I am so happy I have an account on here, even if some people can be quite abrasive
We tend to have strong opinions here that’s for sure. Most people are good about giving space for honest discussion, which is nice.
Your mother - she’s older than you!
Well, we need to remember that the longer ago someone registered the more likely they are to hold some strong views. For many of us it was just a strong feeling that corporate ownership is awful, but not for everyone.
When I saw this article I was like oh damn if I post it here I’ll get loads of upvotes lmao.
You were apparently correct haha
If social media becomes decentralized we might even gain traction reversing some of the brainwashing on the masses. The current giants are just propaganda machines. Always have been, but it’s now blatant and obvious. They don’t even care to hide it.
This is why I don’t agree with the “lemmy is cozy, it doesn’t need to grow” point of view. There’s always specific, largely defederated instances that provide that cozy feeling, but I really want decentralized platforms to replace the corporate ones. If that’s ever going to happen, the fediverse needs to grow.
I think it doesn’t need to rapidly grow. The trickle of new users we get each time the main players fuck up is good enough for me.
check out “the gentleman’s guide to forum sliding”….
as long as teams of people sit in a row of computers using dozens of sock puppets, no place is safe once it gets kinda popular….
Assuming you’re talking about this? https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
Agreed. But we need a solution against bots just as much. There’s no way the majority of comments in the near future won’t just be LLMs.
Closed instances with vetted members, there’s no other way.
Too high of a barrier to entry is doomed to fail.
It’s how most large forums ran back in the day and it worked great. Quality over quantity.
@a1studmuffin @ceenote the only reason these massive Web 2.0 platforms achieved such dominance is because they got huge before governments understood what was happening and then claimed they were too big to follow basic publishing law or properly vet content/posters. So those laws were changed to give them their own special carve-outs. We’re not mentally equipped for social networks this huge.
Programming.dev does this and is the tenth largest instance.
Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through a couple of hoops for something better, compared to your average Joe who isn’t even aware of the problem
Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through hoops because that knowledge/experience makes it easier for them, they understand it’s worthwhile or because it’s fun. If software can be made easier for non-techy people and there’s no downsides then of course that aught to be done.
Ok, now tell the linux people this.
It’s not always obvious or easy to make what non-techies will find easy. Changes could unintentionally make the experience worse for long-time users.
I know people don’t want to hear it but can we expect non-techies to meet techies half way by leveling their tech skill tree a bit?
10th largest instance being like 10k users… we’re talking about the need for a solution to help pull the literal billions of users from mainstream social media
There isn’t a solution. People don’t want to pay for something that costs huge resources. So their attention becoming the product that’s sold is inevitable. They also want to doomscroll slop; it’s mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It’s what people want. Truly fighting it would requires huge benevolent resources, a group willing to finance a manipulative and compelling experience and then not exploit it for ad dollars, push educational things instead or something. Facebook, twitter etc are enshitified but they still cost huge amounts to run. And for all their faults at least they’re a single point where illegal material can be tackled. There isn’t a proper corollary for this in decentralised solutions once things scale up. It’s better that free, decentralised services stay small so they can stay under the radar of bots and bad actors. When things do get bigger then gated communities probably are the way to go. Perhaps until there’s a social media not-for-profit that’s trusted to manage identity, that people don’t mind contributing costs to. But that’s a huge undertaking. One day hopefully…
We have a human vetted application process too and that’s why there’s rarely any bots or spam accounts originating from our instance. I imagine it’s a similar situation for programming.dev. It’s just not worth the tradeoff to have completely open signups imo. The last thing lemmy needs is a massive influx of Meta users from threads, facebook or instagram, or from shitter. Slow, organic growth is completely fine when you don’t have shareholders and investors to answer to.
If you could vet members in any meaningful way, they’d be doing it already.
Most instances are open wide to the public.
A few have registration requirements, but it’s usually something banal like “say I agree in Spanish to prove your Spanish enough for this instance” etc.
