest some sort of "requestcommunity", in which you can apply to become the mod of said community, if community is being badly run (or not run at all).
Will make a rule limiting number of communities per moderator or created per week or something like that. On the to do list.
Thanks for that - that's a big concern in any forum, and it's fantastic to see it addressed here :)
Thank you!
Unfederation should not be used so cavalierly. Instead, community blocks. I know many people that chose lemmy.world because it doesnt block anything and hope it stays that way.
Agreed. I'd rather avoid individual communities instead of instances.
Yeap chose lemmy.world because of the server experience. But I've already blocked the communities I don't want to see at a user level.
What about the ability for users to block instances? I'm sure there's a way I'm not thinking of that this would be problematic.
Yeah, I was going to say. I want to create communities from reddit that are not yet in here. But I don't want to be the one running it. On the other hand. I don't want a guy like that running a community I like. I would gladly create these communities and hand them over to proper mods later on if that's possible.
I'm not mod material.
It's absolutely possible. I already have a hundful of mods helping keep an eye on TIFU just a day after creating the community. There's definitely people willing to help things run smoothly.
Same, I want r/collapse and r/climatechange to come to lemmy but I also do not want to be the one running the show. I'm way too inactive regularly for that.
Isn't this the situation on Reddit, all the big subs moderated by a handful of people? I remember blocking them all years ago.
This is such a good find and 100% something that should be look at. Sorry, I'm also not mod material and can't chip in (with time)
There should be a limit on how many communities you can create in a given time span
There should be a limit on how many communities you can run, period. This is how we got super-mods like GallowBoob on Reddit
There should be a limit on how many communities you can create in a given time span
Yes, I thought of that, but then I am sure they would just create alt accounts to create as many communities as possible. I think the requesting of communities is still the best way. If one wants to be the mod of a community that already has a mod who is moding 50 other communities and is not doing jackshit..
this. Ihateany "verification" or "request" process as somebody has to do it. But saying that you cant create more than x communities per month or y communities per yearwould pretty much solve the problem.
Yeah we don't need supermods here
I don't think mastodon has had this issue and it has been a while. Since we are not on Twitter, you can just block whoever is an asshole.
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!
This is my plan. I have already blocked some nsfw instances so you can block more than just users as well.
Yeah, it's a beautiful system. When all the banned Twitter Nazis moved to gab and then gab moved to Mastodon everyone immediately defedded them, it's like having a pre-curated blocklist of most of the worst people on the platform
Woah, this is the first time I've pressed "all" on lemmygrad. It's... so much bigger!
Lol yeah!. Default should be "all" imo. Also, the default sort would be "hot".
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.
Downvote they ass
Hopefully all the assholes are attracted to one shitty instance and then that instance gets defederated.
Srsly tho, the assholes are kind of apart of the whole experience, but I think the people being drawn over here right now are not really the asshole type, at least so far.
Typically assholes like to be in an echochamber and won't stay in a community where they get downvoted and reported. Just downvote asshole posts and they'll naturally leave to an instance that allows assholes.
in mastodon there were instances only to assholes, and other instances blocked them as a whole, so i think it's gonna be easier
Just waiting for the lemmy.circlejerk to pop up lol
The story of gab in a nutshell.
How long until we start seeing tiktok/instagram/facebook/reddit reposts.
Then we'll know we've truly "made it".
I know it is part of the Fediverse, but I wish bots were a not thing or allowed. I know they are not 'assholes' but I just think they take away from having real human connections.
I think we just collectively need to learn how to act better.
Choose not to respond when people are agressively onesided, you won't be changing their minds.
We cannot control assholes or trolls, but we can control our behaviors. Stay kind as long as possible, disengage when you can't. Don't let these idiots turn YOU into an asshole.
There were a lot of very useful bots, and you can’t block bots anyway without blocking APIs, and we can all see how well that goes.
I think some bots are good. I could personally go without seeing the bots that reply to comments when something specific is said, but many subs had helpful bots in them.
We'll live, we'll see. Meta is showing its interest in mastodon, so we have a reason to worry. But I think, lemmy will change according to the situation, when situation will be present, not before it.
How can your comment have minus 1 downvote?
Lmao I was wondering too. Lots of bugs in the system still happening clearly.
there are multiple ways evil can behave on lemmy:
adfjakjdfkl would be easily detected as spam
any other thoughts on proof of work, or how evil doers can behave on social media sides?
I don't have any other suggestions, I just wanted to say that your comment is officially the nicest formatted comment I've seen on Lemmy thus far.
I know it's just standard markdown stuff and it's super common and will become more common on here as userbases build, I just enjoy the new platform mini milestones
No, assholes need to learn to behave within the context of the instance / community they are posting to or get downvoted / moderated. Ideally they go away to their own instance where they can be assholes to each other and be defederated.
In the older, better days of the internet assholes would be banned frequently. The problem is that in recent years instead of having a large number of relatively small forums we have a few massive social media sites that effectively control communication over the Internet, and being banned from one of those would be a very big deal.
With the Fediverse, we can go back to the way things were, where banning someone from a given instance isn't a huge deal since people can just make accounts on other instances, but it's still enough of an inconvenience to act as a deterrent. And if they keep being an asshole on their new instance then they'll get banned again until the only instances that'll take them are ones that cater exclusively to assholes, and those can be defederated.
What makes you think this platform has "free speech"? It has a bunch of tools for suppressing or excluding undesirable tools. Most obviously, moderation can be used to remove comments or users from an instance, and federation can be used to remove whole instances from the network.
