Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There’s a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we’ve had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, ‘tankie-ism’, etc. The subject of the admin’s, and Lemmy dev’s, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don’t really engage with posts about international events, I don’t share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond “Don’t be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can”, and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I’m also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
I was super into the idea of lemmy.ml and actually had some extensive conversations with them and with lemmygrad when I first joined Lemmy. I didn’t agree with them on practically anything, but whatever, it is fine. Then, lemmy.ml mods started deleting my comments when they decided that I was expressing the incorrect viewpoint and that viewpoint needed to be deleted to clear the way for the correct viewpoint. That’s kind of a red line for me in terms of whether or not I feel like fuckin with a particular instance, and I pretty much turned my back on it.
They take a very Chinese-style approach to managing the internet. Authoritarian.
This was my exact experience. I was pretty excited for a community well to the left of reddit, only to discover that they had no knowledge or interest in leftist theory beyond Lenin and Mao. Then I got run out of town for basically challenging this orthodoxy.
Whatever user: I can’t wait for the revolution, let me challenge the status quo with my iconoclasty, no politics is gonna be enough until we can battle in the FUCKING streets
Me: Dude I don’t think opinion X is correct
Whatever user: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA shaking and crying ban ban ban
I wonder if I’m banned from some places and don’t even know lol. I had some casual conversations in these areas too but wasn’t supportive of the alt right bs
It’s a tankie shitshow that I’ve personally blocked because you can’t have unbiased discussions.
Their users are overwhelmingly shitposters or actually believe what they say, which is downright scary. Of all the users I’ve blocked, half of them are from there (the rest about 50:50 between lemmygrad and hexbear).
No pressure, but can you speak to some examples? Are we talking just intense “eat the rich” stuff, or “the gulags didn’t exist, and if they did they were a good thing” level.
Edit: And in your experience was it just individual discussions with users, or getting stuff removed by mods for obvious ideological reasons - and if so was it community-agnostic?
All of it, the “eat the rich” comments are a general leftist-trope that you find on all instances. It was really more like “Russia and China are doing everything right” comments that got a lot of negative feedback that the mods removed and stuff like this, and all across communities.
Often the discussions started rather harmlessly on something broadly political, then you’d have a bunch of people of the “fuck corporates” movement chiming in, and then it derailed real quick into an outright “blame the west for everything” bashing.
First of all, the complaints are not without substance. Some of their admin decisions are highly questionable and obviously politically motivated. However I think the idea of defederation is a huge overreaction.
What do people think about lemmy.ml?
They have always been left-aligned, despite officially being privacy/FOSS focused. This is largely due to the history of Lemmy, which was created by leftist developers and existed in relative obscurity for a couple of years prior to the reddit API exodus a year ago. They have received a good number of relatively apolitical users since the API exodus due to their branding, but many of those users eventually chose to leave to other servers.
These screenshots from 7/16/23 and 9/5/23 show that lemmy.ml experienced a massive bump in users that quickly ebbed away in the following months. This happened with all Lemmy servers, but beehaw and lemmy.ml had the biggest drop offs.
Right now they are sitting right around 2.5k MAUs, same as us.
Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically?
I don’t believe it creates problems for Lemmy users, but I can see the argument for why it does. I think there’s a misconception that lemmy.ml is still the flagship instance or new users are being drawn to them, but I just don’t think that’s the case. People dont really recommend lemmy.ml to new users, because it’s already common knowledge about their political leanings. And they’ve never prioritized promotion of that instance on join-lemmy.org or anywhere else that I’m aware of. This is borne out by the data I just shared, which shows their share of the Lemmy userbase has steadily declined over time.
For sh.itjust.works specifically, I don’t agree that it’s creating problems for our users. Our server has literally grown in the garden planted by lemmy.ml users. We are less dependent on lemmy.ml today than ever before, and now is when people decide they want to defederate? That seems really lame and somehow duplicitous.
