Melmi

But how will you get a “universal” view of the fediverse? No single authoritative view exists.

You yourself acknowledge that this is complicated, but I honestly don’t understand what appeal a hacked together fake centralized system would have for people if they don’t care about decentralization in the first place. Any such solution is almost inevitably gonna end up being janky and hacked together just to present a façade of worse Reddit.

Lemmy’s strength is its decentralization and federation. It’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a feature that’s attractive in its own right. It doesn’t need mass appeal, it’s a niche project and probably always will be. I don’t think papering over the fundamental design of the software will make it meaningfully more attractive to the non-technically minded.

That’s I guess why CSEM is used, because if the images are being shared around exploitation has clearly occurred. I can see where you’re coming from though.

What I will say is that there are some weird laws around it, and there have even been cases where kids have been convicted of producing child pornography… of themselves. It’s a bizarre situation. If anything, seems like abuse of the court system at that point.

Luckily a lot of places have been patching the holes in their laws.

CSAM is supposed to be more explicit that the images are essentially crime scene photographs, and to emphasize that it is Abuse first and foremost and not merely pornography.

CP is a morally neutral term, or at least the components words themselves are. CSAM is not, and is explicitly negative.

This is certainly an interesting topic. There are men who are comfortable wearing dresses and wearing makeup and all that, just as there are women who are comfortable with cutting their hair short and wearing baggy clothes and all that. It’s also true that those people are sometimes harassed and called “eggs” by people who are ostensibly trans-friendly (especially fem-presenting guys).

But I don’t think that that is equivalent to the trans experience. I assume you’re not trans, correct me if I’m wrong, but dysphoria is a real thing that for many people is very deeply related to physical body parts, and your theory just doesn’t account for that at all. I don’t think that your average fem-presenting guy wants to take HRT to get breasts, let alone go to the extra length of getting bottom surgery and get vaginoplasty. There’s clearly something more about dysphoria than it just being a matter of what they like differing from what’s socially acceptable, unless you broaden it so wide as “liking having breasts or a vagina” or “liking having a penis”, and even that is a stretch because dysphoria is a very visceral sense of wrongness in one’s body that goes much deeper than just preferring a different body part.

Not all dysphoria is physical, either. It can relate to misgendering, or any number of societal things that aren’t necessarily related to just what we’re “allowed” to do. Frankly, unless gender is outright abolished and there are no longer distinctions between genders or even societal differentiation between sexes, I don’t see it going away. And even in a post-gender world, I imagine there would still be trans people (perhaps by another name) who experienced physical dysphoria.

Your theory also doesn’t account for trans people who present as would be socially acceptable for their assigned gender at birth, and have interests that are similar to their AGAB, but still identify as trans and even may experience dysphoria.

All in all, while I appreciate your conclusion to support trans people, I disagree with your reasoning. I don’t think that being trans is merely a result of one’s likes not being in line with societal norms. I think it goes much deeper than that, and can’t be reduced to such a simple cause.

I feel like this would be spotted and stamped out immediately. Everyone’s eyes are on Threads right now; astroturfed content might sneak in on Mastodon, where regular Threads content will be mixed in with the hypothetical astroturfed content, but here on Lemmy there will be little to no Threads presence due to lack of interoperability, so every single Threads account that shows up will be noticed. It’s already super visible when Mastodon users show up due to the weird formatting issues that happen due to the lack of support.

I just don’t see an astroturf campaign as being viable unless Threads implements community functionality, which seems pretty far out when they’re only now implementing basic federation with Mastodon.

The microblog side of the fediverse is really hostile to scraping or indexing of any kind. On the one hand, I get the idea of safe spaces and not wanting your data to be public, but then why are you on an instance that federates openly?

It seems to me that anything that’s being federated out by ActivityPub is public by nature. If you don’t want it to be public, you should use an allowlist, or just don’t post publicly.

I guess I just assume that everything I’m posting is being scraped and archived forever, because there’s no way to ensure it’s not. It’s ironic that the fediverse is so hostile to this fundamental fact of the internet when ActivityPub is basically designed to just hand out information to whoever asks. It seems like there’s a conflict between the protocol and the culture.

I do agree with Ada in broad strokes. The Fedipact is just a petition. Meta doesn’t care if you sign it. And it’s not binding either—you can sign it and end up changing your mind and federating anyway, or you can defederate without signing it (like Blahaj).

It’s still interesting data though. It may not represent every instance’s stance on Meta, but it does reflect the stances of those that sign, and suggest that they’re more active in the discourse.

You’re right on the money with it being about admins and not users, too. Users aren’t even allowed to sign it, only mods and admins can.

It’s hard to extrapolate too much just from this data, I think.

That said, my read on it: Mastodon is way bigger than any other fedi platform, and with popularity comes outsiders to fedi culture and politics and people who just don’t care. Also, a lot of the big instances want to federate because they have more of a growth mindset, so they when they see Meta they just see more potential users.

It’s interesting though that Mastodon is the platform that would be most affected by federation. We here on Lemmy don’t have great interoperability with the microblog side of the fediverse, so we’re less likely to see Threads activity.

Harry Potter spaces are not unique in creating structure. There are tons of fandoms, with millions of members. It’s not the first modern fandom by any means either. It’s not like if HP suddenly disappeared there wouldn’t be any fandoms of equivalent or larger size to provide “structure” to vulnerable people. Lots of them have more queer people in them too, and less transphobia.

