Good to know, thank you!

Personally I think we should add a differentiation between the storage policies of content which is owned by your own instance and content that federates from other instances.

The former should be kept for a long time (forever?), while the latter can be cleared more regularly.

My first sentence was:

There’s a lot of discussion around this topic, much of it good, but I feel like we’re losing sight of the forest for the trees.

As I indicate, I’ve read the discussion that was here at the time, and appreciate it. I’ve even responded to a couple of posts. In this comment, I was hoping to bring up a different angle.

If you don’t agree and/or don’t want to engage, that’s fine, but don’t assume that I’m just blindly soliciting responses without reading what people are saying.

There’s a lot of discussion around this topic, much of it good, but I feel like we’re losing sight of the forest for the trees.

The aim of Affirmative Action, as a policy, was to improve the following metric: “wealth of black Americans compared to wealth of white Americans”. (I’m using ‘wealth’ as a stand-in for all the good experiences we’re trying to optimize for, and ‘black’ and ‘white’ as stand-ins for the various groups at play). I think most of us agree that this was the aim of AA.

We can, of course, debate on whether AA was successful in improving this metric or not. I’m willing to concede that it may indeed have improved this metric.

But I don’t think that it’s a useful metric in the first place. And I can’t really articulate why. I’d welcome some responses to help me flesh out my thoughts.

I guess… it just seems racist to me to be comparing “oh, the Chinese group is making XYZ dollars but the Indian group is only making ABC dollars. Let’s make sure the Chinese give some of their wealth to the Indians”. That doesn’t seem to be a productive way of thinking. Who cares how much money the Chinese make compared to the Indians, as long as no individual is being treated unfairly right now.

Like I said, I’d welcome responses to help flesh out my opinions.

Yeah, a few times. It was especially helpful in finding causes of subtle UI bugs, to identify the exact commit which changed the UI.

Agree! Defederation is a nuclear option. The more we do it, the more we reduce the value of “the fediverse”, and the more likely we are to kill this whole project.

I think defederation should only be a consideration if an instance is consistently, frequently becoming a problem for your instance over a large period of time. It’s not a pre-emptive action.

As a stadia user, I loved it.

It made gaming accessible in a way that GeForce definitely doesn’t. It felt more like a console than GeForce, which feels like… well honestly like emulation.

I think they had 3 solid strategies, each of which they fucked up in execution. First they were trying to compete against consoles (hence the studio acquisitions as they were trying to make exclusives). Then they gave up. Then they were trying to compete against steam by being a Netflix-like library online. But then they gave up. Then they tried to build a new “cloud gaming” market (maybe whitelabel to existing game companies).Then they gave up that too.

Throughout the whole time, they were great from a user perspective.

If “botters” are willing to spend >$5 per bot on established instances, then I don’t believe this is a solveable problem. For the fediverse, or for ANY platform, Reddit included. I am perfectly human, and would be hard-pressed to decline a >$150/hour “job” to create accounts on someone’s behalf.

Like any other online community, constant vigilant moderation is the only way to resolve this. I don’t see how Lemmy is in any worse position than Reddit so I don’t think we need to be all “doom and gloom” quite yet.

As for botters creating their own instances…

For example, newly created domains might be blacklisted by default.

This is just a start. Federation allows for many techniques to solve this. Perhaps even a “Fediverse Universal Whitelist” with an application process. I’m excited for the possibilities, but again I don’t think it’s quite time to be overly concerned yet. These are solvable problems.

There are two worries here:

1. Bots on established and valid instances (Should be handled by mods and instance admins, just like conventional non-federated forums. Perhaps more tooling is required for this— do you have any suggestions? However, I think it’s a little premature to say that federation is inherently more susceptible or that corrective action is desperately needed right now.).

2. Bots on bot-created instances. (Could be handled by adding some conditions before federating with instances, such as a unique domain requirement. Not sure what we have in this space yet. This will limit the ability to bulk-create instances. After that, individual bot-run instances can be defederated with if they become annoyances.)

There is NOTHING stopping these bots from just creating new instances, and using those.

I read somewhere that mastodon prevents this by requiring a real domain to federate with. This would make it costly for bots to spin up their own instances in bulk. This solution could be expanded to require domains of a certain “status” to allow federation. For example, newly created domains might be blacklisted by default.

Honestly, I’m interested to see how the federation handles this problem. Thank you for all the attention you’re bringing to it.

My fear is that we might overcorrect by becoming too defederation-happy, which is a fear it seems that you share. However I disagree with your assertion that the federation model is more risky than conventional Reddit-like models. Instance owners have just as many tools (more, in fact) as Reddit does to combat bots on their instance. Plus we have the nuke-from-orbit defederation option.

Since it seems like most of these bots are coming from established instances (rather than spoofing their own), I agree with you that the right approach seems to be for instance mods to maintain stricter signups (captcha, email verification, application, or other original methods). My hope is that federation will naturally lead to a “survival of the fittest” where more bot-ridden instances will copy the methods of the less bot-ridden instances.

I think an instance should only consider defederation if it’s already being plagued by bot interference from a particular instance. I don’t think defederation should be a pre-emptive action.

Agreed! This is annoying for me as well, but still I like it a lot. Better than Reddit, even.

I see. So each instance in the “fediverse”, whether Kbin or Lemmy or Mastodon could have their own rules on what to allow. Those that allow too much and get spammed are likely to lose standing in the community and be defederated by other instances.

Requiring a domain and having a mechanism to block domains seems like a good approach to start with.

Thank you! That cleared it up for me.

I appreciate your commitment to this privacy consideration. I personally don’t think it’s the hill I’d prefer to die on, but I welcome your contributions.

Yes, that’s a fair point. Just because you send a “I have deleted this message” signal out into the universe doesn’t mean that everyone will receive or obey it.

I assumed that was understood.

But that’s very different from instances intentionally and malevolently keeping data despite indicating to users that it was deleted, which is what I think folks’ privacy concerns are about.

EDIT: What I mean is that the federation model is inherently non-private in a certain sense (but in the same sense that someone could take a screenshot of your Reddit comment and your deleting your comment won’t delete their copy). But Lemmy is not egregiously misusing data.

As far as I know (another assumption haha), there’s no universal IDs across the fediverse.

Hmmmm so I see that you pinged me in this post, but I didn’t get a notification for it. Wonder how that works.

Not a stupid question at all!

Lemmy and Kbin are two different systems that talk to each other. Like how Gmail and Outlook are two different systems, but you can still send emails between them.

So you can make posts over there on Kbin and I can upvote them from over here on Lemmy.

Make sense?

Yes, true, the current system does allow that. But the current system also doesn’t allow users to accidentally vote twice (and it remembers your vote)— this is the feature I think would be more challenging to implement if we were to hash & salt the user’s ID.

Good on you for actually checking and not blindly assuming like me! Hahaha glad to see my assumptions bore out this time.

But yeah, even if lemmy doesn’t aggregate it, it would be possible to set up a bot pretending to be an instance which collects and aggregates vote histories.