Draconic NEO

I don’t know how it is on mbin but on Lemmy the best thing to do is message the admins directly, and not bother reporting. This is because Lemmy’s developers give way to much credit to the legitimacy of forum moderators and do not allow a way for reports to only be sent to administrators, meaning that community mods like these can easily dismiss reports before they are seen by admins. So best thing to do is message them directly at the current time.

Even with the Hashtag misuse that’s not as bad as group spam, since people spamming groups can reach further than they otherwise would just spamming on their server. Which is why being able to moderate groups is important. Also with Guppe’s system you can create any group you want without authorization, that’s a problem because malicious people can create groups that aren’t acceptable including ones with racist and illegal content and use it to distribute that across the network. I found a few of these without much digging and I quickly reported them to Mastodon.social and got them suspended but they’re still there on the other servers.

The problem with Guppe is that it automatically federates all the post content unlike with hashtags which are just a marker. If someone spams in a hashtag n one server it’s going to suck but unless people follow them it’ll be limited to that server for the most part. With Guppe groups if they spam to them it gets boosted to all servers. It’s not just a tag that gets cluttered, it forces the content into all the other instances by way of boosting.

Something I learned recently which should’ve been obvious but I guess I just never noticed it was that it seems that Guppe groups aren’t moderated, like at all. This is concerning and problematic because it basically means they could become spam and hate vectors with only the admins of individual servers able to moderate the content. Compare that to the fact that Lemmy and mbin indeed can moderate communties, remove posts, and most importantly ban users from participating and stop the group from boosting them. That’s as good a reason as any why one might want to use Lemmy or mbin to host groups on Mastodon instead of guppe.

Yeah I’ve heard the spam problems have gotten worse these days but I always knew people complained about that because many of the services just didn’t moderate spam.

Yeah that is true, though in my experience from posting things from mastodon it’s not as bad as one might think. While you generally should include a title sentence separate from the rest of the post if you don’t it’ll just use the first sentence you write as the title. The biggest problem with Microblog content in Lemmy is the community mention, since if that is in the same area as the title it’ll look messed up. I think if enough people become aware of that it would help since they could just put the mention towards the bottom. Maybe even with group support mentioning the group will become not a thing anymore and will be replaced with native functionality to post to a group.

Even though some content will likely look out of place I don’t think it’ll cause much of an issue since it’ll only intermingle in groups, content outside of groups will still be the same Mastodon content, and Lemmy communities will likely enforce proper posting etiquette for Mastodon users even if they don’t do it in groups. For that reason I don’t really see it becoming a serious problem.

What’s great about using it (while it lasts) is that it boosts content to a lot of instances across the fediverse, so you don’t need to be incredibly well connected in order to have reach. Otherwise, if you post microblog posts from Mbin, you risk yelling into a very tiny void.

Yeah that is an unfortunate side effect, I don’t think guppe is fully immune to it though, its current communties have a lot of subscribers so content gets boosted very far, but if one created a new community it likely wouldn’t get very far since for federation to work you need one subscriber per server or it doesn’t show up. It’s what services like Lemmy-federate aim to solve on Lemmy and mbin, it still takes effort to grow your communities/groups but it’s easier if they’re available on the most servers possible.

It’ll be interesting to see how native group support in Mastodon is going to play out.

Yeah, I’m very excited for that feature. Hoping it comes out soon. Could help bridging the gap between Mastodon and Lemmy if Groups/Communities could also be hosted on Mastodon. That assumes Groups will work well or be compatible with Lemmy, I hope they do and they probably will in the end but I imagine there will be a rough in-between period where something doesn’t work quite right and throws it off.

Heads up the project behind a.gup.pe is very much stagnated, and while it does still work, I wouldn’t encourage people use it because it has federation issues with non-Mastodon software, and the fact that it could potentially go down anytime taking the groups with it, to be clear it’s a risk with any service but since guppe hasn’t gotten much attention for a while it’s more of a risk since they might not be maintaining the site.

I don’t deny that it’s a cool service but it probably won’t last. I’d recommend people use alternatives to host groups on Mastodon, like communites on Lemmy or mbin. Ultimately though they are the same thing activitypub wise, it’s just a handle that is a group entity, rather than a user. Different services just interpret the data differently, Lemmy and mbin show a forum, Mastodon just shows boosts of user’s posts (yes it is posts, not toots, toots is an outdated term).

Yeah kbin isn’t coming back, and even if Ernest comes back and continues kbin he will not be considered the official project anymore, because mbin is further ahead and what everyone else is using.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t an open standard, that means they are using it as a closed system. This isn’t a case of XMPP not being open, it’s a case of servers using it choosing not to be open. Therefore the problem isn’t XMPP not being open, it’s services themselves not being open. As an example Reddit uses Matrix in their awful chats function, but you can’t message other matrix users there or message reddit users from Matrix. That doesn’t make Matrix not open, it means someone is using it in a way that isn’t open to others.

