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.
But what is the magical ability to achieve step 2? How do you filter and moderate users reliably at scale?
The fundamental issue is that Beehaw wants to eat their cake and have it too. They want their users to be able to read and comment on other instances, but not have to mirror their content, pay for image hosting, etc. or allow other instances’ users access to Beehaw’s content.
They want the benefits of federation without giving anything in return.
I listed Reddit’s “secret rule” amongst long-term moderators and subreddit communities. Just straight up ban accounts that are younger than a certain age. That’s already going to grossly clamp down on porn-spam and troll accounts, because it means that the trolls need to either buy a pre-made account, or the trolls have to wait a week with good behavior before engaging in troll activity.
EDIT: Is that enough for Beehaw.org? I don’t know. But lets say INAA.net is just a time-delay. All accounts less than 1-week are only allowed to post to lemmy.world. All accounts older than that are unlocked to talk with Beehaw.org.
But in your example, everyone would have to sign up to INAA.net rather than lemmy.world. Like I couldn’t use this account, I’d need a separate one because accounts aren’t registered across instances like that (nor transferrable atm).
Theoretically, INAA.net could use ActivityPub federation to keep a database of user accounts from various instances based on their Fediverse address (i.e.
@BaldProphet@kbin.social) that Lemmy and Kbin instances can query to check for things like age and reputation. No accounts would necessarily have to be created there.Yes.
That’s why its become clear to me that the “Trust” of a server is important on the Fediverse. This is an alien concept to Redditors (where there’s only one server so everyone is at the same base level of trust).
Its not a perfect solution, but it seems to be the “Fediverse way”. The nature of the new set of rules that this community has.
After all the shit that has happened on Reddit to drive people to the Fediverse, I don’t think the concept of how important it is to be able to trust your server admins is a foreign one.
Correct me if I’m wrong but that’s not how it works. Beehaw users can’t read and comment on other instances, that Beehaw defederated with.
Indeed, but this was their request for the future. Mastodon has a similar option as instance-wide “silencing”/limiting - https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/#limit-server
Go and read their comments, they’re pretty open about it.
This is a totally disingenuous take.
Defederating works both ways. Defederating from another instances also means that Beehaw users can’t access content from that defederated site. And, in fact, that’s exactly the purpose of defederating. They access remote content by having it imported locally, and what’s being imported doesn’t adhere to their site’s guidelines.
They’re not “having their cake and eating it, too”. They’re saying “this cake that keeps showing up on our table is full of turds is full of turds, and so we’re just not accepting outside cake deliveries anymore”.
They do want similar features that are available on mastodon, that essentially allow their users to interact with the outside world but the ability limit what comes in. It’s still a disingenuous take though, as it has nothing to do with image hosting, not allowing people to view their content, etc. They just don’t want assholes.