As this #RedditBlackout accelerates the Fediverse experiment, I feel the urge… the need… to chime in with my 2-cents.
My summary of the current lay of the land: Beehaw saw a wave of pornography spam and decided to shut Lemmy.world off and Defederate from this server. I’m too new to this community to fully understand the wants/needs of each individual server, but I’ve been around the internet long enough to recognize that porn-spam is an age-old trolling technique and will occur again in the future. Especially as small, boutique, hobbyist servers pop up and online drama/rivalries increase, online harassment campaigns (like coordinated porn spam attacks) are simply an inevitability.
Lemmy.world wants open registrations. Beehaw does not: Beehaw wants users to be verified before posting. This is normal: many old /r/subreddits would simply shadowban all 1-year old accounts and earlier… giving the illusion that everything is well for 5+ or 10+ year old accounts, but cut out on the vast majority of spam accounts with short lives. This works for Reddit where you have a huge number of long-lived accounts, but its still not a perfect technique: you can pay poor people in 3rd world countries to create accounts, post on them for a year, and the these now verified accounts can be paid for by spammers to invade various subreddits.
I digress. My main point is that many subreddits, and now Lemmy-instances/communities, want a “trusted user”. Akin to the 1±year-old account on Reddit. Its not a perfect solution by any means, but accounts that have some “weight” to them, that have passed even a crude time-based selection process, are far easier to manage for small moderation teams.
We don’t have the benefit of time however, so how do we quickly build trust on the Fediverse? It seems impossible to solve this problem on lemmy.world and Beehaw.org alone. At least, not with our current toolset.
A 3rd Server appears: ImNotAnAsshole.net
But lets add the 3rd server, which I’ll hypothetically name “ImNotAnAsshole.net”, or INAA.net for short.
INAA.net would be an instance that focuses on building a userbase that follows a large set of different instances recruiting needs. This has the following benefits.
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Decentralization – Beehaw.org is famously only run by 4 administrators on their spare time. They cannot verify hundreds of thousands of new users who appear due to #RedditBlackout. INAA.net would allow another team to focus on the verification problem.
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Access to both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login – As long as INAA.net remains in the good graces of other servers (aka: assuming their user filtering model works), any user who registers on INAA.net will be able to access both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login.
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Custom Moderation tools – INAA.net could add additional features independently of the core github.com/LemmyNet programming team and experiment. It is their own instance afterall.
Because of #2, users would be encouraged to join INAA.net, especially if they want access to Beehaw.org. Lemmy.world can remain how it is, low-moderation / less curated users and communities (which is a more appropriate staging grounds for #RedditBlackout refugees). Beehaw.org works with the INAA.net team on the proper rules for INAA.net to federate with Beehaw.org and everyone’s happy.
Or is it? I am new to the Fediverse and have missed out on Mastodon.social drama. Hopefully older members of this community can chime in with where my logic has gone awry.
can’t users from any other instance already do this?
beehaw blocks world so they can’t see each other but users from other instances can still see both. I’m currently on lemmy.one and I’m subbed to comms at both beehaw and LWorld.
they only problem i see is for users in those specific instances as they can’t see one another, but everyone else can see both.
i think the result here is that beehaw will be limiting itself. probably fine as they are overwhelmed right now anyway. it seems that’s what they wanted to do from the start as well. if they begin blocking even more instances things will get smaller for them.
but hey, that’s the beauty of the fediverse. if you want an instance that does exactly what you want then go for it. make your own. link to whoever you want and block whoever you want
speaking of that, are users getting more ways to block instances and communities? I’d like to have all the tools to customize my feed. there’s no AI doing it for me (which is good) so i need the ability to do it myself
Intent matters.
Lets say INAA.net has an invite-only Lobste.rs model, and engages in “Tree-bans”. (If I tree-ban you, I tree-ban all your invites, and all of the invites-invites, etc. etc. The entire branch is culled). Lobste.rs is famous for its overly strict invite-only procedures, but it is clear that they have far more control over their community than other communities. (Not in the fediverse, but their model is interesting to me).
Similarly, if I create INAA.net with a message “I’m planning to recruit 100,000 users to my server, and all 100,000 users will be friendly”, then someone like Beehaw.org will be willing to federate with INAA.net. I can enforce this through Lobste.rs-style tree-bans, or any method I want because its my private server with my private rules running my private code. As long as I’m in the good graces of Beehaw.org, my users will be happy.
With a stronger curation model than most other servers (ex: lemmy.world), my users should enjoy more freedoms than most other instances.
I think we’re describing the same thing. I’m saying the ability is already here and you’re saying perhaps someone should purpose-build this because the other instances that this applies to are only doing it by chance.
I’ve been a proponent of having Lemmy instances that have only a couple of communities that are specific to admin things for that instance. Then they are just filled with users who interact with content on other instances. Personally, I was thinking about this from a performance standpoint, but it also makes sense from a social gathering standpoint as well.
I’m planning on giving a go at making my own instance over the summer (hopefully soon) and exploring what things I might want to do after that. I’d love to make some medium-sized instances assuming I can gather enough funds to support 1 or more servers for the project. Your idea does give me new things to think about in terms of organizing and attracting an instance user base. I was initially thinking it would be based on topics, but being based on something like reputation would likely be even more valuable to many.
I think you’ve got the gist of what I’m saying perfectly.
I don’t know what the long-term implications are for Lemmy, the Fediverse, or whatever. But at least at this juncture, this idea of “User-based curation” and “Servers/Instances that focus on the user-contract” is something that simply wasn’t possible in the Reddit-model at all. Its worth looking into at a minimum, and probably well worth experimenting with.
I don’t know what kind of rules a user-focused instance should have. Lobste.rs is a fun one but it has its downsides. Worst case scenario, you run 2 or 3 instances each experimenting with a different user-model / user-contract.
i think it will take some experimenting in order to get the right mix. i also think that whatever choice becomes popular isn’t likely to be the best.
still a good idea to say least be open to having an account at more than one instance. make one early, because if they get backed up or change the rules you might not get into a server later on as it seems some people are experiencing right now
I think we’re in the stage where experimental instances will rise and fall, and collapse. The community will understand these growing pains, though we should try to minimize the disruption.
I think the best plan would be to create instances with a rough set of rules. Ex: TimeLockedUsers.net, and InviteTreeBan.net, etc. etc. and all the other recruitment/curation methodologies that exist.
Then we consider the tools needed to make these users trustworthy on a large number of sites. Ex: InviteTreeBan.net could create user-accounts for Beehaw.org that helps them create lists that match the TreeBan structure and help them mass-ban poorly performing trees of the recruitment tree. These tools wouldn’t make sense in Lemmy-in-general, they’re just specific to the trustbuilding website.