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0 pointsdragontamer2y ago0 comments

> The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky.

Yeah.

I'm optimistic on this front. Bugs are one of those things that "everyone agrees upon", although you're right in that the Lemmy development environment hasn't taken off or expanded as much as it probably should have. Still, bugs will be fixed because its low-hanging fruit. Everyone gets bothered, someone will get bothered enough and then a patch will be submitted.

The advancements from 0.17 to 0.18.0 to 0.18.5 have grossly improved Lemmy in substantial ways. There's enough bug-progress that I'm happy. There's plenty more bugs, but progress is largely all that I care about.

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The deeper concern of mine, and I alluded to this earlier with my "Naive" comment, is that Lemmy is very ideological right now. Ex: There was a week or two where people were against Lemmy Search Engines, worried that they'd track us. (Thankfully, someone made search-lemmy.com and life is better now).

But now we're running into a "Privacy / anti-tracking" problem, directly in relation to this new-user / trolling issue. The most direct solution to the trolling problem is to have a way to track new-users and their early posts to see if they're a bot, troll, or otherwise a fake malicious account. Reddit does this through its Karma system.

But Lemmy is fundamentally against Karma-tracking at the moment, meaning an _actual_ solution to this "trolls just create a new account from an unmoderated server" cannot rely upon karma (right now). I'm hoping that the politics shift enough that we can start talking about Karma-tracking (or other simple statistics that grossly diminish trolling behavior), but its going to be a while before everyone gets convinced IMO.

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I think the "Adults in the room" know about the problem. But there's also the need for the underlying community to believe in the problem and have an ideological shift to successfully keep the community in unison.

Or to get more specific: I know the Beehaw.org server wants to join everyone else in the federation. And we all know why they aren't doing so, and everyone respects everyone else's opinions and situation. Until this trolling problem is... addressable (not necessarily solved, but "addressed", so that we have tools to deal with it), it will be best for some instances to just remain de-federated (especially from open-registration servers who are prone to these coordinated trolling-assaults).

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johnnyanmac2y ago· 2 in thread

>I think the "Adults in the room" know about the problem. But there's also the need for the underlying community to believe in the problem and have an ideological shift to successfully keep the community in unison.

much easier said than done. That's the one big issue on surges of traffic driven through controversy, you get "Witches":

"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." - Scott Alexander [0]

Most people by nature are apathetic, so the ones who do get riled up and change more often than not tend to be the highly opinionated ones. This could make for excellent power users who will provide tons of content, or venom that turns the entire community sour.

It sounds like Lemmy has handled this much better than Voat, but identifying the "witches" without disupting the "libertarians" is quite the subtle but ambitious endeavor. I think the key is simply transparency: be ready to show that an active but disruptive user has been nothing but combatative to the community, and explain why certain servers can't be federated as of now. Some will twist the words, but overall a good policy should feel like common sense (even if it takes a lot of designing to properly establish).

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

dragontamerOP2y ago

This sounds like a libertarian-exclusive problem to me, and Lemmy's culture leans away from the Libertarian / Reddit style.

The overall plan seems to be: major centers of relative openness (sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world), a few hybrid locations, and finally well curated gardens (ex: Beehaw.org).

The different groups will federate, or de-federate, with each other as they see fit. You're right in that the more libertarian-leaning instances (ex: sh.itjust.works) are experimenting with lack of controls... but even they see various instances as toxic and are willing to ban them wholesale.

I don't think anyone is going with the extreme-libertarian Reddit style "everyone is welcome" anymore. There's too many shitty communities out there who are attracted by that.

The overall "Most are welcome" signposts are good enough for now.

johnnyanmac2y ago

>Lemmy's culture leans away from the Libertarian / Reddit style.

They are most vulnerable, but I see it as the natural pressures of the network effect. Unless you are some sort of status symbol, you can't reject 99.9% of visitors and expect to grow your community. So being lax in the beginning is necessary to growth. But being lax is exactly what ne'er do wells will take advanadge of, so it's a careful balance between growth and community fostering.

I say this mostly to assert that early users are the most valuable and usually the most opinionated ones, so those politics you speak of can be hard to balance. Don't want to end up too much like a dictator, but you also can't be a pushover either.

davidgerard2y ago

Blocking obnoxious servers on the lemmy/kbin network works well enough, same as on Mastodon. There aren't Mastodon-like lists as yet, but there are some servers that just aren't worth talking to.

Blocking obnoxious individuals from your server helps keep them from crapping up the home versions of the groups.

Our only worry about the software is that it's run by weird tankies. But if they become intolerable we're pretty sure there will be enough people to maintain a fork. Probably with our admin as a main guy, lol. Nobody actually wants that to happen, to be clear.

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