I think to the extent that there are problems with the lemmy.ml userbase, they have come more recently after hexbear got defederated from most of the fediverse. I think some long time users on hexbear and lemmygrad who got a taste of the wider fediverse decided to move over to lemmy.ml so they could keep pushing their ideology. That’s not ideal but I don’t think defederation of the whole server is a proper response to a handful of hexbear trolls up to their old tricks.
For me personally as an admin, I can confidently say that I don’t feel like lemmy.ml users have been disproportionately involved in bad behavior or trolling. I’ve removed my fair share of hostile comments in political arguments, but no more offensive or combative than stuff I see from our own users, lemmy.world, lemm.ee, or any big server. I haven’t seen them brigading communities or threads, aside from the ones located on their own server, which is obviously fine.
In terms of their admins, I have to acknowledge that they sometimes make mistakes with moderation. But moderation on Lemmy is also a really difficult task. One important factor is that they host a disproportionate number of communities and especially political communities. Here on SJW, our most active communities tend to be fairly non-controversial. I cannot imagine the moderation burden for active political communities such as those hosted on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, and I’m thankful they’re doing it instead of us.
TLDR Lemmy.ml is basically alright with me, aside from some minor annoyances. I think it’s kinda embarrassing to talk about defederating them when none of us would be here without them. But that’s just my personal opinion, I will of course abide by the wishes of my fellow sh.it.heads.
My concern is that the devs have shown a willingness to keep their finger on the scale and use .ml as a tool for this ideological end in any way possible. If, eg, there is a way for a malicious instance to modify federated content from other instances and republish it, I would confidently say that the .ml devs certainly have the ability, and have shown a willingness to engage in that kind of agitprop. At the very least I think we have to take this threat seriously.
Furthermore, If .ml were to be treated as a state espionage actor, federating with them is exposing your users to very significant risks, as it would be trivial for them to collect identifying information via federation, and to promote malicious or compromised websites by modifying their feeds, or even the feeds of individual users. They could very easily collect identifying information from a target, and then modify a web application to serve malware to that specific user, which they push to the top of that users feed in various ways.
This is an aspect of the fediverse which generally makes me uncomfortable. Even if the core code is safe and audited, there is nothing stopping a malicious admin from running modified versions of the front end or forum code. Again, it would even be possible to only serve such malicious content to individual targets, and federating content with them provides an incredibly convenient threat surface for performing this kind of targeted analysis.
The biggest thing stopping this kind of behavior would be “who the fuck would bother?” And the scale needed to provide cover for the operation. Who? Well, an admin who openly admits they are waging information warfare in the fediverse, that’s who. Or perhaps a dev who appropriates the name of an infamous murdering zealot as a symbol for his “cause.” How? Maybe via one of the largest and most visible instances on the fediverse?
Of course, I have no evidence that this actually happens. It would be incredibly difficult to detect such targeted threats. But the whole combination of the way the admin and devs handle themselves, and the adversarial way they interact with the rest of the fediverse, just triggers all sorts of red flags in the secOps part of my lizard brain, and it bothers me that people don’t seem to be taking these threats seriously.
I hear you. My perspective may be slightly different from yours because I have more faith in the devs. I believe them when they make statements about supporting privacy and open source. I understand that they have some extreme beliefs regarding political ideology, but I think it’s unfair to use that as evidence that their ethics are compromised in other aspects. They certainly have an agenda, but they also ultimately have principles and I would be quite surprised if they committed such a betrayal.
It’s like the old adage about conservatives being pro-life right up until the baby is born. People compartmentalize their feelings on different issues and parts of their life, and I think that within the compartment of software development, the devs seem quite ethical. Within the compartment of sociopolitical theory, they have opinions that many would characterize as unethical. But I don’t think the latter implies that the former is likely to be compromised.
I’m not really well versed in software, so I can’t offer much in terms of discussing potential vulnerabilities on that level. I’m glad that someone is worrying about it though.
And that brings me to my second point, which is that the Lemmy userbase is chock full of techies, skeptics, and critical thinkers. Even if they did have some grand scheme to propagandize us, I just don’t think it would work. It’d be similar to what’s happening now, with people independently calling them out and then collectively dealing with the issue.