This is a choice any instance can make if they want, none are but that doesn’t mean they can’t or it doesn’t work.
Instances that don’t vet users sufficiently get defederated for spam. Users then leave for instances that don’t get blocked. If instances are too heavy handed in their moderation then users leave those instances for more open ones and the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.
I wish this was the case but the average user is uninformed and can’t be bothered leaving.
Otherwise the bigger service would be lemmy, not reddit.
the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.
Just like classical macroeconomics, you make the deadly (false) assumption that users are rational and will make the choice that’s best for them.
The sad truth is that when Reddit blocked 3rd party apps, and the mods revolted, Reddit was able to drive away the most nerdy users and the disloyal moderators. And this made Reddit a more mainstream place that even my sister and her friends know about now.
Reputation systems. There is tech that solves this but Lemmy won’t like it (blockchain)
You don’t need blockchain for reputations systems, lol. Stuff like Gnutella and PGP web-of-trust have been around forever. Admittedly, the blockchain can add barriers for some attacks; mainly sybil attacks, but a friend-of-a-friend/WoT network structure can mitigate that somewhat too,
Slashdot had this 20 years ago. So you’re right this is not new.or needing some new technology.
Space is much more developed. Would need ever improving dynamic proof of personhood tests
I think a web-of-trust-like network could still work pretty well where everyone keeps their own view of the network and their own view of reputation scores. I.e. don’t friend people you don’t know; unfriend people who you think are bots, or people who friend bots, or just people you don’t like. Just looked it up, and wikipedia calls these kinds of mitigation techniques “Social Trust Graphs” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack#Social_trust_graphs . Retroshare kinda uses this model (but I think reputation is just a hard binary, and not reputation scores).
I dont see how that stops bots really. We’re post-Turing test. In fact they could even scan previous reputation points allocation there and divise a winning strategy pretty easily.
I mean, don’t friend, or put high trust on people you don’t know is pretty strong. Due to the “six degrees of separation” phenomenon, it scales pretty easily as well. If you have stupid friends that friend bots you can cut them off all, or just lower your trust in them.
“Post-turing” is pretty strong. People who’ve spent much time interacting with LLMs can easily spot them. For whatever reason, they all seem to have similar styles of writing.
I mean, don’t friend, or put high trust on people you don’t know is pretty strong. Due to the “six degrees of separation” phenomenon, it scales pretty easily as well. If you have stupid friends that friend bots you can cut them off all, or just lower your trust in them.
Know IRL? Seems it would inherently limit discoverability and openness. New users or those outside the immediate social graph would face significant barriers to entry and still vulnerable to manipulation, such as bots infiltrating through unsuspecting friends or malicious actors leveraging connections to gain credibility.
“Post-turing” is pretty strong. People who’ve spent much time interacting with LLMs can easily spot them. For whatever reason, they all seem to have similar styles of writing.
Not the good ones, many conversations online are fleeting. Those tell-tale signs can be removed with the right prompt and context. We’re post turing in the sense that in most interactions online people wouldn’t be able to tell they were speaking to a bot, especially if they weren’t looking - which most aren’t.
We also need a solution to fucking despot mods and admins deleting comments and posts left-and-right because it doesn’t align with their personal views.
I’ve seen it happen to me personally across multiple Lemmy domains (I’m a moron and don’t care much to have empathy in my writing, and it sets these limp-wrist morbidly obese mods/admins to delete my shit and ban me), and it happens to many people as well.
Yeah you can go fuck yourself for pinning your flavor of bullshit on ADHD. Take some accountability for your actions.
So much irony in this one
Good job chief 🤡
Freedom of expression does not mean freedom from consequences. As someone who loves to engage on trolling for a laugh online I can tell you that if you get banned for being an asshole you deserve it. I know I have.
- Dude says he is regarded BC reasons in civil manner
- Another dude proceeds to aggressively insult him… I would say not civil.
