Ech

Ah, you’re right.

And also has nothing to do with upvotes.

While I don’t doubt that there’s a market there, I would never in a million years pay money for a “power user”'s reddit posts. Fucking wild.

“What did you see, DenverCoder9?!?!”

That thing is such a nuisance. Makes the modlog nearly unusable.

Unfortunately blocking an instance only blocks posts on that instance, not users from it, which is the main issue people have with those instances.

Cool!

To clarify, this is not Fedi-NFTs, right? Just collaborative art/game stuff?

Not to say it’s not still impressive, but Dessalines and Nutomic also get grant money from NLNet, or they at least did for a while. Not entirely sure what the status of that is lately. I’d guess donations make up the bulk at this point either way, following the surge in users from last year.

Demands software they didn’t develop and servers they don’t run abide by their self-proclaimed criteria

Tells others to “get over yourself”

Interesting you only have a problem with this after you got kicked out. Certainly no reason it could be exaggerated or straight up untrue. 🤔

5.0.1: Before using the website, remember you will be interacting with actual, real people and communities. Lemmy.World is not a place for you to attack other groups of people. Every one of our users has a right to browse and interact with the website and all of its contents free of treatment such as harassment, bullying, violation of privacy or threats of violence.

To be clear, I’m not saying it is sketchy. I’m saying that giving absolutely zero information on a service they are ostensibly promoting makes it look sketchy. Giving even a simple breakdown of their goals and process is really the least they could do.

They may want to add a description of what the hell it is, instead of just linking to a website that is only an email gathering prompt. Right now all I can gather from comments on it is that it monetizes the fediverse “somehow”, but there’s zero explanation of where the money comes from, who it goes to, who the whole thing supports, etc etc. If they don’t want to seem sketchy as hell, they should be forthcoming about who they are and how they work.

That would certainly be one way to handle it, but it brings up a few issues to my mind.

One, like I brought up in my comment, it would be pretty contradictory to a decentralized platform like Lemmy/the Fediverse. Every instance is run the way the admins wish, and having a forced banlistwould be pretty contrary to that idea. If a central authority controls the platform, it isn’t very decentralized, is it? That said, even if we accept an enforced banlist, how effective can it be?

It would need to be handled by a person or group beyond reproach, there would need to be an ironclad way of telling which instances are homes to bots, and it would need to be constantly maintained to add instances as they were found out. None of these really translate to the real world, unfortunately. And even if we get lucky on all of those points and it worked out for a while, introducing a way to block instances off from the entire platform without approval is a pretty big risk if it ever falls into problematic hands down the road.

And if it’s not enforced, we’re left relying on all the instances agreeing, which is just not going to happen. Some instances will decline to work together out of principle, disagreement, or just contrarianism. And then we have all the “dark” instances that are left unmaintained and updated. I’m not sure how much of a problem that latter group would be, overall, but I figure it would lead to some issue or another. Maybe I’m over estimating the effect non-participants would have, but even if that’s not such an issue, what happens when big instances have disagreements, or start their own banlist? Then it’s just a fractured mess that isn’t really helping anybody, doing more to hinder efforts against bot havens than it is helping.

All in all, I just don’t see a good way of it working. I know I’m not really offering solutions here. I’m really just poking holes everywhere, but that’s kind of my point. I hope I’m wrong and there’s a way to address this that I just don’t see. I really like this whole decentralized thing and I want it to work out!

This is (most likely) a case of poor or absent instance administration, and it looks like it’s being managed well enough, but I do wonder what recourse there is against bad actors setting up their own instance, populating it with bots, and using them outside the influence of anyone else. For one, how do we tell which instances are just bot havens? Obviously we can make inferences based on active users and speed of growth, but a smart person could minimize those signs to the point of being unnoticeable. And if we can, what do we do with instances that have been identified? There’s defederation, but that would only stop their influence on the instances that defederated. The content would still be open to voting from those instances, and those votes would manifest on instances that haven’t defederated them. It would require a combined effort on behalf of the whole Fediverse to enforce a “ban” on an instance. I can’t really see any way to address these things without running contrary to the decentralized nature of the platform.