On feddit.de, lemmy.world is only temporarily defederated because of CSAM until a patch is merged into Lemmy that prevents images from being downloaded to your own instance.
So I’ll just be patient and wait. It’s understandable the admins don’t want to get problems with law enforcement.
Makes quite a bit of sense
Depending on jurisdiction it can be pretty hairy if your instance downloads it
IANAL but I’m pretty sure that in the US you have a “duty to report” and you can have legal protections if you end up getting it and then reporting it
But IANAL so I’d recommend looking into it with an actual lawyer if you run a website that hosts content
Won’t that lead to some horrible hug-of-death type scenarios if a post from a small instance gets popular on a huge one?
Yes, but arguably it was never very scalable for federated software to store large media. It gets utterly massive quick. Third party image/video hosts that specialize in hosting those things can do a better job. And honestly, that’s the kinda data that is just better suited for centralization. Many people can afford to spin up a server that mostly just stores text and deals with basic interactions. Large images or streaming video gets expensive fast, especially if the site were to ever get even remotely close to reddit levels.
We need more decentralization, a federated image/gif host with CSAM protections
How would one realize CSAM protection? You’d need actual ML to check for it, and I do not think there are trained models available. And now find someone that wants to train such a model, somehow. Also, running an ML model would be quite expensive in energy and hardware.
Maybe a system where the files federate after 3 upvotes from outside the original instance?
That’d still be exploitable. You could just run 3 of your own instances. Coming up with a system to stop malicious users that can’t be gamed would be tricky.
This is what I’m waiting for before I host my own as well. Rather not have to worry that much about constantly having to admin out CSAM.
Not to shill but I just found the other day that cloudflare has a csam scanning and reporting engine built into their proxies. In theory it gives them a window into the data stream by them decrypting and re-encrypting that could snatch a password hash, but 2FA makes that useless after a minute. Basically it scans anything that gets put in the cache and reports it, notifies you to pull it down, and automatically puts up a 451 block on the link.
Even on public instances, I don’t understand why people think defederating hurts the fediverse. Just join a different instance, how hard can it be?
I’m on 3 different instances right now
Do we have a way to combine feeds yet? I don’t know of one. So it’s kinda annoying to jump from account to account to make sure your seeing everything.
I’m not sure there is. Personally, I wish there were a way for an individual to block entire instances since I’m a terminally online individual with 3 accounts who sorts by all -> new for content :P
I get what you’re saying, and hopefully it’s a feature that gets added. I’m sure eventually it will, or maybe someone will make an app or an add-on
I definitely can block inetances, I did with one click. Maybe it’s the app I use? (Connect)
I still see comments from it’s users but they’re behind a (comment from blocked instance) button.
The “block instance” feature is apparently in the pipeline for Lemmy.
Kbin currently allows you to block entire instances, so that’s nice.
Yes, actually! Liftoff for Lemmy is still in early development, but you can get it on iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux, and it provides precisely this feature. There are a lot of features that Liftoff is yet to incorporate, probably most notably moderator tools and support for adding Kbin accounts – but give it a try regardless, and do what you can to contribute to its further development. Liftoff is an app with a lot of promise and a surprising amount of functionality already this early in its development.
It’s worth noting that Liftoff is a fork of the now abandoned project Lemmur, which I believe was the first Lemmy client to support combining feeds.
It’s why I’ve found myself gravitating to the less defederation-happy instances. But a new user wouldn’t know to do that.
I’m building this into an app right now, I’ve got an android beta open if you’re interested in helping decide the course of it.
Right now it just does the normal stuff with some extra features and lots of filters, but the goal has always been to build custom feeds on your device from a lot of individual sources. I’m redesigning stuff under the hood with that and support for other fediverse integration, I’m looking at kbin and mastodon in the near term, but I think I want pixelfed and maybe friendica down the road
The name is Luna, let me know if you want a link
Sure, but keep in mind the comparison to any non-federated site has to be that you had no other instances to jump to in the first place.
Summit for Lemmy supports multi-communities however it still doesn’t support multi-communities from multiple instances at the moment unfortunately.
Social media needs to be as easy as possible if you’re going to reach the masses. Most people do not give a shit enough to create 3 accounts; they’ll just leave.
That’s just fine with me. Quality > quantity
Some of the best forums I use have just a handful of active users
But quantity and quality are linked. If only, say, 0.1% of people will post high quality content, that means you need to attract a thousand people to get a high quality poster. You can’t just put up a sign that says “high quality posters only”. Plenty of quality posters also want an audience, so they’ll go where the people are and leave if that audience isn’t there.
