With Lemmy’s current setup, you can’t really automate creating accounts because there’s an approval form you need to fill out. Uploading content to an arbitrary Lemmy server shouldn’t be possible as far as I know. That means the only way to spam shit is to put it on your own server and try to get it repeated to others.
Moderation is always necessary of course, but it’s a lot easier to hit the ban+purge button to remove the link than to hunt down the filename and make sure it’s wipes from disk.
Also, bandwidth and disk storage aren’t free. If everyone would just be able to upload media to other servers willy-nilly, you’d have to deal with serious abuse (think “turn random Fediverse servers into some kind of free Dropbox” levels of abuse).
The Fediverse is already split up, in some ways. There are the usually-banned servers (some types of porn, extremists, practically unmoderated servers) who generally can talk to each other but nobody else. There are the servers that will remove bad content when they see it and leave it at that. There are also servers who are in favor of more strict moderation (which generally seem to be the better servers to be at) that will ban more hosts and accounts than others, for smaller offences.
Most of the time, the system Just Works like it has done for quite a while. If it becomes a problem, I expect it’ll only be a problem because of implementation choices (i.e. Lemmy automatically mirroring communities you subscribe to for everyone who can search the site, or just for the user who subscribed). If/when that happens, I think things will sort themselves out.
You’re thinking about this purely from the standpoint of stopping spammers/bad actors, where as I’m trying to approach this from the standpoint of a well meaning user just trying to follow the rules. The current system does stop people from intentionally abusing the system, but it ironically can lead to people unintentionally abusing it. E.G. say I as a “normal” user with no knowledge at all of how the federation is actually implemented (not too far from the truth) decide to post into a community whose content violates the rules of my home instance (but not the instance the community is hosted out of). I would (incorrectly it seems) assume that as long as I was abiding by the rules of the community I’m posting in, that I’d have no problems, however doing so could see my account banned from my home instance.
In our theoretical example of a lemmy server run by PornHub, if I as a user of lemmy.ml want to post contents to a community hosted on PornHubs server I feel like I probably can’t as lemmy.ml, for reasons of moderation I assume, has a site wide rule against pornographic content. If I did reasonably post in good faith believing that the community rules took precedent I would likely end up in trouble with the admins of lemmy.ml. In order to avoid this situation I feel like I’d need to make an account on the PornHub instance and treat that as my main account. That feels backwards to me.
I can see where you’re coming from, but while the current solution makes things easy for the admins and moderators, I think it’s going to lead to a lot of confusion when/if lemmy instances that allow porn actually start showing up (I’m not aware of a single one yet). There’s also the question of text content that violates rules. If I post text content into a community in another instance that’s allowed by the rules of that community, but somehow violates the site wide rules of my home instance where does that end up? Does my home instance even know about it? It’s not stored locally I don’t believe. I presume the only way they’d become aware is if the admin/mod of the community being posted into complained.
I think the way Lemmy and some other federated sites are current set up make this a rather difficult subject once you get down to the details. On other parts of the Fediverse, the fact you’re interacting first and foremost with your own home server is made a lot clearer by the website’s design.
You’re absolutely right that an unsuspecting user would expect posts submitted to a “foreign” community would be uploaded there, not locally. There’s even an NSFW toggle right next to the official instance, even when the rules say you’re never supposed to use it! I highly doubt most servers will take action against contents posted in communities outside their jurisdiction, but it’s up to the server administrators to choose how to deal with this.
The rules are just not clear enough, I think. Lemmy.ml says “no NSFW content”, but doesn’t specify whether that means uploading locally or interacting with remote sites.
The unfortunate fact is that server rules are often directly influenced by the effectiveness of moderators. The more a server allows, the harder it becomes to effectively moderate, and the higher the probability that your server ends up getting banned from everywhere else.
The mods over at beehaw wrote an excellent post about how they came to the decisions about the setup of their site. They also ban NSFW content because of moderation difficulties, and sadly they don’t say if that also involves interactions with other servers. However, I think their approach makes it pretty clear what their intentions are, even if the rules themselves are vague.
