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  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • People have suggested making a portal/quiz for instance signups, but that adds to the barrier. There are also problems like how in-depth and inclusive it should be. It reminds me of Linux distro pickers that often suggest weird niche distros.

    There are already big/default instances in the Fediverse though but there are people who actively discourage this. Maybe Mastodon just had a bad start and Bluesky learned from that. I wonder if Bluesky’s PDS will be like Fediverse instances though. Many Fediverse instances are built around shared interests but the PDS just looks like a glorified handle.

    Personally, I think the Fediverse discourse should shift to designing social media with decentralization in mind rather than mimicking mainstream social media with a “decentralized twist”. I don’t think the Fediverse will ever be as big as Twitter, but it doesn’t have to be. It just needs to be sustainable enough to keep new conversations going.

    Doesn’t answer the question but maybe it’s worth sharing anyway.


  • This Lemmy instance is much harder to maintain due to the fact that I can’t tell what images get uploaded here, which means anyone can use this as a free image host for illegal shit, and the fact that there’s no user list that I can easily see. Moderation tools are nonexistent on here.

    0.19.4 provides a way to see uploaded images (although not the best) but this version was only recently released so I can see where the frustration is coming from especially since the CSAM attacks happened nearly a year ago. At the time, I had to make a copy of pictrs, view everything on a file manager, and manually remove those images. People can still upload images without anyone seeing it however.

    It also eats up storage like crazy due to the fact that it rapidly caches images from scraped URLs and the few remaining instances that we still federate with.

    This was fixed in 0.19.3 (released 7 months ago) where you can disable image “caching”. This has solved storage costs for us together with pictrs’ image processing.

    plug in an expensive AI image checker to scan for illegal imagery

    It’s unfortunate that we need this. Not everybody has the resources to run fedisafety nor does everyone live in USA where they can use Cloudflare’s CSAM scanner. I think a good way to deal with the issue is to have images that are not public, not be stored (or have no private images at all). This way images can be easily reported.

    Overall, I understand the frustration and to some degree I also feel the same but I also limit my expectations considering the nature of the project.




  • The mod tools are too basic and barebones. I’d appreciate if we can get:

    • Post approval system for new or low-karma accounts (it can be karma for local communities)
    • Reporting system with multiple options (very hard to implement in the fediverse as everyone has different rules) so that the reports are sent to the proper channels. Admins shouldn’t have to deal with community-specific rules (for example, “memes only on mondays”).
    • Automoderator (these might already exist? I have not tried them.)

    I don’t know if I should split this comment into three or not but they’re some general suggestions to address the complaint of basic mod tools.