The time when the Lemmy devs could hope to control the evolution of this platform is long past. They’re outnumbered and there is a substantial negative sentiment about them amongst the userbase. I’m really not too worried about the harm they might cause. I’m more concerned about making a rash decision that creates more problems than it solves.
I am not worried about propaganda. I am worried about a state actor performing pattern analysis on my user, trying it to a specific IP address, and then serving me targeted malware. The fediverse is unique in that sense because of the nature of federation exposes a significant amount of user telemetry to a huge number of different internet hosts.
At this point I am 100% convinced that if hexbears could perform cyber attacks at the behest of China, they would do it enthusiastically. And .ml Admins protect hexbears. To me, that’s motive and opportunity, and it would be naive and foolish to trust them given the adversarial nature of the way they interact with the broader fediverse.
What problems does defederation even cause? Do we have sympathy for this tumor? The very fact that they are openly willing to engage in information warfare, and are being marginalized for it only makes the threat bigger in my mind. If they feel like they are losing this war, their behavior will only grow more extreme. I would again like to reiterate that “Dessalines” is literally the historical poster child for “extreme ends justify any means.”
You raise some interesting points, and I don’t think they should be dismissed out of hand. I have some questions though (some of them are re: your other comments here):
[…] some evidence that they are running their own modified version of the code which seems to give them special tools to do things like instant mass bans and selective federation of content.
Could you speak to this in a little more detail? Does what you are seeing inherently require functionality beyond what Lemmy’s public release offers natively, or is beyond the scope of something like an automod tool? Asked honestly, I am not an IT professional.
[…] if .ml were to be treated as a state espionage actor […] it would be trivial for them to collect identifying information via federation and to promote malicious or compromised websites by modifying their feeds, or even the feeds of individual users.
This is obviously a very serious accusation, but let’s put that aside for a moment.
My (limited) understanding is that as a function of using the ActivityPub protocol, it is already trivial to collect identifying information on users of federated services. What makes lemmy.ml unique in this regard - couldn’t a bad actor do this just as easily by other means? Simply it’s comparative size to other instances/services that can be leveraged for this purpose? Aren’t there lower profile means of accomplishing this same thing?
I don’t know enough about how federation works from a technical perspective to speak to feed manipulation when viewing a ‘rogue actor’ instance from a place like sh.itjust.works, but welcome comments/clarifying questions on this point from smarter people than myself. Want to know more, just don’t know what to ask.
Federation exposes potentially quite a bit of user telemetry data through a few different vectors. For example, simply loading a thumbnail from another instance exposes a user’s IP to that host instance. The exact ability for a third instance to tie a specific web request or usage pattern to a specific user is unclear, but is not a large leap. I am working through some specific exploit ideas on a test server I run, but I don’t have a ton of time these days, and it’s difficult to model some of these vectors without real traffic. I can say that so far, if a user interacts with a post soon after making the content request, it’s pretty easy to grab their IP, especially on low traffic content. So if I can see that a user interacts with a niche community (because votes are federated for some strange reason), I can target them that way. I should also be able to set a cookie via the content request, as well as do all the typical browser fingerprinting tricks. Once that association happens, it becomes trivial to serve malicious content to an individual user. This is a very serious threat vector specifically because it’s easy to hide what you are doing from the rest of the world, so it requires vigilance by the target to uncover. If it is done rarely it would be all but impossible to spot.
The broader point is that there is clear motive and plausible opportunity here. From a cyber security perspective, that’s enough to take preventative and protective measures.
It’s good to know that ml users aren’t disproportionately causing problems. That was the impression that I got - they have their overzealous trolls with their own ideological spin but they don’t have disproportionately more trolls than other instances - but I’m not a mod anywhere so I don’t pay attention as closely.
I think ml does have moderation issues, that post on the technology community is not the first time I’ve seen overly aggressive mod actions from them. I’ve left several news and politics communities on ml due to certain users and moderators creating an environment I prefer not to be in. Being a moderator is a hard job, but I genuinely appreciate the transparency and even-handedness from the mods in other large non-ml communities and they show that we can and should expect better from our community moderators.