I’m not sure what makes Harry Potter uniquely digital in your mind either. I’m sure you can interpret it as being about that, but I don’t think that’s the interpretation most people walk away with. Even if it really is a lens some people use to understand the Internet or whatnot, I certainly don’t think it’s the first story to be used in that way… There are a lot of stories that can claim that title that far predate Harry Potter, many of which have fandoms of their own.

I just don’t think HP is an essential backbone of culture. It’s important to a lot of people, for sure. And I can’t imagine what it’s like to realize that the creator of a work that’s so important to you is a terrible person. That has got to be a really shitty situation to be in. But there are other fandoms out there. There’s other great fiction, written by authors who won’t weaponize your consumption against minorities. It’s not a dichotomy of either you embrace Harry Potter or you must write your own.

I don’t think it’s particularly hard to find authors who aren’t actively spreading hate, actually. And I don’t think Rowling’s level of transphobia is a particularly specific purity test.

Plus, Rowling takes an active role in promoting hate. She’s loud about it. She has a big platform because HP is so popular, and I think that makes her especially dangerous.

She certainly seems to put her money where her mouth is too.

I love to be able to reclaim works from their hateful authors, especially cultural ones. I’m a big fan of Lovecraft, and that dude was hateful. He makes JK Rowling look sweet and kindly. But it’s a lot easier to reclaim the narrative and make it a part of our culture when the author is literally dead.

Lovecraft is a cornerstone of modern fiction, despite being a bigot. We can acknowledge how he was a terrible person, even analyze it, but we know that our enjoyment of Lovecraftian fiction isn’t benefiting Lovecraft’s hateful causes, especially because the work is public domain.

In contrast, JK Rowling is not only still alive, she is active and vocal about her hatred, how she spends her money towards hate, and how she considers support of Harry Potter in light of her hate to be support of her vile views.

Consumption of media is not a passive action. Even if you do not actively give any money to the franchise, promoting the franchise encourages other people to do so, and then their money goes to fund hate.

I understand that HP is important to a lot of people. It was a cultural phenomenon. But we aren’t leaving it behind just because JK Rowling said something offensive. We’re leaving it behind because the author is actively using our consumption to fund hate and campaigning to deny rights to trans people.

There are plenty of other forms of media, new and old, that aren’t being piloted by known bigots. If you want a cultural backbone, using one that is currently controlled by a bigot will probably make a lot of trans people feel unwelcome at best and at worst, if HP continues to be a cultural phenomenon on a large scale JK Rowling will use the platform and the money to further the oppression of transgender rights.

The fundamental problem is that all this data needs to be hosted somewhere. P2P systems have the issue of persistence: either posts only stick around as long as the people who posted them keep their server online, which is then a burden on anyone who wants to be active in the community, or everyone shares the responsibility for hosting, and then what happens if someone posts CP? Is it just mirrored across the entire P2P system, and each person has to individually root out the CP or just be okay with hosting CP?

Torrents work because you have to actively join a torrent. But discoverability is handled from the outside, through trackers. Trackers choose what they want to host.

Tor or really I2P are the closest equivalents, but they work because everything is encrypted going through them. It’s a privacy thing. With social media, everything is public by design.

It’s kind of ironic taking a project that’s already written in Rust and writing a replacement for it in Java.

Usually things get ported to Rust, not the other way around.

There’s a difference between defederation policy and ban policy. You could have a server that is very slow to defederate, only defederating for abuse and illegal content that can’t be stopped through moderation, while implementing a standard or even fairly aggressive enforcement policy for individuals, both local users as well as remote users. The idea is that you ban offending users, while only defederating when the instance itself is the problem.

Defederation splits the network apart. Trying to make defederation a last resort doesn’t necessarily mean one is a freeze peach instance. Defederation policy is an entirely different beast from moderation.

That said, my understanding is that Lemmy’s moderation tools are pretty lackluster at the moment, and so a big part of the reason that some instances are quick to defederate is that it’s difficult to moderate between poor mod tools and small volunteer mod teams. It’s easier to just defederate.

I agree though that the freedom of FOSS moreso lies with admins, as they’re the ones deploying the software so they can choose how to run their instance, whether that means federating with everyone or just running a completely defederated Lemmy instance with no peer instances.

It looks like the registrar changed the nameserver, which is a harder thing to recover from. Still, didn’t keep them down for long. Looks like they figured something out

The devs don’t stop anyone from running their own instance, like most of the Fediverse they just won’t federate their own instances with hateful ones.

A sorting algorithm seems out of scope for Jerboa, which is just a lightweight client. The current algorithms, such as they are, are handled by Lemmy itself, and I think it makes more sense to keep it that way so that features aren’t unique to this one app. Plus that way you aren’t downloading the entire list of content and sorting it locally, which seems somewhat expensive versus just sorting it on the server where it already is.

Yup, it got added to the comment chain, and I’m replying directly from Lemmy!

Maybe I’m missing something, but what’s so remarkable about persistence? EVE Online has had persistence since before Star Citizen was even announced. It’s nothing new to the MMO world. Especially since it’s sharded, so it’s not even synced between shards/servers. It’s literally just numbers in a database somewhere. Where’s the novel technology? They don’t even have server meshing yet.

It might have been hard to code, but that has as much to do with their choice of engine as anything.

I think you’re thinking of Starfield, because Star Citizen is nowhere near done. They only have one solar system, with only a few people per instance, terrible optimization, only a fraction of the planned features, etcetera. It’s very immersive (aside from all the glitches and low FPS) but there’s not much actual content.

You’re definitely thinking of Starfield, which is the new Bethesda game. Star Citizen won’t be No Man’s Sky 2.0, because Star Citizen is never going to come out.