Cutting out huge swaths of users at once just stifles the content including the small percentage of actually quality content. You can’t pick out and keep the good stuff when you cut off whole instances. It also brings down the engagement in your own content.
Take your favorite small forum and now split it according to political opinion, now split it again according to if users pirate movies(lol). Your forum is now dead since no one likes speaking into the void.
We should be treasuring the connections, not putting up walls because it makes the circle jerk easier.
Counterpoint: new users who don’t know the ins and outs of the fediverse might join an instance at random and see significantly less content.
Fair, but a lot of new users might also get discouraged if the first thing they see is content from exploding-heads or hexbear, and the instances that strive to be safe, inclusive spaces and thus do a significant amount of defederating are usually quite forthright about this when you sign up. For example, I knew just what to expect when I joined beehaw.
The instance I’m posting from now tries to keep things inclusive more via moderation vs. defederation. There are pros and cons to each approach. I can see both perspective.
I just don’t think either approach harms the fediverse. I think that’s a bit melodramatic.
Funny enough, Hexbear actually defederated from my main instance first, due to it not being inclusive enough for their standards. My own experiences with Hexbear as an autistic enby are that Hexbear is actually the most inclusive Lemmy instance out there, by no small margin. The issue with Hexbear is that its users like to “punch up” at non-leftists, pointing out how people propagate or benefit from exploitative systems, and justify these systems to themselves.
Being “dunked on” may annoy and wound the pride of non-leftists, but this is also very much not the same as the actually evil Nazi shit posted to EH, which “punches down”. I have for many years understood the difference between being annoyed and having my pride wounded for having a bad opinion, and being actively terrorized and marginalized for being a member of a marginalized group. The world would be better off if more people understood that difference.
Counter counterpoint: the other option is to give your unique identifiable butthole print to zuck
Too many people never used forums and think every site needs to talk to every site.
Forums died for a reason. Reddit took over that space for me because it was one place to see everything. Federation is a better version of that. Decentralized and connected is how the Internet should be
Reddit took over because threading on forums was awful. The centralization was just a nice bonus imo.
I don’t get it either. Defederation is a tool just like banning or spam prevention. If it’s unused it’s pointless to have.
But you don’t ban everyone for a single offense just like to don’t defederate lightly. If you do then people will move elsewhere and the problem resolves itself
I would say that a big part of the issue is the difficulty in transferring one’s account. Ignoring the fact that one simply can’t transfer their posts, trying to manually copy all previously subscribed communities to a new account is a rather tedious task. I am aware that there exists scripts that can automate that process, but I don’t think that it’s fair to expect that the userbase should run 3rd party scripts. Until account transfer is properly implemented, defederation will continue to be a major issue.
It would be less of a problem if we as users on an instance could block entire instances, effectively defederating it just for our user. Then those running instances could defederate only in severe cases.
Blocking an instance on a user by user basis has a key drawback in the sense of those instances you block can still influence the posts and comments via up and down votes
Defederating basically means that those instances no longer have any influence on the community you’re a part of
Basically think of it this way, say you’re on a queer friendly instance that is still federated with a right wing instance. That right wing instance can manipulate the posts of the queer friendly instance by up voting queerphobic content and down voting queer positive content. And you block the instance as a user those votes still federated over so you’ll see queer positive content getting down voted to oblivion.
Would it though? I understand that the main reason for defederating is to avoid your instance downloading CSAM posted in another instance, which could get an instance maintainer in legal problems. Allowing users to block entire instances won’t help, because the illegal media will still get downloaded by the instance.
IANAL, if subscribers had a decryption key, and the instance only stored encrypted copies of the media, would instances still be liable? Kinda-sorta like Tor relay-only nodes; it seems like only exit nodes get in trouble.
“I don’t like drama” is always said by people who cause drama. This drama stirring meme is 100% expected from someone who would write that title
From the same people who gave you
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I’m never unfaithful
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I never get into fights
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I’m not a bully
The whole epidemic of defederating is mostly because of all the csam issues, no?
theres also some other drama with tankies and communists as far as I understand. I dont really care about political views of people
tbh i have noticed them a lot less in the last couple weeks. maybe they’re giving up
Yeah the hexbear brigades seem to have mysteriously disappeared (or at least decreased) after Facebook shut down the big Chinese troll farm recently
Can’t I have a reasonable anti-imperialist stance while browsing memes in peace?
