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?
None. Someone is going to say federation helps here, but the effect is the same as creating an alternative to a popular subreddit under another name.
Yep. People around here love to attribute some magic powers to decentralization it definitely does not have. The assumption that crappy behavior is somehow localized to a specific instance is bizarre, nothing is keeping people from spamming accounts on instances with free signups. If anything, the decentralization makes it significantly harder to scale up moderation, on top of all the added costs of hosting volunteer social media servers.
That said, I’m not concerned at this point. There is nowhere near enough growth happening to make this be a problem for a long time. Masto worried about it legitimately for like twenty minutes back in some of the first few exodus incidents, before all the normies got alienated and landed on Bluesky.
Don’t get me wrong, I like it here, it feels all retro and kinda like 90s forums, but “what if it gets so popular it’s swamped with bad actors” is VERY low in my list of priorities. We have like two spammers and they’ve become local mascots. Mass malicious engagement is NOT the concern at the moment.
Decentralization provides a lot of important benefits, such as protection against worsening the whole system for profit, or imposing unpopular network-wide rules. I like it here; it’s fun in the way the old web was and the corporate web isn’t.
I think we’re in agreement that preventing moderators of popular communities from being assholes and handling large-scale abuse as OP asked about are not among those benefits.
Agreed, for sure. If anything, decentralization makes those things harder, I’d say. And also agreed that there are benefits to decentralization along the lines you mention. Those two things can be true at the same time.
I think it’d be cool to figure out what the toolset to handle those issues is before they become a problem. Or, honestly, just because figure it out would be a meaningful challenge and may move the sorry state of social media in the right direction just in general. That said, there is a LOT of overcomplacent assumptions, at least in the userbase, regarding decentralization being a magic bullet. I think the development side is a lot less… I don’t want to say naive, but a lot more realistic about the challenges, in any case.
The assumption that crappy behavior is somehow localized to a specific instance is bizarre, nothing is keeping people from spamming accounts on instances with free signups.
I disagree. If that is your primary concern, look at what Beehaw (another Lemmy instance) did. They closed their signups to prevent the bad actor spam accounts on their own instances, and they defederate from instance that allow the easy signups.
Its extreme, yes. It limits conversation from the wider fediverse, yes. However it does mitigate the exact problem you’re citing. I personally prefer to deal with the spammers for the wider audience, but I don’t fault Beehaw for their actions and choices.
No, see, you’re assuming that this is a problem for one instance. Which makes sense because there’s nobody here and not much incentive to target people who are.
If you’re the size of a Twitter (and that’s a couple hundred million accounts) or a Facebook (about ten times that), then there are more than enough people to be targeted by more than enough bad actors to swamp EVERY instance with more spam sign-ins than Beehaw ever had, legitimate or not.
And you have nothing to stop bad actors from spinning up entire instances, which you then have to moderate individually, too.
You can’t defederate from every instance that gets hostile accounts because the logical thing if you’re a malicious actor is to automate signups to ALL available instances. Spam is spam is spam. You do it at scale. And you can’t shut down all signups on all instances if you want to provide the service at scale.
There is no systemic solution to malicious use. If there was, commercial social media would have deployed it to save money, at least when they were still holding to the pretense that they moderate things to meet regulations. Moderation is hard and expensive, and there are no meaningful federation-wide tools to manage it in place. I don’t even know if there can be. The idea that defederation and closing signups will be enough at scale is clearly not accurate. I don’t even think most of the big players in making federation apps would disagree with that. I think the hope is the tools will grow as the needs for them do. I’m not super sure of how well that will go, but I’m also not sure things will get big enough for that to matter at any point soon.
None. Someone is going to say federation helps here, but the effect is the same as creating an alternative to a popular subreddit under another name.
Which mechanism in Lemmy allows one person in power to decide a single word is a reason to ban a person from every instance in the Fediverse? Since there isn’t one, that is a way that Lemmy is more insulated from institutional abuse.
I agree, but the server owner imposing unpopular rules is not one of the two problems the OP asks about. Those are:
- 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?
Decentralization with federated servers does not address those problems.
The first to create a community control it.
If the community becomes toxic, its easy to create an identically named community on another instance. A perfect example: when I joined lemmy I subscribed to the “news” community on lemmy.ml. When I saw how it was run, I unsubscribed and instead subscribed to “news” on lemmy.world.
censorship,
Modlog documents all actions including moderator censorship. Nothing like that exists at reddit. If there is censorship happening, its in full view of the users on lemmy.
and controlling a narrative.
Again Modlog, if a moderator is removing dissenting opinion.
If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?
