It’s worth noting that instances can defederate from other instances and also remove specific content even if it comes from users on other instances. Instances can also ban users on other instances from their instance.
Using an instance like lemmy.blahaj.zone is likely to be a very different (and much more supportive) experience, even if they are federated with the same instances, due to the ability for admins to curate.
I don’t think anyone has been active in it for a while 😆. Would be a good place for it though as there are still lots of eyes on the room even if no one is chatting.
Queries, I do have some, but they’re ugly AF. lol. I should prob look into starting a Matrix room or admin community where we can share and improve each others’ utility scripts.
That’s pretty much the official Lemmy space’s Moderation tools room, right?
I know it’s called Photon because of all the times I got it wrong. Easy mistake to make!
Well hey, sounds like you might be able to help. Lemmy devs are actively soliciting opinions on lemmy votes, maybe you could have a say? Most of the comments are around “votes are already sort of public” therefore either a) make them actually public so we aren’t pretending they aren’t, or b) keep them hidden, a little less public is better than completely public.
Perhaps you can come in with a c) option to make votes even less public?
Under activitypub, a lemmy community is kind of like a user (actually an activitypub group). When I post here with my lemmy.nz account to this lemmy.world community, lemmy.nz sends my comment to lemmy.world who then sends it to sh.itjust.works for you to see. The community is the controller of all interactions within the community. In this case, lemmy.world is the official source of how many upvotes this post has. And each vote is validated using the user’s public key to ensure it actually came from that specific user - a standard part of ActivityPub.
So would lemmy.world assign a token for your votes? If your instance assigned the token, Lemmy.world would not be able to validate against your user’s public key. If Lemmy.world assigns the token, it would only be valid in lemmy.world communities, as other instances would have to assign their own token. And both sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world admins could still see the real association.
Also, changing how votes work would break compatibility with other ActivityPub software (e.g. Mastodon could no longer interpret an upvote as a favourite, Mbin would’t be able to retrieve any data about the votes unless they specifically changed to work in the Lemmy way instead of using standard ActivityPub).
I believe blocking an instance hides posts from your feeds but nothing else, but it’s worth testing.
I have lemmit.online (reddit copy) blocked, but I can still search for a specific post and view it. I have also seen others complaining that when they bad an instance they still see comments from users on that instance, so at least at the moment it seems it just hides the posts from your feeds.
How does this work? The community issues federates votes but with a linked token instead of a linked user? How do you track vote manipulation across different communities on different instances?
Ah right! OK first off, you can block all of Lemmy.world with one action now.
Secondly, Lemmy now supports image proxying (with a new feature in Pictrs 0.5, which I believe was also introduced in Lemmy 0.19). I’m not sure which instances have it enabled but in theory you can check the source of images for remote users who have posted images.
Lemmy is already a strain on hard drive storage so I don’t think many people have enabled it (proxying will store the images on the Lemmy server for a set period of time).
Thanks for the explanation by the way, it makes sense.
Both Lemmy and Mbin lack the ability to filter out or block Cloudflare nodes. They both only give a way to block specific forums.
Lemmy lets you block whole instances, it was introduced in 0.19.0 (which was released just before Christmas, but many instances didn’t update until 0.19.3 was released around the start of the year due to federation issues with 0.19.0).
I don’t get why you want users to be able to apply cloudflare filters, though. If your instance doesn’t use cloudflare, then you won’t access through cloudflare. I’d actually be really interested in understanding why this is something you’re looking for, rather than just the ability to block an instance such as Lemmy.world.
It’s actually called Photon.
It’s actually called Photon.
Admins need to know if the votes/likes coming in are legitimate, else they should block them. It’s too easy to abuse anonymous votes to affect how content is ranked.
This is a very real problem right now. Admins that are on to it use the votes to identify swarms of users that follow each other around upvoting each other’s spam/troll posts.
Just to be clear, I think registration applications are necessary for anyone without a team of admins across the world.
I’m not saying these instances requiring applications are doing a bad thing. Just that it’s a barrier to entry and given the non-commercial decentralised nature of Lemmy we will never be able to hire thousands of staff to handle reports like Facebook does.