Who is the asshole here?
limp- wrist morbidly obese
That tells me all I need to know
Yes
lemm.ee and lemmy.dbzer0.com both seem like very level-headed instances. You can say stuff even if the admins disagree with it, and it’s not a crisis.
Some of the big other ones seem some other way, yes.
Lemm.ee hasn’t booted me yet? Much like OP, I’m not the most empathetic person, and if I’m annoyed then what little filter that I have disappears.
Shockingly, I might offend folks sometimes!
I mentioned this in another comment, but we need to somehow move away from free form text. So here’s a super flawed makes-you-think idea to start the conversation:
Suppose you had an alternative kind of Lemmy instance where every post has to include both the post like normal and a “Simple English” summary of your own post. (Like, using only the “ten hundred most common words” Simple English) If your summary doesn’t match your text, that’s bannable. (It’s a hypothetical, just go with me on this.)
Now you have simple text you can search against, use automated moderation tools on, and run scripts against. If there’s a debate, code can follow the conversation and intervene if someone is being dishonest. If lots of users are saying the same thing, their statements can be merged to avoid duplicate effort. If someone is breaking the rules, rule enforcement can be automated.
Ok so obviously this idea as written can never work. (Though I love the idea of brand new users only being allowed to post in Simple English until they are allow-listed, to avoid spam, but that’s a different thing.) But the essence and meaning of a post can be represented in some way. Analyze things automatically with an LLM, make people diagram their sentences like English class, I don’t know.
A bot can do that and do it at scale.
I think we are going to need to reconceptualize the Internet and why we are on here at all.
It already is practically impossible to stop bots and I’m a very short time it’ll be completely impossible.
I’m thinking of starting a friendica node for my city. I feel that a big problem with federated apps is that the audience isn’t local enough; it’s usually mostly tech-oriented people and doesn’t have enough local services.
All we need is people at this point. Still way too many people on Reddit and they’ve gone downhill significantly since the push for monetization
More people will bring a lot of interesting problems we don’t have right now. First and probably most important is money. High intensity traffic and storage is exponentially more expensive with increased load, and I don’t know if it’s possible to afford it without some kind of monetization
This is why some of us are so focused on spreading the load.
Yeah but it’s tough to get some communities going, like the equivalent of r/NFL on reddit here is basically dead. More people also doesn’t necessarily bring more interesting content, but it’s tough finding similar communities that I had subbed to on other social media
Reddit became an outrage factory for me in ways that other social media doesn’t. Facebook et al would push political news at me that was meant to piss me off, but Reddit suggests me nothing but videos of people being assholes in public, cutting each other off in traffic, getting into fights, etc. It’s like clockwork orange or some shit. I like that here, I can set my default algorithm to only subs (are they called subs?) that I subscribe to, in chronological order only.
They’re called communities, but they’re still your subscriptions, so in this context it works.
That’s exactly what I did on Reddit, I’d only look at subreddits that I subscribed to. The only reason I’m here is because Reddit 180d on their API support and killed third party apps.
Yeah suggestions have never been implemented well but I relied on just viewing what I subscribed to for content. That plus suggestions from others that turned out pretty well. Post monetization and the removal of 3rd party apps made reddit unbearable so I’m glad to move on
I have a feeling this place and other decentralized social medias will be banned in the near future. Look at what’s happening to TIktok. You either bend the knee or you get axed. It’s why the other social media giants bent the knee. They understand the writing on the wall. There’s more going on behind the scenes that they don’t share with us. I think we’re sort of watching a quiet coup.
Isn’t decentralization a thing that makes that much harder? There isn’t the same “national security” concern. I’m not saying it won’t happen just that the mechanism is much more difficult to make work.
You’re mixing multiple subjects here, one being the logistics of blocking a federated system like Lemmy, the other being whether the wrong person finds the content of such a system objectionable and labels it a “national security issue.”
I’m being a tad pedantic here, but my reason for pointing this out is that I think #2 is not far fetched at all, but I’m unsure of how feasible #1 might be and would love if somebody who knows more than I do would chime in.