Again, you’re subject to your site owner’s restrictions. If I were to host a site that accepted sign-ups, I wouldn’t ban people for posting porn on porn sites, though I’d prefer it if they used a different hosting domain. I also probably wouldn’t take action against a user that breaks another server’s rules by doing something perfectly okay on my server. I would take action against users that are abusive on other sites, though.
Perhaps you should simply ask your moderators on their stance about this. I personally chose to self-host exactly because I don’t want to deal with account ownership issues and moderation edge cases. If you’re worried about getting kicked for SFW versus NSFW content, perhaps you should consider doing the same (assuming you have the necessary knowledge to pull that off, of course).
Yeah, I’m not sure there’s a good answer to be found here, but clearer messaging about exactly what the rules mean would help avoid confusion.
I took “no NSFW content” to mean no creating NSFW communities or posting NSFW content to any of the communities hosted there, but I had not assumed it would mean no subscribing to NSFW communities on other instances, or posting to NSFW communities on other instances. Understanding now the way that embedded media works though I’d now assume you could probably subscribe to NSFW communities on other instances, but not post to them.
Personally I have no problem with NSFW content, so I kind of regret signing up on lemmy.ml, but on the other hand there are no lemmy instances that currently allow NSFW content that I could sign up with, and there definitely weren’t any 2 years ago when I created this account.
As for self hosting, while I do have the knowledge to do so, it’s a question of motivation and priorities. I simply don’t want the headache of running a server, I’m annoyed enough as it is just keeping my home systems patched and up to date. I used to run some servers for other things, but after not even logging into one for nearly a year (yes, that’s terrible and very risky) I decided to retire them.
I don’t mind NSFW either but until the rules get made clear (or some kind of incident happens) I’d watch out with NSFW content.
For what it’s worth, setting up a home server isn’t that hard, I have a cron job that applies the Yolo upgrade method (just docker compose pull and hope it stil works when I wake up). I don’t really care if the instance goes down for a while, if I’ve got time to waste on Lemmy then I’ve got time to waste on fixing my server. However, “just host your own server” isn’t useful advice for 99.9% of the population so I’d hate that to be the mantra.
However, based on the recent things I’ve been reading, I wouldn’t really join lemmy.ml even if I hadn’t set up a server of my own. I’ve got nothing against the broader community, but despite the distinction from lemmygrad there’s still some tankie stuff on .ml that I’d rather not see too much of, and the moderators don’t seem to care (or even take part in it). So far beehaw seems to do a lot better in terms of community management but there are also other servers I had in mind before I decided to join the convoluted way.
I had considered setting up an account on beehaw, but the no downvotes thing really bothers me. Plus it still has the no NSFW problem. There’s only a couple people I’ve seen so far on lemmy.ml that post Russian and Chinese propaganda that I’ve had to block, but I also understand that they aren’t technically violating the rules of the server so there’s nothing the admins can (or should) do in those cases. I’m a strong believer in freedom of speech so I’m against censorship in general however I also feel that the corollary to that is that nobody should be subjected to something without their consent. If it becomes more of a problem I might look for a different server, but unfortunately lemmy.ml is one of the biggest instances so many of the communities I’m interested in are based out of it. Even if I registered elsewhere I think I’d still end up subscribed to several of its communities.
Longer term, I feel as if the federation model of lemmy is slightly misaligned. Like the communities and users should be more decoupled or something. I don’t know, don’t have a good solution, just a general feeling like all the pieces don’t quite fit together right currently, but they’re close.
My problem isn’t so much that the weird authoritarian communist propaganda isn’t spread there, there’s bound to be a legacy of course, but the fact the moderation team doesn’t seem to consider it an issue. It’s quite disappointing because it is indeed the biggest server with the most communities.
I think a lot of issues with how Lemmy works could’ve been avoided if it didn’t make all of your posts available to everyone on the server and if it didn’t automatically sync all communities for everyone if just one user subscribes to a foreign community. I can see why they chose this model (more transparent and more efficient, and also more compatible with the wider Fediverse) but it’ll take some getting used to.
At least Jerboa has multi user support, that makes the “multiple accounts for multiple purposes” workaround a lot easier even if it’s not exactly great.
