I know probably not the perfect place to post this but want to get the discussion started and don’t know enough to be scared or not: because of the decentralization of Lemmy, is it extremely vulnerable to malicious/ad bots, astroturfing, spam and such?
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Not sure if you were alive when we all moved from MySpace to Facebook but it is supposed to be exciting and scary, baby. All the best things in life are.
Or when Digg leadership made utterly boneheaded decisions that wrecked the way users interacted with the platform and drove everyone to: Reddit.
Former Digg user who migrated to Reddit once everyone stopped posting. I don’t actually remember why though. What did Digg do again that pissed us off? I remember something about the navigation changed that I didn’t like, but it’s all a blur.
If I recall correctly they changed the algorithms to prioritize “promoted” corporate content and deemphasized user content. They also did multiple redesigns, removing and changing features, and ultimately removed messaging, downvotes, and video posts with DiggV4. That final redesign, and user generated content getting buried lead to the mass exodus.
Sounds like Twitter Blue now. Except the corporate content is bluetlicker dipshits
For me it was always the redesigns. Man they just never stopped and it just got worse and worse. I’m sure they were in aid of something but it sure as shit wasn’t the users.
The site is still up now and you can see what it is. Just a bunch of links
I owned MySpace. I am Tom. I have no friends now :’(
If an instance is not willing to work on these issues, other instances can opt to defederate the offending instance.
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You created an account on the lemmy.world instance, but there are a ton of other instances out there.
Defederation explanation as far as I understand the topic: By default all instances talk with each other and publish their communities (The federation part). But if an instance decides to defederate from another, it will block the second instance from getting interacting with communities on the first instance. So the users of instance 2 can’t post on instance 1.
Do you think instance spamming could theoretically become an issue? I’m sure there will just be instance filters that instances can apply broadly though, like ad filter lists.
Federation is like email. Maybe you signed up for email at gmail, and that’s the server your account lives on, but you can still email people with @yahoo or @hotmail accounts, even though their accounts are on different servers.
It’s like Reddit and email had a baby.
My understanding is there isn’t one Lemmy. There are lots of instances, but they all talk to each other. I.e. they share the posts and comments their users make. If an instance becomes problematic then other instances will choose to stop receiving updates from them. So users of the bad instance can still see the content and comment on it, but other users won’t see the content from those users.
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The decentralized nature is one of the aspects that prevents this kind of behavior, because it favors small instances/servers that are easier to moderate. And even if you are in an instance that has some moderation problems, you can always move to another one better moderated and still be able to consume the same content.
The instance you are on is able to take drastic measures. I heard that’s what behaw did. They defederated while they get their moderation back in order.
The community has complete control, and has the ability to cut off other parts of the community that isn’t working.