EDIT: Looks like some have already discussed #2 in the other comment thread started by Teknikal.
There is a big difference. If a platform belongs to a single entity, you can pressure that entity especially if its profit driven. If there are thousands interconnected platforms that only share an open protocol the most you can do is shutdown a single instance. That’s why an open protocol creating decentralized instances is so much different than a centralized platform. It’s like trying to ban email or censor speak: not that has never been tried, but that is a whole different cup of tea.
Not saying you are wrong if anything though I think Reddit is probably the next obvious victim after TikTok they’ll simply point to the Chinese Tencent who own shares and the next thing you know Musk will be part owner.
Fediverse I think will probably be the last hit simply because it’s small and because of the design can’t be hit easily, wouldn’t surprise me if they just targeted the biggest servers though.
Realistically if it is hit it’ll be through some sweeping “social media safety” bill that makes the cost of administrating a social media site as a hobby prohibitively expensive and/or time consuming, maybe even as on the nose as requiring the software to receive a specific certification before it’s allowed to open registration.
We’ve already seen the UK’s online safety bill cause many admins of small forums and communities to shutter their communities as a result, and who knows how Australia’s recent social media bill will affect Australian Fediverse servers & users
A decent amount of the larger servers are hosted outside the US, which might complicates matters. However, many also use Cloudflare (US based) as a proxy, which might make targeting the Fediverse easier.
Isn’t it possible to just move the site under a different domain name, or have mirrored secondary servers in an entirely different location in case the primary one gets taken down?
Changing domains is essentially like starting a whole new instance. It can be done but communities and accounts start from scratch.
The lack of frictionless secure user level migration is the achille’s heel of lemmy.
I’m not sure if duplicate servers are supported with AP, I suspect it will cause the posts to be shared twice.
I have been thinking about whether instances also being available on TOR could help, mostly due to Saudi Arabia banning lemmy.blahaj.zone. Commercial VPN’s are apparently something problematic governments detect, so I doubt that accessing the TOR network is safe.
Yeah I think along the same lines can only hope if servers are compromised like this they get defederated immediately to make a point, ultimately though I think the design of the fediverse pretty much keeps it safe but some servers may unfortunately face consequences
I’m not really expecting any attempts to compromise the servers themselves, I think it’s more likely to see more website blocks like Saudi Arabia did with lemmy.blahaj.zone did some time ago.
Is there some way of safely circumnavigating these types of blocks in countries under oppressive regimes? I know about VPNs and TOR, but are those methods actually safe?
I’m not sure. I think your best bet would be to use a commercial VPN to blend in with the crowd that want to watch Netflix and then connect to TOR, although that does give authorities an excuse to arrest you in many places, but it’s not like they would really need it anyway.
I hope not. I just arrived!
Dont worry, lemmings worry about some shutdown every other week. Been here since the API closures, and its quite nice (if you block the news communities)
Yeah I finally decided to actually commit to getting off reddit would be unfortunate.
Welcome!
Welcome! Any questions so far?
then we will all get on WordPress or something and go back to rss feeds. they can’t ban everything, the Internet is too big. people will find a way
they can’t ban everything, the Internet is too big. people will find a way
they don’t really have to ban everything. for example, the persistent chinese internet-goer has the ability to view things he’s not supposed to see even though China bans large swathes of the internet.
but by making it as difficult as possible for most people and creating strict punishments for breaking the rules, you can effectively ban most things you want for majority of people
if posting on lemmy makes you an enemy of the state and the state is becoming increasingly harsh with its punishments… would you still be going on and posting regularly? i would certainly think twice.
if posting on lemmy makes you an enemy of the state and the state is becoming increasingly harsh with its punishments… would you still be going on and posting regularly? i would certainly think twice.
Where else would we go? Perhaps it’s my non-American privilege but I think in a time like that I couldn’t be silent.
that’s kinda where i am. I’m in the mindset to be as gay as possible and as loud as possible about my dissent on what’s happening here.
me and my partner are both also trans. our lives are probably worthless anyway, why would i cower now?? I’ve worked too hard to become my own person to let the fuckin GOVERNMENT take it away from me. they can strip my rights and even kill me, but they can’t make me not be queer.