It’s a new problem requiring a new solution, and while I think Mastodon hasn’t solved it yet, I think they are ahead of Lemmy.
I explained in another comment to someone else, but to recap Lemmy.world has lemmy’s registration applications feature turned on, but behind the scenes they run a bot to approve everyone who types the requested thing in the box. You sign up, type the thing in the box, and you get immediate access.
Compare this sign up process to the instance that the Lemmy devs run on Lemmy.ml.
Now to be clear, I’m not saying it’s unjustified. Trolls and spammers are a problem on Lemmy and we need more tools to help. Most instances require registration applications and I think that’s necessary for anyone without a team of admins across the world.
But that doesn’t change that it’s a big barrier to entry. Facebook has thousands of people able to respond to reports in a short period of time. Decentralised non-commercial Lemmy instances can never meet this, so we have a problem that needs a solution.
Yes they are a good candidate I think. Curious about their sign ups though. Lemmy.world asks people to write “I agree to the TOS” in the answer box. If you do, a bot automatically approves you, if you don’t, a bot automatically declines you. There’s no waiting time.
Lemm.ee states In the “Answer” box below, please state that you agree to follow the lemm.ee instance rules (found in the sidebar of our front page), which has no specific phrase you need to answer, so I’m guessing they manually approve them?
I honestly think registration applications are a huge barrier to anyone not already on the fediverse.
We are fine, but it’s not fixed. I have a second VPS running in Finland, using this queue batcher. The Lemmy.world team kindly set up their server to point to this VPS instead of the actual Lemmy.nz server, then the VPS collects all the events and sends them to the Lemmy.nz server in batches of 100.
It keeps us up to date, but it’s cheating 😆
Last I heard Aussie.zone doesn’t have this setup, but they do have a prefetcher (or rather, Nothing4You, who made the queue batcher, is running a prefetcher for them). This basically takes the new comments and posts from Lemmy.world, and sends a request to Aussie.zone to fetch that post. Because this happens outside the normal federation queue it can be done in parallel. It means when Aussie.zone receives the federated activity from Lemmy.world, it already has it, so it can reply quicker and process more events per second. Lemmy clears out activities older than a week in a weekly scheduled job, which is why you will see Aussie.zone’s backlog drop a bit once a week. They won’t get that content from Lemmy.world, it’s just lost. Because of the prefetcher, it’s likely just up/down votes (which can’t be prefetched).
Oh definitely some. At the time we were still in the tail of the reddit surge, we were getting plenty of valid registrations and spam was only starting to take off (which was the reason for closing registrations).
But to my point, I think back to my first Lemmy experience and remember trying to work out which server I should join even though I already had a basic idea about the Fediverse from Mastodon. And I just chose the biggest in the end bpecause how do you choose? Even today I would be wary about joining any server that didn’t have lots of people.
And later I remember hearing about Beehaw then finding a registration application page and not creating an account.
These happened well before the reddit exodus, and I never really got into Lemmy until that happened and I joined Beehaw.
Doesn’t that say they default new users to a server owned by them? That’s the same kind of thing as defaulting to Lemmy.world for Lemmy apps.
What I mean is a larger list of trusted instances. Including ones outside the control of one organisation, though I get that this is risky for Mastodon because they don’t want to default people to somewhere that’s going to shut down or have some drama and ruin a hard earned brand.
We probably have more leeway to do it in Lemmy apps since (with the exception of Jerboa) they aren’t developed by “Lemmy”, and Lemmy.world is also not run by “Lemmy”. But for this same reason, " Lemmy" has no control over what these apps default to.
I do see Lemmy.world admins take quick action when it’s raised to then. However, Lemmy does not differentiate between community and admin reports, so using the normal report function may not be enough. Lemmy.world has a separate process for when an admin needs to be contacted.
I have seen that issues raised on Lemmy.blahaj.zone get raised directly from their admin to to lemmy.world admins, and then there is swift action. Another reason blahaj is a good instance for someone who is gender diverse, the admin doesn’t hesitate to go in to bat for their members