this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Some thoughts β
The original "Eternal September" (on Usenet) wasn't an influx of abusers. It was an influx of new users who didn't know how to do things properly yet.
Most of the new users were from the America Online (AOL) private service, and known as "AOLers". (As it happens, I joined Usenet around the same time, but from a local dial-up Unix BBS in the Washington DC area.)
The AOLers didn't know which aspects of the service as they saw it were due to the AOL custom client software, which were due to the AOL local server, which were due to the newsgroup (forum) they were looking at, and which were due to the global Usenet consensus. So when they had a problem, they didn't know where to address that problem. They complained on public newsgroups about UI issues with their local client, because they didn't know what was what.
And the existing users didn't have the time or capacity to help them. The AOLers were added to Usenet en-masse without preparation. Nobody had signed up to help them. The AOLers were accustomed to AOL chat rooms that had staff helpers and moderators; most of Usenet did not have any β just regularly-posted FAQ documents, which the AOLers did not know to look for, and grouchy users who angrily told them to read the goddamn FAQ before posting.
Another consequence of the influx of new folks was that Usenet suddenly just had a lot more people. This made it a tasty target for commercial spammers and other abusers; which led to the eventual spampocalypse and a lot of people abandoning Usenet for web forums or other services.
It wasn't long into Eternal September that the hardcore abusers showed up, though. That, I think, is the harder problem to deal with.
"Good" Usenet servers did not reliably disconnect themselves from the servers that were accepting and forwarding spam. It was not generally acknowledged that a good server needs to block bad servers: the free-speech ideal was assumed to mean "accept anything from anyone; let the client decide what to filter out" β which meant that new users who had not written any filters necessarily saw all the spam.
And because nothing was secured by strong encryption, forgery was rampant; with a little cleverness, anyone could pretend to be anyone from any server.
There were many, many efforts to fix the spam problem. Unfortunately, as things turned out, it wasn't enough. Eventually folks noticed that the NNTP facility offered by their ISPs was a great means for sharing pirated porn ....
Agreed on all points! It turns out Lemmy has a mechanism for federating block lists. What will be interesting is when instances disagree about bans. If you get banned from an instance because - hypothetically - you disagree with the actions of one government or another, it's not obvious to me that other instances should repeat the ban.
Will we end up with islands of trust?
It's a damn necessity if you want to avoid a situation like Mastodon had with Gab joining the fediverse.
Imagine the absolute shitshow if a white-supremacist Reddit clone like Poal suddenly integrated their site with Lemmy...
I'm somewhere between libertarian and progressive, I vote for mainstream Democrats, and I'm not super thrilled with the tankie situation 'round these parts. When I get around to running one of these things, you better bet I'm not peering with the Klan.
So much for the tolerant leβ
Hopefully you've got the Paradox of Tolerance on hand, because you'll end up quoting it a lot with every 'free speech!' person who shows up angry that you banned someone for throwing slurs around.
I'm pretty far from Marxist myself, but I gotta say, I can't see a system like Lemmy coming up at this point in the lifecycle of the internet except through that kind of ideology. I'll gladly verbally bitch-slap a tankie for their pro-Putler bs, but the fact that an alt-right instance can (and probably does) exist is proof that true freedom of speech can exist only on a free and open platform like Lemmy. Fuck whatever Elon thought it was.
Yes, as we always do, digital systems should represent the real world, not be a distortion of it. Protocols are meant to standardize communication but the rights to re-distribution have never been guaranteed . Now many understand why this may not even be feasible in a real way.
There will never be just "one zone" and there shouldn't be, however control over your interaction with these zones should be up to you not brokered by a proxy. To a degree we do this out of necessity though IMO the larger goal would be to give the user the ultimate option even if deployed infra is helping make it happen.
It's OK for online systems to represent a projection of the real world. Not every feature of the real world needs to be represented in every online system.
It's OK for the furries to have their server where everyone pretends to be tigers and dragons.
its also ok for them to go to private residences and dress the part, im usually speaking of data, trust and execution realms. These need to represent the real world since things like giving up your ownership of your data and systems should not be a requirement to use a novel app. This is not how the internet was intended to operate and in the days of 6ghz silicon and ultrafast dram the cryptographic overhead of doing things in a way where you own your digital domain in the same way you might own a house is very real.
Where you want the technology to not represent the real world is in its abilities to scale, and that's what's really crazy where were are with technology today individuals can be companies and small teams are international orgs. This is not just a concept for entrepreneurs but a concept for anyone who wants to take more control over thier presence.
It's still okay for people who don't dress the part to pretend to be tigers and dragons online.
thats not what i mean either, just like in the real world you can wear masks and costumes or not. you can even wear masks that arent obvious simply pretending to be entirely different people. what else are you looking for, hit me with it.
The same Elder Internet that spawned Usenet also spawned furries, which seem to have become a standard test case for "so just how tolerant is your community?"
i mean as far as they go, strange to me and mostly harmless. I'm running a SFW instance, no fukkin clue what the line there would be (halp is welcome lol), was not a huge thing in the forums I ran back in the 00's. Overall im not queazy but im sure there will be drama, these days I expect drama over everything.
this is also a reason I run topical subs rather than just having OT, general or shitpost subs. Ill have an OT channel usually but if its drama becomes too much a distraction its well enough to just shut it down.
for the more personal and off-topic style subs where people are more "hair-down"....fireworks im sure.
Oh hey, you've actually got your own instance? Cool! I should do that too.
its not hard, ansible playbook and overall not hard on the machine.