I think in a time like that I couldn’t be silent.
Honestly, nobody really knows until they are in such a position. I’d like to think I’d be noble and rebel but honestly I think I’d just try and stay quiet and under the radar. The older I’ve gotten, the more cynical I’ve become about positive change.
I’m more worried with making sure me and my family are in a good position. And if I start posting dissent online and end up in a gulag or just get dissapeared for it… it’s not quite conducive to that goal.
Yeah, I thought about it more after commenting. I can’t know for certain what I would do given a bad timeline. Maybe I’d just go offline, spread fliers, something.
Let’s call it by it’s name: neofeudalism/technofeudalism
Without the paywall: https://archive.is/TJzyt
Hey, that’s us!
In the same way that email has been decentralized from the get go, social media could have been equally decentralized, and I don’t mean in the older php forums, but in a different way that would allow people to reconnect with others and maintain contacts.
I’m currently reading The Expanse, and at one point a character mentions checking in on the family aggregator his cousin set up to help everyone keep track of who’s living where.
Dude spun up a private Lemmy instance for his family. The future is now!
Distributed (and zero configuration needed), but with centralized development. Federated is not good enough - separate instances may lag behind in versions, or their admins do something wrong, and user identities and posts are tied to them.
Ideally when an instance goes down, all its posts and comments and users are replicated in the network and possible to get.
A distributed Usenet with rich text, hyperlinks, file attachments, cryptographic identities, pluggable naming\spam-checking\hatespeech-checking services (themselves part of that system).
It was a good system for its time, first large global thing for asynchronous electronic communication.
OK, if you are, you don’t pretend, and if you pretend, you aren’t. And if you talk about someone somewhere probably designing something, then you are not making that something closer. I’m tired of typing things in the interwebs people either already know and agree with, or won’t take seriously.
Ideally when an instance goes down, all its posts and comments and users are replicated in the network and possible to get.
Federation allows this, no? Provided your instance is old enough to have federated with the content in the first place.
Tildes (a closed garden Reddit alternative) frequently love to reminisce about the days of small forum communities. Maybe we need to bring them back.
They still exist. I’m active in one, love it.
I sometimes fantasise about a lemmy like decentralised protocol that works for old school forums.
NodeBB has added ActivityPub federation today. So that should work
Tildes as in https://tilde.club/ or something else?
This one: https://tildes.net/
what does closed garden mean in this context? as in contrast to the fediverse?
you must be accepted after filling out an application, then you’ll get your ssh key validated and only then can you tunnel in and join properly
Tildes is invite only similar to lobste.rs
Tech Broligarchy*
My own “we need” list, from a dork who stood up a web server nearly 25 years ago to host weeb crap for friends on IRC:
We need a baseline security architecture recipe people can follow, to cover the huge gap in needs between “I’m running one thing for the general public and I hope it doesn’t get hacked” and “I’m running a hundred things in different VMs and containers and I don’t want to lose everything when just one of them gets hacked.”
(I’m slowly building something like this for mspencer.net but it’s difficult. I’ll happily share what I learn for others to copy, since I have no proprietary interest in it, but I kinda suck at this and someone else succeeding first is far more likely)
We need innovative ways to represent the various ideas, contributions, debates, informative replies, and everything else we share, beyond just free form text with an image. Private communities get drowned in spam and “brain resource exhaustion attacks” without it. Decompose the task of moderation into pieces that can be divided up and audited, where right now they’re all very top down.
Distributed identity management (original 90s PGP web of trust type stuff) can allow moderating users without mass-judging entire instances or network services. Users have keys and sign stuff, and those cryptographic signatures can be used to prove “you said you would honor rule X, but you broke that rule here, as attested to by these signing users.” So people or communities that care about rule X know to maybe not trust that user to follow that rule.
