It appears to me that the current state of Lemmy is similar to other platforms when they were smaller and more insular, and that insularity is somewhat protecting it.
I browse Lemmy, and it feels a bit like other platforms did back in 2009, before they became overwhelmed and enshitified.
If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar “landed gentry” moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?
I don’t see how your statement applies to a Beehaw type response. Who cares how many bad actors there are if you’re allowing zero signups at your own instance, and you are defederating from instances that do? I don’t know the bowels of Lemmy code well enough to know if there is an “instance federation allowlist” opt-in as opposed to a “defederate from X instance” opt-out. If the former doesn’t exist yet, then it would likely be added to Lemmy code to combat the exact example you give of an infinite number of spam instances being spun up.
I agree with this.
I’m arguing there doesn’t haven’t to be federation-wide tool. There are instance level tools that give enough control depending on how extreme a response the instance wants to enact.
I agree. I argue a systemic solution isn’t a requirement. You’re looking for one thing that solves the problem for the entire Fediverse. That’s a rather un-fediverse concept. The point of the fediverse is decentralization allowing instances to enact their own rules that work for them.
I don’t know how old you are, but decades before giant social media existed, internet forums were a common community posting system. This is an old and known problem. There are a number of approaches that apply from those days to modern Lemmy instances. Yes, many of these would require raising the walls of the garden, but again, these approaches exist. Is it perfect? No, but if thats what it takes, then that will be the result, and the tools exist in Lemmy to do that.
I am old enough to remember that IRC had more in common with 4chan than modern social media and that moderation of atomized, non-interoperable forums was either just as bad or handled at much smaller scales by people with commercial interests.
You care about how many bad actors there are if they are enough to be in every instance. Again, you’re presuming that bad actors will choose a specific instance to populate. You can’t defederate from every instance that allows people to sign up or you end up with a group chat instead of a social network.
That’s the Fedi-wide problem to solve if it ever gets truly popular. If I put together a bot farm or a sweatshop tomorrow that targets every instance of every Fedi app with multiple spam signups per minute how would you stop that? Especially if I’m not immediately posting spam and instead generating bad content slowly over time.
What if instead of one person doing it it was thousands? How high are the garden walls at that point? Is there anybody left inside them?
“There are tools to do that” is a bold assertion, but nobody has been able to explain to me what those tools are or how they’d work at scale. I’m all ears. Even if I don’t think it’ll be needed I’d love to know what the plan is, if there is one.
You can. Beehaw did. Perhaps that is the future of Lemmy. I don’t know.
Beehaw did. I think you’re still looking for a solution that allows the full Fediverse-wide system of communication with control of bad actors. I’ll agree that doesn’t exist and likely won’t. I’m arguing that it doesn’t need to for certain use cases of Lemmy to operate.
You’re still thinking about it as an asymmetrical problem. Taking one portion that has a problem and isolating that from the rest. I’m saying if every part has the same problem that doesn’t solve it AND it means the entire network is no longer interoperable, which was the entire point from the start.
What you’re ultimately saying is that you can have a small interoperable network or a large centralized network, but not both. Which, if you’re right, begs the question of why try to decentralize and federate in the first place if you don’t have a solution to secure that arrangement.
And, to be clear, even in that scenario now you have an isolated, self-run social network that has exactly the same moderation issues and running costs as Reddit or any other alternative.
I am. I don’t believe there is one version of success nor one version of failure. That’s one of the beauties of the Fediverse. While there can be fully integrated interaction between instances, there doesn’t have to be.
Bolding is mine. That is an opinion, but not a fact. I’ll agree it was one of the biggest features, but it is by no means the only reason for Lemmy or the Fediverse’s existence.
I’m citing those as the two extremes but I’m not saying those are the only two options.
I reject that premise. If decentralization and federation were inexorably linked to Lemmy (and the Fediverse as a whole), the authors of Lemmy would not have built in the functionality to defederate, nor to block other instances. They did though. This tells us that while they envisioned the benefits of sharing, they also recognized those that wouldn’t want to and endorsed it with methods to cut out the sharing.
Not quite. From an operators point of view, sure. However from a consumer’s point of view, a social media application stack is a massive undertaking to write as whole cloth. Lemmy software simply existing means that anyone can stand up their own social media network with their own rules (and yes, costs). This, in itself, is a better evolution over Reddit as a private platform. If you don’t like that “reddit” you can stand up your own “reddit”.
If you’re looking for me to say Lemmy is the perfect platform without any flaws, you won’t find me saying that. I will say however that it is better than the alternatives we have today. We’ll see if it has enough autonomy and control to its operators to stand the test of time. Irrespective of where we each stand on this discussion, I think we’ll both be hoping it does.
I just don’t think that’s a reasonable view, and it’s certainly a marginal one in the community. Nobody is out there claiming that the core feature of Fedi apps is self-hosting a tiny social network for your friends, disconnected from every other piece. The selling point is supposed to be that your tiny, self-hosted instance is still connected to this distributed, crowdsourced larger network.
Building a social network sure is hard and requires a building a lot of software, but unlike other pieces of software, social networks carry a LOT of additional costs to run at scale and make no sense to run without the scale. You can host Jellyfin for your small group of friends. Maybe a chat server or a list service, not a forum or a link aggregator.
In any case, even if you are an outlier and see that as a valid use case, that’s definitely not a majority view, and the Fedi community has both ambitions to get larger and an expectation that this will be done with effective moderation baked into the service. You and I agree on the existence of that problem, we just disagree on the resulting state after it surface.
You’re welcome to hold that opinion.
I agree.
I’m not making any strong claims to the resulting state afterward. I can’t predict the future with any level of confidence. However, I’m saying there are future scenarios where my position can exist at an extreme. This itself is a benefit over the competition.
I appreciate the time you’ve taken to discuss this. I think we can leave the conversation here and part on good terms. I see your position as a valid possible future too.