For example:
- bots everywhere
- astroturfing
- repost bots being sold to spread propaganda
- etc.
This is my worry for the Web. Lemmy seems even more open than Reddit was (less bot prevention). Maybe Lemmy will get beefier protection as time goes on?
A few thoughts:
- Unlike reddit, Lemmy provides a way for instances to not tolerate those sorts of activities by limiting what users can join their own instances and blocking entire instances where those activities are coming from.
- With karma not being a public profile stat, there shouldn’t be any needs to farm it.
- Without the corporate profit motive and centralized control Lemmy (as a whole) couldn’t do what reddit is doing with the APIs. An instance could and an instance could also serve ads, but people are free to move to another instance if they don’t like it while still maintaining access to most content.
Hmm, those are some good points. I am mainly concerned with the difficulty in moderating the server well (especially as it scales) but your and the other comments have mostly convinced me.
Same here. I just want to still see the ability to move or duplicate my account to another instance. For peace of mind.
It might be possible to raise it as an improvement suggestion on the project’s github, something like “allow migration of user accounts to other lemmy instances”. Not sure how much work it’s gonna take or if it’s even possible, but we do have more people willing to pitch in and help now.
I’m imagining a scenario where the mods of a semi-popular Instance X do a bad job and let a bunch of spam bots join. Other instances block Instance X, but X’s genuine users are the collateral damage. Hopefully moving accounts will be much easier by then…. but then the spammers might move too….
Yep it’s a huge issue, and the inverse case where instance Y’s admins take a bung from some product manufacturer or agenda lobby and overnight the content moderation policy changes. There’s no point getting comfy with your account right now until user migration is lightweight, frictionless and doable after a ban, to reduce the cost to a user of a changing relationship with the admins of an instance.
The things you mentioned are not a Reddit problem but an Internet problem. The point of a fediverse is not to avoid the general Internet problems but the centralization problem like Reddit being able to do whatever they want as they control everything.
Federation IS the protection.
The ability of instances to choose which other instances they want to federate with means unpopular instances that abuse things like ads and bots will quickly find themselves secluded in their own echo chamber.
yes, the problems don’t go away but your options to deal with it increase significantly. as of now you are mainly at the behest of the reddit admins with mods doing the bulk of the work but with an extremely limited toolset.
here instance admins are often some of the same people that modded on reddit yet now they operate an instance server with its own blocklists and the ability to filter/control traffic through it as they please (technically possible tooling is going to be ongoing i expect).
there are a lot of similarities to email, your provider or instance will help manage spam and garbage, sometimes things will get through and just like now with your provider youll need to mark some things bad and maybe help dig some of the mistakenly tossed out things in the trash.
there are a lot of ways a “control your experience” discussion can go, since this is a protocol you are free to connect your instance to any other compatible network, there will likely be many in time.
There are some problems that should not develop. A CEO will not cause 3rd party apps to be no longer viable. One moderation model will not be applied to all instances.
