Wander

cross-posted from: https://yiffit.net/post/221160

I wish I had the skill to make a cover.

Something with big colorful tiles I believe. Was recommended as the way forward for self hosting in general, but I can't find it now.

Thank you <3

I'm trying to better understand Activitypub and I understand that there's a signature to avoid forgeries of known accounts.

However I'm having trouble understanding what prevents a malicious actor from sending a private spam message supposedly from a never before seen account name with valid generated key pair but for a domain they've never bought since there is no DNS lookup or test.

Thank you!

(just a few thoughts I wanted to write out)

Don't get me wrong, I love the local and federated timelines, but after thinking about it I realized that it's also the cause for a lot of drama.

Email and Xmpp never had such a big problem with cross instance blocks. If you think about it, all federated content is blocked by default and only becomes available if a user searches for it and subscribes to it. Before that, the server has no idea what is out there unless a relay is used. But there's two exceptions... the local timeline and the federated timeline.

These are great to get stuff started and kickstart the following process, but are forcing people to receive content that they might not want to see.

Where previously a block would only be necessary whenever a malicious user messaged me directly, now we have to deal with the need to curate content of public timelines in order to avoid problems with local or remote users.

The instance admins have full right to decide what is hosted on their instance and what not. This is not about free speech because you are not entitled to using someone's server in a way they don't want, but about creating complicated dilemmas and tough moderation choices by forcing together content and users that could be drastically different in beliefs or preferences by using timelines which are understandably very appealing to use.

Maybe all posts should be unlisted by default and both timelines, whether on Lemmy or Mastodon only contain whitelisted user accounts to give your instance's users and remote users a few recommendations.

Don't get me wrong, I love those two timelines and I have a thick enough skin that I can simply ignore or block content I don't like, but as an instance admin both on Mastodon and Lemmy I've noticed that this is not the case. Users are often eager to report anything they don't like to see or disagree with even though they don't follow that community in question or would never have interacted with it. This could cause a lot of moderation overhead as well as drama as it puts users and remote instance admins on alert about X, Y or Z divisive or distasteful content (especially when it comes to NSFW) potentially being sent out to them.

There's some heated discussion going on about a community dedicated to Donald Trump and, a few days ago, we started receiving concerning news about bot infested instances.

I believe there's three additional settings for instance administrators which Lemmy could implement in the future and it's probably worth discussing first. These would be :

1. Block specific users or users from specific remote instances from creating new posts in local communities (or have them require approval).
2. Block specific users or users from specific remote instances from writing comments to posts in local communities.
3. Block specific users or users from specific remote instances from upvoting or downvoting posts and/or comments in local communities.

These options alone could allow concerned instance admins prevent brigading and content manipulation without necessarily defederating which should be left as a last-resort.

As a small instance admin myself I would be shooting myself in the foot if I were to block a very large instance, but maybe it would make sense to require approval for posts from certain remote users.

That said. One concern I have is that by having too many options we could make things much more confusing. But right now we have too few moderation options and I can't think of other ways to keep federation while also having a way to prevent brigading or content manipulation.

I've been having a look at https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy and taking note of the servers where total users is orders of magnitude larger than active users, but I was wondering if there was a comma separated list that we could import into our ban-list.

Thank you!

Check out !worldnews@lemmit.online. The admin of lemmit.online has set up a bot that fetches reddit posts via RSS, making it much easier to make the switch and of course not getting any ads.

Also, these posts can then be cross-posted to help us create more content on lemmy native communities. Although I do recommend removing most of the post body when cross-posting. Alternatively you can turn the cross-post into a native post as if you simply were sharing content that you've seen on reddit, but with the perk of not having to load reddit.

You can make requests for subs to fetch at !requests@lemmit.online.

In the end we're just using lemmy and lemmit's bot as a simple RSS reader, so nothing illegal or even remotely unethical happening here.

Current reply:

I'll get right on that. Check out /c/subredditname@lemmit.online!

Proposed reply:

I'll get right on that. Check out /c/subredditname@lemmit.online!

Click here to fetch this community for your lemmy instance if you get a 404 error with the link above.

Anyone well known who wants to speak out about what's been happening on reddit? Louis Rossmann? Apollo dev? John Oliver (one can dream)... or maybe former Reddit mods who were kicked out?

Anyone who has a story and who understands they'd have a massive impact by giving an exclusive AMA on a Lemmy or Kbin instance.

This could be announced a few days in advance to make sure all remote instances follow the AMA community.

This next version is quite important as it brings important fixes.

Bugs: https://enterprise.lemmy.ml/c/actualbugs018

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/300197

Enterprise: enterprise.lemmy.ml - Thank you!