sunaurus @ sunaurus @lemm.ee

Not active on Lemmy any longer. If you send me a DM, I won't see it. Sorry!

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Joined

2 yr. ago

According to my cake day, it was just over 1 month ago now

A bit more than that😅

Like are we going to make a policy of defederating hate groups?

Hey! First of all, here is our federation policy. In short, it is not a goal for lemm.ee to curate content from other instances, simply because this would be a massive effort for very little benefit. There are tens of thousands of instances out there, and that number is constantly increasing. Meanwhile, problematic content from the vast majority of those instances very rarely reaches lemm.ee - even for a big instance which we have defederated already, burggit.moe, there were only a couple of problematic posts that I had to purge from lemm.ee at the time I defederated them.

If I commited to policing other instances outside of lemm.ee, it would leave very little time for me to do much more beneficial things, such as working on Lemmy code. Not to mention, I'm not really interested in going out to these toxic instances and reading what they post there. So I am relying on our users - if a lot of reports about rule breaking on lemm.ee end up being caused by users of a single instance, then I would consider that a strong signal to defederate that instance. Similarly, if content that is against lemm.ee rules starts creeping in to our "all" feed from a specific instance, I would also consider that a strong reason to defederate an instance.

Here on lemm.ee, we have simple rules. One of those rules is no bigotry. So far, all users reported for posting bigoted content on lemm.ee have been banned. Most of these users have been local lemm.ee users, with only a few exceptions. I have not noticed any trends with any one specific instance causing a lot of problems so far.

Weird racist posts from dank memes keeps showing up in my feed.

Can you please point out specific posts that have shown up in your feed? I personally am on lemm.ee a lot, and have not managed to catch anything like that in any of my feeds. I am asking users to please notify me of such things directly with concrete examples so I can take action.

Yep, they are federated. I'm not a Mastodon user myself, but from what I understand, the Lemmy <-> Mastodon experience is not great at the moment, mainly due to differences in UX. This would most likely apply for Threads as well.

Hey, I really appreciate the message! Unfortunately, there are no crypto wallets for now, and probably won't be in the near future. Sorry about that!

Hey folks! I have spent this morning helping lemmy.world mitigate the issue. I have also sent out mitigation instructions to other admins as well.

For the particular exploit that was used on lemmy.world:

1. It does not spread through federation
2. lemm.ee was not vulnerable in the first place
3. As mentioned above, it has already been mitigated on lemmy.world

So there should not be any reason to defederate. I will continue monitoring and investigating, if further vulnerabilities pop up then I will adjust accordingly.

As of Lemmy 0.18.1, cached copies on other instances do not disappear if the original instance has died.

In theory, it might even be possible to actually clone a cached copy into a new local community. This would require some database hacking, so not recommended unless you're familiar with Lemmy code and SQL.

There are a couple of reasons:

1. Most importantly, all content posted by lemm.ee users is always hosted on our servers. Even if you're posting on another instance. The deal is that if you use our servers, you have to follow our rules.
2. Our rules are designed to keep our content civil and acceptable for a wide range of other instances. If we enforce these rules properly, then other instances are far less likely to feel like they need to defederate from us.

Hey, admin of lemm.ee here. I have no behind the scenes knowledge of what happened to vlemmy, but I have heard (in this thread and elsewhere) that some communities have been suddenly left without a home. I hope it's OK for me to direct a message to such people here.

If you're looking for a new home for your community, and don't want to do it on lemmy.world for any reason, I would be happy to welcome you at lemm.ee! If you're interested and want to know more about how lemm.ee is run, you can check out our administration and federation policy.

We recently upgraded our servers, so should be no problems in accepting some new users. In general, lemm.ee is not going anywhere - we have even already paid for some of our infrastructure up front for a year.

Let me know if you have any questions!

One fear that people have is that by then, it will already be too late - people will have joined Lemmy for the sole purpose of using it as a proxy for Threads, and any defederation later on would cause serious disruptions to existing users.

Thanks for the comment.

I think that if we lord the fact that our platform is open for everyone, we need to walk the talk.

This is not actually a goal for lemm.ee at all. We are not open for everyone, only for those willing to follow our rules.

They can’t push ads to us.

This is not true - there is currently nothing preventing them from doing this. See my other comments under this post for some more context.

In a hypothetical scenario, if I was a PM at Facebook and I wanted to maximize Threads ad impressions through Lemmy, I would implement it like so:

1. Get the top 1000 active posts from federated Lemmy instances every day
2. Send out comments under those posts that contain ads. Potentially put a #ad in there somewhere as a "legal disclaimer" that it's not organic content
3. Incentivize Threads users to upvote these synthetic comments in the Threads app - expose and highlight these comments in feeds, make them look engaging (maybe make them look like memes etc), maybe gamify it somehow

3b. Alternatively, just doctor the scores for these synthetic comments, so no real user interaction is even necessary

This would ensure that all Lemmy users will get ads from Facebook. Even users who are not subscribed to anything from Threads.

Lemmy and Mastodon both use ActivityPub, which is the protocol that Threads wants to implement as well.

Sorry about the downvotes, I think I may have caused people to be very trigger-happy with downvotes by asking for downvotes on the main post 😅 I'm seeing a lot of downvotes on quite high quality comments here.

Regarding the e-mail example, I do want to refute it a bit:

E-mail providers (including Google) are in fact notorious for how strictly they block other servers. This is especially true for any SMTP servers which focus on sending ads - if you set up an SMTP server which aims to earn profit by sending out ads to normal users who haven't asked for any ads, major providers will very quickly blocklist your server and not deliver anything sent from you.

While it's true that Threads is not sending out ads yet, you just need to look at how Facebook and Instagram do ads already, and how basically all of their revenue comes from selling ads - it would be very unexpected for me if ads were not their core business model for Threads as well.

Thank you! Interesting points. The stress test in particular would indeed be super valuable, and would probably result in another round of optimizations being found for Lemmy.

I'm leaning towards not presuming any innocence for them, though - just having a new app does not really take away their track record.

They don't control ActivityPub, but they are in control of what their own users see (and vote on), so they would effectively have full control your feed thanks to the sheer volume of votes that they can publish into the fediverse.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I agree that Lemmy could act as a nice buffer between yourself and Facebook. But the "The Algorithm" is exactly one of the major things I'm worried about - currently, there is no way in Lemmy to avoid our users being subjected to their algorithm if we federate with them. Perhaps if such tools could be added to Lemmy, the situation would be different.. something like ignoring all votes that originate from Threads.. I will think about this.

Thanks for the comment!

I definitely think that you have a valid point - defederation can make us look bad to potential new users. It might be a bit of a case of shooting ourselves in the foot. On the other hand, sometimes you need to amputate a foot in order to save a patient.

Thanks for the response! I want to point out one thing:

If there are ads or otherwise bad content on threads, I’m not going to see it unless I actively go follow treads accounts.

Unfortunately, this isn't true (as of Lemmy version 0.18.1). With their massive user base, Threads could easily ensure that all content by their users will always have huge amounts of upvotes. This would mean that any post or comment made by a Threads user would always be at the top of "Hot" or "Active". This also goes for any synthetic content (ads in the form of posts/comments).

Consider also that Facebook has full control over what their users see (through their algorithm) - effectively this means that they will be able to control what the top voted posts and comments are on all instances that federate with them.

I maintain a high level overview of the infrastructure on my GitHub sponsors page (scroll to the bottom)