A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
"Joining the fediverse isn't hard bro, your instance doesn't matter, just pick one."
"Stop using Lemmy.world, we need to redistribute to smaller instances."
The number of times I've heard these fucking lines when people discuss why Lemmy/the Fediverse isn't growing like corp-owned alternatives...
“Joining the fediverse isn’t hard bro, your instance doesn’t matter, just pick one.”
It's true, especially in cases like this when users have 3 months to pick another instance.
“Stop using Lemmy.world, we need to redistribute to smaller instances.”
Also true. Should LW go down in 90 days in a similar way, is it better if LW has 50% of the users, or a smaller number?
I saw a few of their users here and there. Rip in rest. Come to lemm.ee.
Now that they're out, lemmy.zero?
never heard of lemmy one
It originally set out to be just an account-hosting instance, at a time when the major instances with the big communities would be going down as usage surged from people leaving Reddit. This way it was more responsive and reliably online. They have <10 communities hosted on the instance.
sounds useful! hope we fill that niche
Thanks for the cross post.
Citations needed on mod tool complaints. I mod one of the largest communities on Lemmy. In 2 years I've had around a couple dozen times that required actual mod stuff. The tools are perfectly adequate for the volume of users in my opinion.
We all took it a little hard when some regular users left. I get that. There will always be people coming and going for various reasons.
There is also always an issue with narcissists that tend to get involved with moderating for the wrong reasons.
All humans are lazy at times. And all of us have a right to pick up an leave if we choose. Blaming the tools as a scapegoat for one's laziness, or inadequacy, or to mask one's financial limitations, seems to me like a narcissistic way to toss in the towel and check out, like an attempt to drag others down too.
I wish those that want to leave all the best, and I'll still be here hanging around if you ever want to come back, friend. Regardless , thanks for what you contributed to this place in the time we spent as digital neighbors.
The linked post explains:
A Lemmy.World user informed us about an instance we are federated with that was hosting very illegal content a while back. This was a result of an attack more than a year ago, and said content federated to many other instances, which made local copies of the material. Unfortunately, when this material was taken down at the source, that action did not federate to all linked instances, meaning that there are still some instances showing this material.
Once we were made aware of this, we realized that this was likely not the only occurrence, so we started looking for other instances where this content may also still exist. We have identified more than 50 affected instances and already reached out to many of them to inform them about this content to have it taken down.
It seems that it is quite difficult for instance admins to do things like permanently remove posts locally which have already been removed by a mod somewhere else. Ironically, by intentionally making it difficult to access, its inaccessibility afterwards makes it difficult to... uh... access, e.g. to delete it, very much a design flaw.
it's a combination of multiple issues.
lemmy federation has improved significantly over the past years, so if this was happening with lemmy instances today, especially online ones involved, this would be much less of an issue.
the original user posting this stuff was on a kbin instance. kbin/mbin still do not support federating bans of users. kbin is basically dead, mbin is tracking that here. when this was originally removed on kbin this never federated out to other platforms.
the next problem is that the original instance is no longer there, so attempting to address this with community bans from lemmys side is not working anymore if the user isn't known to the instance anymore, as it can't be refetched from the source. if the instances that the related communities are hosted on purged this user in the past they wouldn't be able to federate out a community ban anymore.
another problem is that lemmy is typically configured in a way where it creates a local copy of thumbnails if no thumbnail url is provided by the source, which is what lead to a local copy of this material. in the end i consider this only a secondary issue, as while most people would rather not have this stored on their servers at all, if you allow media uploads you can never be 100% sure about the content uploaded to your server. this is therefore typically something where providers are expected to take action once they become aware of it. some providers are also taking preventative measures like scanning uploads, comparing to hash databases of known csam, etc. had the original instance ban or community bans been performed properly this would at least have removed public access to the stuff, as the media filenames are randomly generated and not guessable.
it's generally not impossible to prevent stuff from returning to your instance once you have taken it down properly, but in cases where federation didn't work, which could be for a wide range of reasons, including your instance being misconfigured during maintenance, your instance being defederated from an instance involved in the removal, and others, it may require local action. if i ban a user then no new content form that user is going to come to LW until they are unbanned again. this includes manually fetching posts or other content, so if i purge an old post of theirs the post wouldn't be able to come back until the user gets unbanned.
This should be the top post. This is the part with the meat and potatoes.
The biggest one is that there needs to be a distinction between mod report and ijstance admin report
Fully agree. Make issue, open bug bounty if you wish. Ask your community for donations or plain make a paid service so you can handle finances. Thats it. Of course things can always improve but that also requires that instances drive donations to the devs and are active in decisionmaking.
Everyone thinks the moderation/admin features need to be improved. I'm curious which improvements people are really needing. Whenever I see big complaints about it (beehaw, lemmy.one) I never see any specifics. Link the filed Github issues for them otherwise the feature requests don't really exist, and I'd like to give them thumbs up reactions so they get prioritized more.
Once I saw Beehaw give an actual specific complaint, and it was fixed in a hotfix (v0.18.5) within a couple weeks. Of course Beehaw never updated to that version anyways.
Here are a few things off the top of my head.
Deleted accounts leave orphaned posts/comments, which still exist on the site but can be difficult for admins to find and remove: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5525
Private message reports don't go to all the right people: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4436
We should be getting some vote analytics in the future, which will be great. Lemmy seems to have a significant number of vote manipulation accounts that only exist to upvote/downvote in unison, but they are currently hard to find. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5669
I really should open an issue to improve the reports queue. It's tolerable if you mod an individual community or a smaller instance, but it is unusable as an admin on a really big instance like .world. There is no way to search or sort the reports. You can filter by posts or comments but then it only shows you 20 entries, which is a weird and unhelpful limitation. All reports have equal priority; there is no mechanism for users to flag reports that should be escalated to admins. And, if something is heavily reported, there is no way to batch resolve the reports after you address the issue.
