this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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Is that the case? Isn't the federated structure good to leave an instance once it got bad? And bans and stuff exist just like everywhere else
Lemmy's design is fundamentally excellent to deal with bad actors, the whole point of ActivityPub/Federation is that moderation is much more effective while also preserving free speech. I'm not sure what that person on about.
It's good to leave a bad instance. It's not the best to deal with trolls avoiding ban evasions by creating alt on every instance.
Are other social media better at that?
Based on the number of people asking how to circumvent a ban on [email protected] , I guess so
Wait, I know 196 moved to .world but reddit is there too now??? This is going too far!
Jokes aside, I see your point. Guess they have an authentication system or something. Most lemmy instances have a "tell us why you want to join" field and I think some require emails. Sure, this isn't perfect but it's not systemically important to prevent evil doers.
Eh, if an instance allows trolls, then that instance typically gets defederated from very quickly (at least it does on my instance). The only reason it is an issue now is that two of the big three instances (.world and .ml) have very lax moderation standards. If the lemmy-verse grows to the size of Reddit, then two lax instances won't be as big of an issue.
The problem is the federated nature gives a limited view of user behavior to everyone except the home instance, which means identifying spammers, bots and influence ops and effectively banning them is much harder, assuming the mostly volunteer admins even have the time and desire to do so. Federation also introduces the possibility of malicious instance owners.
I'd argue that it actually makes it much easier not harder. If an instance refuses to moderate itself, it gets kicked out of the network.
The problem is it takes time to identify them and kick them out. At a large scale, there will be a constant churn of poorly managed and malicious instances getting access to the network and then not getting booted until weeks or months later.