With Lemmy’s current setup, you can’t really automate creating accounts because there’s an approval form you need to fill out. Uploading content to an arbitrary Lemmy server shouldn’t be possible as far as I know. That means the only way to spam shit is to put it on your own server and try to get it repeated to others.
Moderation is always necessary of course, but it’s a lot easier to hit the ban+purge button to remove the link than to hunt down the filename and make sure it’s wipes from disk.
Also, bandwidth and disk storage aren’t free. If everyone would just be able to upload media to other servers willy-nilly, you’d have to deal with serious abuse (think “turn random Fediverse servers into some kind of free Dropbox” levels of abuse).
The Fediverse is already split up, in some ways. There are the usually-banned servers (some types of porn, extremists, practically unmoderated servers) who generally can talk to each other but nobody else. There are the servers that will remove bad content when they see it and leave it at that. There are also servers who are in favor of more strict moderation (which generally seem to be the better servers to be at) that will ban more hosts and accounts than others, for smaller offences.
Most of the time, the system Just Works like it has done for quite a while. If it becomes a problem, I expect it’ll only be a problem because of implementation choices (i.e. Lemmy automatically mirroring communities you subscribe to for everyone who can search the site, or just for the user who subscribed). If/when that happens, I think things will sort themselves out.
You’re thinking about this purely from the standpoint of stopping spammers/bad actors, where as I’m trying to approach this from the standpoint of a well meaning user just trying to follow the rules. The current system does stop people from intentionally abusing the system, but it ironically can lead to people unintentionally abusing it. E.G. say I as a “normal” user with no knowledge at all of how the federation is actually implemented (not too far from the truth) decide to post into a community whose content violates the rules of my home instance (but not the instance the community is hosted out of). I would (incorrectly it seems) assume that as long as I was abiding by the rules of the community I’m posting in, that I’d have no problems, however doing so could see my account banned from my home instance.
In our theoretical example of a lemmy server run by PornHub, if I as a user of lemmy.ml want to post contents to a community hosted on PornHubs server I feel like I probably can’t as lemmy.ml, for reasons of moderation I assume, has a site wide rule against pornographic content. If I did reasonably post in good faith believing that the community rules took precedent I would likely end up in trouble with the admins of lemmy.ml. In order to avoid this situation I feel like I’d need to make an account on the PornHub instance and treat that as my main account. That feels backwards to me.
I can see where you’re coming from, but while the current solution makes things easy for the admins and moderators, I think it’s going to lead to a lot of confusion when/if lemmy instances that allow porn actually start showing up (I’m not aware of a single one yet). There’s also the question of text content that violates rules. If I post text content into a community in another instance that’s allowed by the rules of that community, but somehow violates the site wide rules of my home instance where does that end up? Does my home instance even know about it? It’s not stored locally I don’t believe. I presume the only way they’d become aware is if the admin/mod of the community being posted into complained.
I think the way Lemmy and some other federated sites are current set up make this a rather difficult subject once you get down to the details. On other parts of the Fediverse, the fact you’re interacting first and foremost with your own home server is made a lot clearer by the website’s design.
You’re absolutely right that an unsuspecting user would expect posts submitted to a “foreign” community would be uploaded there, not locally. There’s even an NSFW toggle right next to the official instance, even when the rules say you’re never supposed to use it! I highly doubt most servers will take action against contents posted in communities outside their jurisdiction, but it’s up to the server administrators to choose how to deal with this.
The rules are just not clear enough, I think. Lemmy.ml says “no NSFW content”, but doesn’t specify whether that means uploading locally or interacting with remote sites.
The unfortunate fact is that server rules are often directly influenced by the effectiveness of moderators. The more a server allows, the harder it becomes to effectively moderate, and the higher the probability that your server ends up getting banned from everywhere else.
The mods over at beehaw wrote an excellent post about how they came to the decisions about the setup of their site. They also ban NSFW content because of moderation difficulties, and sadly they don’t say if that also involves interactions with other servers. However, I think their approach makes it pretty clear what their intentions are, even if the rules themselves are vague.