I think the post over on Technology has the right idea - move the non-political communities off of ml to other instances, the politics communities already have active alternatives due to the mod issues. The Star Trek communities show this is totally possible, but the non-political communities are the least likely to have issues with overzealous moderators (unless you’re foolish enough to engage in politics elsewhere over there and get a blanket ban from all of ml for bullshit reasons…). But a community call to action is harder than a blanket defederation.
I think the moderation issues are more than a minor annoyance, but I agree that defederation, at this point, would be excessive. And I think we’re all happier not addressing the elephant in the room because, well, we wouldn’t be here without them.
It’s good to know that ml users aren’t disproportionately causing problems.
Yeah, precisely. It’s a very different situation compared to hexbear, who would flood threads on our server and deliberately try to rile up our users. The problems with lemmy.ml mainly come from users going into their communities and saying things that go against the grain.
If you get banned from lemmy.ml in that situation, I feel like it’s not a bad outcome. Just join the equivalent community somewhere else. Defederating them is almost the equivalent of banning yourself anyway, if you think about it.
I think the post over on Technology has the right idea - move the non-political communities off of ml to other instances […].But a community call to action is harder than a blanket defederation.
I think the moderation issues are more than a minor annoyance, but I agree that defederation, at this point, would be excessive. And I think we’re all happier not addressing the elephant in the room because, well, we wouldn’t be here without them.
Very well said. I completely agree that it behooves us to move a good chunk of communities off lemmy.ml. I think I missed touching on that point in my original comment, thank you for expressing it so well.
I think it’s kinda embarrassing to talk about defederating them when none of us would be here without them
Yeah, embarrassing for them
People picked their fediverse option over others. Had Lemmy not been there, we’d all just be elsewhere. They got the popularity, but are clearly actually disliked by a lot of their users. They should probably self-reflect with that knowledge
Sure, but there’s no reason it can’t be both. They caused an issue with their actions, but we can either continue to make the situation worse or begin to repair the damage, depending on how we react.
I had a different reply typed out but I’ve decided to change it because:
This is such a weird reply. It really feels like you’re claiming that people pointing out that abusing mod powers (objectively a thing being done) are somehow in the wrong for doing so just because the people abusing the power are those who coded the site it’s being done on.
The choices users have to deal with an issue like this are to block (per-user, so they have to discuss it), defederation (a big decision, so discussion), or leaving entirely (in which case theyd want others to come with, so discussion). That is unless shaming the people doing it works, but they’ve kinda shown they don’t care as this is far from the first time this has come up.
How is it at all embarrassing for the users of a forum to discuss on said forum one of their few methods of recourse to people with power on that forum abusing it?
Was hoping you’d chime in :)
Just thinking out loud here, but question: Do you know if the current version of Lemmy allows for user-level importation of bulk community block lists (kinda like what you see for ad blockers)? I can’t help but wonder if this is a middle-ground for folks who feel defederation is warranted on the basis of discourse, where the problem may actually lay primarily in specific communities based on the topic of interest.
A group of interested parties could get together, review communities worth blocking based on whatever criteria they come up with, make the list available and users who are interested/aligned with the group’s principles could apply it in one go. Saves the effort of having to engage and block on a case-by-case basis, or blocking whole instances if that feels like overkill.
Not certain I’d use something like this, and it brings its own concerns for consideration, but it seems like a happy medium others could be interested in.
Was hoping you’d chime in :)
You should know by now that I can’t help myself, I like to hear the sound of my own voice 😅
What you’re talking about is really similar to gui.fediseer.com, except that’s on an instance-wide basis. I think it’s a really good idea and seems pretty simple to set up if it’s not already possible.
This particular situation is kind of rare, because typically you’d either want to block the whole instance or just a handful of problem communities. But since lemmy.ml has so many active communities, there are too many bad ones to block manually, and too many good ones to block the whole instance. So yeah, a sharable user-curated community block list would definitely be useful right about now.
