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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  • johntash@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    Your hypothetical 3rd server already exists as basically any other federated instance. I don’t like the idea of having a central authority that controls user accounts though.

    Maybe an alternative would be some sort of circle of trust type system that doesn’t rely on a central authority?

    • dragontamer@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      So yes. This “already exists”, but no instance is actually optimizing for this use-case yet.

      INAA.net would ideally be a “zero-community” instance. Its pure purpose is to create and curate a list of users that creates a wide-spectrum of trust throughout the Lemmy-Fediverse.

      I don’t know quite what kind of rules, moderation, and banlists are needed to build instances with “High-user trust”. “Zero-communities” would be one such element, indicating a user-focused instance. A strong admin-team (without communities, moderators are useless), admin-level bans that work to police the group and keep everyone on the same page across other servers. Etc. etc. But too many rules creates stagnation and cuts off growth, so a balance needs to be figured out.

      I’m hypothetically thinking of an implementation of the Lobste.rs model of invite-only recruitment and tree-bans of entire sets of invite-trees. (If Alice recruits Bob who recruits Charlie, a tree-ban against Alice would ban all three of them). You can see how Lobste.rs style rules can build trust compared to a completely free server like lemmy.world (where I’m posting from).