I value free speech. But not every platform has to support it, and Lemmy explicitly doesn't - unless people just don't just those levers.
You can run your own instance or join an instance that tolerates that speech, and federate with other instances that tolerate it. So, the "platform" is not supressing you one bit. Go forth, and be an asshole if you wish.
However, administrators and users on other instances also have the freedom to participate without being forced to listen to assholes ad nauseum. "Free Speech" does not mean "Free (from the consequences of your) Speech" or that other people should be forced to listen to you.
The EU definition of free speech online includes platforms. https://slate.com/technology/2022/10/digital-services-act-european-union-content-moderation.html
Platforms meaning major internet giants.
The reason why Lemmy encourages free speech better than the major platforms is that people can just start their own Lemmy.
The argument that people gave for supporting suppression of political speech on platforms was that "you can just start your own site, you don't have to use twitter/fb/etc". With the death of reddit, we can clearly see that is much easier said than done, but I think Lemmy is making progress in that direction.
In the older, better days, we used kill files, and our choice of platform was eventually overrun by spam.
Isn't that what 4chan is for?
I'm into using my block button
This is the solution. We cannot shield an open platform, but we can shield ourselved.
This is the way!
It would be nice if everyone were to be excellent to each other but that's just me talking with rose tinted glasses and a belly full of pizza.
Be excellent to each other.
My new motto for the time being.
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?
The closest thing I could think of is other instances blocking the troublesome one. Maybe if they add support for moving your account to another instance, then you could just move in protest.
This is it. Once import/export is available, it would be easy enough to just move over to another instance and not deal with whoever is running your current one. I doubt we would ever see any major issues with Lemmy itself, given the open source nature.
The decentralised nature of it makes that much harder. But also much less likely to be required.
For example, could you imagine a scenario where emails "go dark"? It'd require individual email services to go dark.
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.
What does "the eternal September" mean?
It's a reference to when AOL started. Every previous year, new students got online from their university around September. Some behaved badly, but the numbers were small enough that they could be educated on 'netiquette'.
When AOL started, suddenly there were too many newcomers, and the influx of rudeness never stopped.
I guess also students are more receptive to learning new rules than the average AOL user.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
There used to be an influx of young students to the internet every September because most people used it at university for the first time. That changed when home internet became more widespread leading to the eternal September.
I think it's just a reference to the old Usenet days in the 90s when it became popular and a flood of new users came in and "ruined" it
The newsgroup server I'm on is actually called eternal-september.org in remembrance.
We still have voting, mods, and admins. Mods can take action for bad content, admins can take action for chronic offenders, or if mods aren't taking care of a community. And worst case scenario, if an instance is causing trouble as a whole, it can be defederated.
Down the line, I think we'll see spam lists to help deal with people creating lots of spam instances, like email has.
I'm wondering the same, I would guess grey listing and shadow banning to be the most effective.
Shadow banning is Orwellian . something you might expect from the CCP instead of a supposedly progressive online forum. If you're going to ban someone at least have the decency to let them know they are banned.
China bad
It's certainly a harsher punishment than normal banning, but I don't see why it would be that different. Assuming you have a user posting something bannable and always sign it with their initials. But whenever they are banned they come back under a different name and continue to do bannable offenses. That is a good reason for shadowbanning imo.
Though any first offense should always be normal-banned imo.
All these American tech firms shadow ban people. The practice is very abusive, but it is also very American.
You're right, it is, but there are some folks who want nothing more than to burn down what you built. In the real world those people get physically dealt with, but in the virtual world where there's no means of physically restraining someone, what's your alternative?
Shadow banning is a bit controversial.
Yeah I would rather we just ban them outright
you don't know do you
thine asses shalt be downvoteth
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...
Some thoughts —
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".
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 ....
this is worthy of a BestOf, do we have a BestOf?
The fediverse is your oyster!
We do now. https://lemmy.world/c/bestof
I've been on reddit long enough that I remember the mantra...
Do not talk about Reddit on other sites
Do not link to Reddit from other sites
They understood the concept of "Eternal September" and wanted to hold it off for as long as possible.
I'm not sure that represents a good lesson from the original Eternal September.
One might hope for an echo of Lovecraft:
Do not call up newbies that you cannot calm down.
And also:
Do not permit automated posting that exceeds your capacity for automated filtration.
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.
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.
Will we end up with islands of trust?
It's a damn necessity if you want to avoid a situation like Mastodon had with Gab joining the fediverse.
Imagine the absolute shitshow if a white-supremacist Reddit clone like Poal suddenly integrated their site with Lemmy...
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.
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.
Will we end up with islands of trust?
Islands of trust, in an archipelago of less-trust, in a sea of no-trust, is probably pretty okay.
Real islands have coast guards and customs offices.
If Usenet newsgroups had come with default killfiles — which users could choose to override — the whole thing might have turned out differently.
So if you get banned by lemmy.ml for "Orientalism", you get a fediverse-wide ban? That doesn't sound like a better system than reddit, that sounds like a worse system! At least reddit mods could only kick you out of their own subreddit, not the whole site.
If anyone is curious about the history like I was, the Wikipedia article is quite well done:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September#:~:text=Eternal%20September%20or%20the%20September,access%20to%20many%20new%20users.
I've just gotta know was that local dial up in DC Digex?
I worked with Tale@UUNET during the Eternal September, providing NNTP support to our customers. God that was hell.
CapAccess.
That's a name I haven't seen in a long time...
(I'm also from the days of bang paths)
Posted to [/c/bestof]!(https://lemmy.world/post/89698)
Posted to /c/bestof!