I don’t think they mean unmoderated as in can’t be moderated but just that they weren’t moderated.

Particularly Lemmy because Lemmy admins have fundamentally broken the idea of federation with defederation. It generally doesn’t matter what email you use or what email the receiver uses, baring more niche services. It does actually matter what instance you’re on.

You’ve probably never tried using email outside of Google, Outlook, Yahoo or Proton but let me tell you it doesn’t just work. A lot of the servers have been blocked by the big first 3, sometimes soft-blocks being redirected to the Spam folder, but often times hard blocks where they don’t get through at all. So it very much does matter what email service you do use, as many of the smaller ones and domains you might obtain to set up your own have been defederated, much more aggressively might I add. It doesn’t take much for a domain to end up on spamhaus’ or other spam lists, and it’s a big pain to get them off said lists.

Let’s compare with Defederation of activitypub services (because Lemmy devs didn’t invent the idea of deferation, it’s part of ActivityPub standard and is a thing on all activitypub platforms), something that typically happens when a server is spamming, spreading violent or hateful messages, or otherwise engaged in unproductive or harmful behavior (i.e. trolling, rudeness towards others, etc.). We don’t use spamhaus or a similar equivalent service to filter “spam” automatically, much of it is done by server admins themself, there are tools like Fediseer meant to keep track of instances which are trusted as well as identifying known bad actors, but since this is community driven and not monolithic it is different from spamhaus and the like.

In all honesty the Defederation boogeyman is a very stupid argument, especially when comparing it to email which has ironically been hit the hardest by it. It has effectively been reduced to a handful of big players while all the other smaller ones out there find themselves unable to compete. Meanwhile on the activitypub side defederation is still an issue but it is a minor one and is limited to edge cases or bad behavior. One thing that is important to note, and why it isn’t talked about more frequently to other people is this. When people invite others to join the Fediverse, they naturally assume the people who are joining are NOT trolls, alt-right sociopaths, neonazis, pedophiles, spammers, etc. and thus are not likely to have their accounts banned or the servers they start get widely defederated. If you are one of those people chances are you aren’t the target demographic for most fediverse servers out there, and thus you will face friction, bans, and mass defederation because people do not want you in their spaces or to listen to your dogshit propaganda.

The Fediverse was never about freeze peach, it’s about collaboration and cooperation between services, and most services do not want to collaborate with people who are assholes. The people still claiming that it is for free speech are lying or misinformed, because on most servers if you speak your mind and say things that are unacceptable or evil, there will be consequences. That means bans from those servers or defederation if you run your own.

It’s an excuse, people don’t want to just say they don’t want to do it, so they make an excuse not to, saying it’s ““complicated””. They don’t feel like it or hate it for some irrational reason, possibly a misconception or just hate change.

If you see someone making excuses like this, or even casually making fun of the idea of decentralization and the fediverse, challenge them on it, point out how they are making excuses simply because they don’t want to do it, or say no. Ask them how it is “complicated” and make them give an explanation. 90% of the people I’ve done this with couldn’t come up with one and just acted embarrassed after, because they couldn’t come up with one. It’s a mindless excuse.

My theory is that they’re doing it to try and avoid defederation and bide their time until they can figure out a way to circumvent it, like was done with Mastodon defederation with activitypub-troll. Thankfully many instances haven’t fallen for it and have defederated them anyway despite not being whitelisted by them.

That’s good to know.

Doesn’t Lemmy already support federated wordpress blogs as locked communities? I don’t really see how this extra complexity is needed.

Would seed-only mode still be acceptable for an instance larger than 100 users? Asking because another instance admin is concerned about the possible ethical issues that might arise if larger instances use this. They haven’t used the tool up to now due to concerns of increasing storage and disrupting/affecting the natural All page by federating many new communities automatically, which is why seed-only mode was being considered.

CC: @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com

(If I misunderstood something or got something wrong I apologize)

I would encourage that, but if your instance doesn’t defederate them you may have to go a bit farther since you’ll still get replies from lemmy.ml users, as users are not blocked as part of this functionality. And that is by design, it’s not meant to act as a replacement or alternative to defederation, it’s meant to act as an alternative to blocking all communities on an instance.

For Twitter it really doesn’t make sense because it has become undebatably a “Nazi bar”, metaphorically since they aren’t an actual bar, but they still support and tolerate Nazis (and other manners of horrible people). Some people insist that it isn’t and there are “normal level headed people there” but that doesn’t matter, it’s still a Nazi bar, because it accepts and tolerates Nazis. How can someone expect to not be judged for going to and hanging out in a place like that?

The one on the left is a MAGA, they’re unable to listen to logic even if the answer is right in front of them.