Again, you’re subject to your site owner’s restrictions. If I were to host a site that accepted sign-ups, I wouldn’t ban people for posting porn on porn sites, though I’d prefer it if they used a different hosting domain. I also probably wouldn’t take action against a user that breaks another server’s rules by doing something perfectly okay on my server. I would take action against users that are abusive on other sites, though.
Perhaps you should simply ask your moderators on their stance about this. I personally chose to self-host exactly because I don’t want to deal with account ownership issues and moderation edge cases. If you’re worried about getting kicked for SFW versus NSFW content, perhaps you should consider doing the same (assuming you have the necessary knowledge to pull that off, of course).
Yeah, I’m not sure there’s a good answer to be found here, but clearer messaging about exactly what the rules mean would help avoid confusion.
I took “no NSFW content” to mean no creating NSFW communities or posting NSFW content to any of the communities hosted there, but I had not assumed it would mean no subscribing to NSFW communities on other instances, or posting to NSFW communities on other instances. Understanding now the way that embedded media works though I’d now assume you could probably subscribe to NSFW communities on other instances, but not post to them.
Personally I have no problem with NSFW content, so I kind of regret signing up on lemmy.ml, but on the other hand there are no lemmy instances that currently allow NSFW content that I could sign up with, and there definitely weren’t any 2 years ago when I created this account.
As for self hosting, while I do have the knowledge to do so, it’s a question of motivation and priorities. I simply don’t want the headache of running a server, I’m annoyed enough as it is just keeping my home systems patched and up to date. I used to run some servers for other things, but after not even logging into one for nearly a year (yes, that’s terrible and very risky) I decided to retire them.
I don’t mind NSFW either but until the rules get made clear (or some kind of incident happens) I’d watch out with NSFW content.
For what it’s worth, setting up a home server isn’t that hard, I have a cron job that applies the Yolo upgrade method (just docker compose pull and hope it stil works when I wake up). I don’t really care if the instance goes down for a while, if I’ve got time to waste on Lemmy then I’ve got time to waste on fixing my server. However, “just host your own server” isn’t useful advice for 99.9% of the population so I’d hate that to be the mantra.
However, based on the recent things I’ve been reading, I wouldn’t really join lemmy.ml even if I hadn’t set up a server of my own. I’ve got nothing against the broader community, but despite the distinction from lemmygrad there’s still some tankie stuff on .ml that I’d rather not see too much of, and the moderators don’t seem to care (or even take part in it). So far beehaw seems to do a lot better in terms of community management but there are also other servers I had in mind before I decided to join the convoluted way.
I had considered setting up an account on beehaw, but the no downvotes thing really bothers me. Plus it still has the no NSFW problem. There’s only a couple people I’ve seen so far on lemmy.ml that post Russian and Chinese propaganda that I’ve had to block, but I also understand that they aren’t technically violating the rules of the server so there’s nothing the admins can (or should) do in those cases. I’m a strong believer in freedom of speech so I’m against censorship in general however I also feel that the corollary to that is that nobody should be subjected to something without their consent. If it becomes more of a problem I might look for a different server, but unfortunately lemmy.ml is one of the biggest instances so many of the communities I’m interested in are based out of it. Even if I registered elsewhere I think I’d still end up subscribed to several of its communities.
Longer term, I feel as if the federation model of lemmy is slightly misaligned. Like the communities and users should be more decoupled or something. I don’t know, don’t have a good solution, just a general feeling like all the pieces don’t quite fit together right currently, but they’re close.
My problem isn’t so much that the weird authoritarian communist propaganda isn’t spread there, there’s bound to be a legacy of course, but the fact the moderation team doesn’t seem to consider it an issue. It’s quite disappointing because it is indeed the biggest server with the most communities.
I think a lot of issues with how Lemmy works could’ve been avoided if it didn’t make all of your posts available to everyone on the server and if it didn’t automatically sync all communities for everyone if just one user subscribes to a foreign community. I can see why they chose this model (more transparent and more efficient, and also more compatible with the wider Fediverse) but it’ll take some getting used to.
At least Jerboa has multi user support, that makes the “multiple accounts for multiple purposes” workaround a lot easier even if it’s not exactly great.
Just chiming in to thank both of you for that interesting discussion