this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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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?

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[–] wit 121 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

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 @[email protected]. 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@[email protected], 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).

[–] Celsiuss 53 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There should be a limit on how many communities you can create in a given time span

[–] vocornflakes 121 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There should be a limit on how many communities you can run, period. This is how we got super-mods like GallowBoob on Reddit

[–] MrPoopyButthole 18 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I upvoted this post and I saw a popup "report created" this is not what I intended, I completely agree with this.

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[–] wit 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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..

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[–] ruud 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Will make a rule limiting number of communities per moderator or created per week or something like that. On the to do list.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] Licensed_to_ill 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

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)

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[–] fubo 120 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (32 children)

Some thoughts β€”

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". (As it happens, I joined Usenet around the same time, but from a local dial-up Unix BBS in the Washington DC area.)

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 β€” 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" β€” 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 ....

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

this is worthy of a BestOf, do we have a BestOf?

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[–] MiddleWeigh 92 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] chrundle 37 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If that were true, they'd be happy staying in voat or truthsocial for example.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

in mastodon there were instances only to assholes, and other instances blocked them as a whole, so i think it's gonna be easier

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[–] wilberfan 76 points 1 year ago (12 children)

I read that as "...asshole migration plan". πŸ˜‚

[–] legion 28 points 1 year ago

Already here. I made it. Thanks for the concern all.

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] MorphinesKiss 64 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] PitzNR 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] TheBananaKing 62 points 1 year ago (23 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] merc248 33 points 1 year ago (16 children)

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

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[–] TigerClawTV 49 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (19 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

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

[–] RedMarsRepublic 21 points 1 year ago (4 children)

We're already seeing a fracturing between communist and non-communists on Lemmy.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Woah, this is the first time I've pressed "all" on lemmygrad. It's... so much bigger!

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[–] phillycodehound 26 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] ComplexLotus 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

there are multiple ways evil can behave on lemmy:

trolling

  • trolling, it is annoying, if 25% of all posts are troll posts, the site can be annoying to use.
    • content voting systems can mitigate this tho, but bots will eventually find a way to game this?
  • the difference between trolling and spamming (imo): trolls type in their message with a physical keyboard. Spammers use bots to automate trolling

(Bot) Spamming / automated troll farms

  • spamming, creates huge load on storage capacity of the server owner, not good if you host for ~~free~~
    • spam can be hard to detect in the age of chatgpt LLMs in general, because normal spam would be detected by how random it is. for example

adfjakjdfkl would be easily detected as spam

  • spamming huge amounts of text is still better than spammers creating huge amounts of video and photographs
  • proof of work algorithms can mitigate this issue somewhat, tho this also makes performance worse for everyone

any other thoughts on proof of work, or how evil doers can behave on social media sides?

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm into using my block button

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