this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Especially since being immune to censorship is kind of the point of the fediverse.

If you're even a tiny bit smart about it, you can start hundreds of sock puppet instances and flood other instances with bullshit.

[–] Gullible 39 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

I try to avoid talking about how indefensibly terrible Lemmy’s anti-spam and anti-brigading measures are for fear of someone doing something with the information. I imagine the only thing keeping subtle disinfo and spam from completely overtaking Lemmy is how small its reach would be. Doing the same thing to Reddit is a hundred times more effective, and systemically accepted. Reddit’s admins like engagement.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago

Put in those tickets. It's a community effort y'know.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

It's an arms race and Lemmy is only a small player right now so no one really pays attention to our little corner. But as soon as we get past a certain threshold, we'll be dealing with the same problems as well.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I feel the same about a lot of Fediverse apps right now. They're kinda just coasting on the fact that they're not big enough for most spammers to care about. But they need to put in solid defenses and moderation tools before that happens

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Another reason to block federation with Threads.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Meta will likely actually moderate against spambots because they want you to fucking pay them for that service. The problem is, they aren't too interested in moderating hate speech.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

So, you're suggesting that it is better that they are profiting from helping state actors and hate groups?

Edit: No, they are not suggesting that. I misunderstood their meaning.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I don't think I made a value statement whatsoever. I think calling it a problem and hate speech would've been enough of a clue as to how I felt about it, however.

It's actually why I support most instances defederating from them

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Ah. I clearly misunderstood your meaning. Sorry about that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Meta has the most resources to combat spam and abuse.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

And the least demonstrated desire to do so.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Can't some instances make some sort of agreement and have a whitelist of instances to not block? People would need to register to add their instances to the list, and some common measures would be applied to restrict someone from registering several instances at once, and banning people who misuse the system.

That wouldn't solve the problem, but perhaps would make things more manageable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You can't block people. Who would you know, who registered the domain?

What you're proposing is pretty similar to the current state of email. It's almost impossible to set up your own small mail server and have it communicate the "mailiverse" since everyone will just assume you're spam. And that lead to a situation where 99% of people are with one of the huge mail providers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

you're right, the matter is more complicated than I thought...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

It's extremely complicated and I don't really see a solution.

You'd need gigantic resources and trust in those resources to vet accounts, comments, instances. Or very in depth verification processes, which in turn would limit privacy.

What I actually found interesting was bluesky's invite system. Each user got a limited number of invite links and if a certain amount of your invitees were banned, you'd be banned/flagged to. That creates a web of trust, but of course also makes anonymous accounts impossible.