Deleted accounts leave orphaned posts/comments, which still exist on the site but can be difficult for admins to find and remove: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5525
I wonder, are you able to view these if you switch to "Chat" view?
the problem isn't being able to see them in the thread but that you can't open the user profile, so you don't see if there are any comments.
A built in auto mod is the largest thing. A way to say that this common pattern is spam and to block it system wide, right now we just don't have that. A nice to have stretch goal would be to use some model to fight actual gore or csam material, which just doesn't exist. A moderation dashboard would be great to see users with their comment history, vote trends, high level to see if a person just had an off comment that might be taken the wrong way, or if there is a trend of trolling behavior
These have been opened on the GitHub and either sit open forever or are just closed.
Unrelated, but deus ex randomized sounds like a great idea. It's been so long I feel like I would have to replay the base game first.
we have a game mode called "Zero Rando" (no randomization) that's basically vanilla with QoL improvements and bug fixes
the Randomizer had so many compatibility fixes, QoL improvements, and bug fixes over the original game, this ended up being really useful for new first time players
since you've played before we also have "Zero Rando Plus" which is the same thing, but also includes the balance changes we've made for Randomizer
and we also have "Rando Lite" and "Rando Medium" to get started with the randomization stuff before going up to Normal Randomizer or Full Randomizer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLZIQTa_kwZhBksj7UzcahPiRaHk87fWch&v=ksoj1QMoGIc
https://mods4ever.com/ | !deus_ex_randomizer@lemmy.mods4ever.com
Unrelated, but Moby Dick was named after a real white whale named Mocha Dick, which was nicknamed after first being encountered near Mocha Island.
I'm a bit bummed as lemmy.one was my introduction to the ecosystem. :(
OTOH, when they were having server problems, I set up a kbin account, but left it when it became clear I could only use the kbin app to access it. Looks like that's shut down now too!
kbin development has halted due to personal issues of the sole dev.
It has since been forked as mbin and seems to be doing well. I too am waiting for stronger app support to truly compare.
I'm excited for both Piefed and MBin. Both projects are progressing rapidly and have communities that seem to have their heads and hearts in the the right places
mbin is going great. Interstellar is a solid app.
Note that I may be biased.
I'll add to the bias. I created both a kbin account and a Lemmy.one account when the migration happened. Preferred kbin's look and feel, then changed over to mbin when Ernest started having issues. Haven't looked back, mbin is great.
+1 for the kbin >>mbin pipeline. I like that it still has pwa support since I really don't need a phone app for a text based forum
since I really don't need a phone app for a text based forum
We are very different people and I respect that.
Lol, I think we might be closer than you think. Lemmy and reddit are both basically unusable in web form on mobile, but Ernest took the time to make the layout of kbin in such a way that it compresses down to a PWA/Mobile layout without becoming a complete clusterfuck, something the mbin maintainers have maintained support for and I think is one of the key distinguishing features of the platform. The way it works feels very similar to the old RIF layout, and as such was everything I wanted from a reddit replacement from day one :)
I'm a fellow mbin convert myself. When the great exodus happened, I set up a Lemmy instance, but I took a 4 month break from it for reasons I don't recall. When I tried to spin that instance back up it wouldn't pull in new posts and didn't support oidc, but I saw that mbin did, so I switched to that and was pretty happy with its look and feel.
Writing this message on the interstellar app just now. My only minor gripe is that there's no way to mark something as read with a single tap that I've found. (Got to long press and mark as read, but I'll accept that I may have missed something)
Writing this message on the interstellar app just now. My only minor gripe is that there's no way to mark something as read with a single tap that I've found. (Got to long press and mark as read, but I'll accept that I may have missed something)
I'll give a quick overview: to mark a post as read, you need to either open it, vote on it, boost it, or mark it as read explicitly, which can be done through the overflow menu (long press or tap overflow button, like you said) or by configuring the swipe gestures to have the mark as read action (then all you have to do is swipe on the post). In the next update, we will also have a "mark as read on scroll" option, which, when enabled, will mark all posts in your feed as read once it scrolls off the top of the screen.
Oh, thanks for getting back with the overview. I appreciate it and will shortly be doing the swipe to mark as read once I find the option.
Mark as read on scroll will be great when that comes out too as that'll work nicely for me.
That's kind of sad but also isn't surprising. They didn't exactly put in a huge amount of effort to maintain it, nor did they put in much effort to grow it or make it appealing as a server for people to join.
That explains why despite it being around for a while I seem to have no opinion of it.
Edit: always sad to see an instance go however
Not surprised. Moderation tools have needed to be the top priority for a long time, and most of lemmy’s users don’t know how janky it is behind the scenes.
most ~~of lemmy’s~~ users don’t know how janky it is behind the scenes
That’s technology in general
Fair point
Any significant communities impacted? Scrolling through my subscriptions list and I don't have any in my list.
!privacyguides@lemmy.one
Edit: not to mention the users
Edit2: 131 monthly active users apparently
Also that was the "official" alternative to the subreddit, for what it's worth.
hopefully it can migrate to a small non-controversial instance.
infosec.pub? lemmy.cafe?
Perhaps even dbzer0?
Oh that is kinda sad.