Hexbear is a instance run by tankies that spread their shit ideology and quash any dissent where they have the power to do so. Lemmy.ml is the exact same, except it’s much bigger and run by the Lemmy devs. I don’t think they should get a pass, and I think that Lemmy will become tankie Voat if this is allowed to continue indefinitely.
I came here because Reddit was being run by corporate scum that only cared about profits, and they crossed too many lines. I thought I could get a new start away from all the mod/admin abuse. I’m starting to realize that basically every instance’s and community’s admins abuse their powers to push their agenda, whether it’s political or trying to maximize membership, to the detriment of their larger userbase.
I don’t think this is a winning fight, even if LML is effectively quarantined, but I’d like to buy time by mass-defederating them.
Well said. The Fediverse has a massive propaganda problem and we should take it head-on if we want to see the Fediverse survive.
The two outcomes I see are:
- We slowly bleed off users until all that remain are tankies, fascists, etc.
- We effectively have two Fediverses, where one is LML, LG, Hexbear, and everyone that wants to allow users and sympathizers from those instances, and the other is everyone else.
Yes, so let’s do #2. I’d enjoy the Fediverse without as much propaganda and negativity, and I’d be thrilled to be able to recommend it to friends.
Midwest.social might be another one, though it gets more and more complex b/c they’ve mixed in “leftism” with “being in the midwestern USA”, so a lot of their users and communities there don’t realize what that means, i.e. they think leftism = liberalism as in Bernie Sanders, not = Marxist-Leninist communism except scratch that, outright fascism just using that as a thin veneer to cover their true authoritarianism. And now they hold those users and communities hostage to anyone that would threaten to defederate from them - though they are currently still small(-ish).
Also, you can tell fairly easily when individual users shift over from such an instance to one that is not defederated - the rules they play by on their own instances is one thing, but what they can get away with on other instances is also the very same thing (“my way = the only correct way, and if I have power then I will enforce that, while if you have power than I absolutely dare you to use it”). Hence while defederation solves some issues, it also merely shifts the issues around to have to deal with some other way at some future date… or else as you say we simply allow it to choke the life out of the whole endeavor entirely.
Which is already happening. We who choose to come here tend to forget: there are a whole huge class of people that refuse to use the likes of Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Threads, and even Reddit, b/c they cannot stand “social media”, as it contains such toxicity. Their solution to avoiding such rudeness into their lives is to simply not partake at all. They read books, play games, solve puzzles, touch grass, etc., and since coming to such a place is not fun, they simply… don’t. When I was on Kbin.social, I started recommending the Fediverse to such people irl, b/c it seemed poised to be different than Reddit et al., though now that I have come over to the Lemmy side and experienced firsthand the likes of Chapotraphouse on hexbear.net and anything at all on lemmygrad.ml and now more and more things on lemmy.ml (which I just blocked yesterday), I can no longer in good conscience recommend the Fediverse to people. Like administering your own Linux machine, good experiences can be had, if you put in sufficient effort to curate your experience, but that is not what the vast majority of average people are looking to do.
So we will grow, or we will die. Thus I would be in favor of defederation if that were the only option, though now I think that there are other alternatives to provide a more “opt-in” - rather than mandate an “opt-out” - experience, e.g. as InEnduringGrowStrong suggested elsewhere in this thread, have new user sign-ups automatically block “those” places on the list, and have a bot send them a message about how to remove those blocks if they wish. The site.content_warning rolling out with v0.19.4 is another option to consider heavily - like porn, perhaps we should not be in the business of banning everything, when merely labelling such experiences would be sufficient as to warn users that it is there? (or both:-)
Lemmy.ml is very obviously being used as a training ground for state sponsored propagandists before they are promoted to Facebook or reddit.
Hello,
Any reason to not include the thread that started it all, and has documented abuse from lemmy.ml admins? https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058
Also, if people want to avoid lemmy.ml communities, here is a thread that discusses alternatives: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20431762