Beehaw is an example of a Lemmy instance immune to “Eternal September”. They disabled their easy signups, and defederated from instances that allow easy signups. I don’t particularly agree with their extreme approach, but its what was important to them and it was effective. This is a powerful use of Lemmy and the Fediverse.
What you’re worried about is basically what federation was built to stop.
If you don’t like the moderation of a community or other aspects, you or anyone else can make a new one on the same or a different instance, if you want.
You can even make it “private” (not federate) to keep others from coming in and recreating the problem you just fled.
…. Acquire/rent hardware, or pay for cloud services?
“How does one cook without a stove”
You’re not required to run your own instance on your own hardware; you’ve just got to find an existing instance with an admin team you’re comfortable with, create your community there and recruit moderators just like you would on Reddit.
I need to know a bit more what you are specifically asking to answer appropriately, but I’ll guess in the mean time.
I’m assuming you asking about starting an instance without hardware. My understanding is that many of the top Lemmy instances are hosted on server farms (companies) rather than self-hosted on their own hardware. Hosting with a company would be essentially renting their server to run your software (Lemmy). You would have control of all the software decisions (instance admin), but would not own the hardware.
I’m not particularly knowledgeable in the area, but the above is my understanding and hopefully that answers your question. If not, let me know and I’ll try again :)
Also, I believe the !buyeuropean@feddit.uk community just posted in the last couple days a list of European companies that could be used to host Lemmy instances.
Edit: added correct community and link.
I’m kind of sidestepping the point, but I think the average user will always be able to depend on the community to some degree, at least hopefully. All it takes is one savvy and willing user to support a huge section of community, bless the admins. If I’m being pedantic, most admins don’t own the hardware anyway, but that’s not the point. It’s not even the software necessarily. If it isn’t Lemmy itself, the spirit of independent web won’t go away. People will be always running Tor, I2P, fedi, I’ll even include crypto. The community isn’t the platform, it’s us.
I apologize for the uncalled-for Ted Talk.
You appear to have asked a vague question and people responded on what they thought you meant with your question.
You seem to be interpreting that as people trying to take your money rather than seeing that what you are looking to understand and what people are answering do not line up.
Another user has already given you other information that looks like what you were looking for, so I won’t bother reiterating.
I just want to say that I hope in the future you’ll try not to assume people interacting with you are trying to take advantage of you and there may just be a disconnect in the conversation.
Regardless, best of luck with everything :)
To be optimistic, I’d hope the federation would be able to guard against deeper centralization like a more extreme .world or .ml, a la meta or whoever. There’s always space for grassroots instances, and I’m pretty sure there will always be someone out there running something or with enough interest to learn.
I agree with everything you said.
I’m thinking/hoping that this new wave of Europeans going to European instances will help spread out the centralization of .world and .ml, now and it’ll hold into the future, but we’ll see.
Hearing that several people have started country specific instances also gives me hope in this. With country/geographicly specific, topic specific, and just general instances, I think/hope it will lead to a more balanced user base.
I just made another comment that elaborated my stance more too.
I didn’t realize there was a trend of European users. I haven’t really thought about it, but Lemmy could use some sort of translation layer to facilitate multi-but-not-bilingual community. There’s a lot of German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese speakers I’d probably love interacting with and would never know! For now I rely on bilingual non-English natives or the little French I remember and just lurk.
Not just Europeans. I was talking to my roommate about how I deleted my Reddit accounts and fully committed to switching over to Lemmy, and his main concern was which instances were hosted in America so he could avoid them.
It will still probably end up like email. There will be a working group, public or private, that defines minimum spam requirements. If you don’t comply, you’ll be defederated.
You’re totally right. My optimism gets around that by hoping if it isn’t Lemmy, this federation, that federation, some other new initiative or tech, community will find a way to make itself. I guess my bigger worry is accessibility and notoriety/viability, but I think that will always come in time too. There are smart, willing people out there, and gathering is human instinct.
Except with email, the sender and receive have no choice. With Lemmy, both can pick an instance that isn’t relying on whitelist/blacklist rules.
You can even make it “private” (not federate) to keep others from coming in and recreating the problem you just fled.
So assuming you don’t like to only talk to yourself, how do you decide who to let into a private instance?
And if you stay public, let’s say for argument’s sake, that the same thing that made you leave this first community immediately happens in the new instance, then what?
I would suggest starting the invite process with the people who were in the community before it went awry. You can also make a post about how you’re starting a new community in the old community and explain what will be different in the new community. I belive this happened recently with the “196” community becoming the “oneninetysix” community when the mods made decisions the users didn’t like.
Being mod of the new community would allow for removal of unwanted users. Additionally, if you were admin of the instance, you could block other instances that had users that tended to not match your stance on issues.
Hopefully, that helps.
I think the primary defense is the decentralized nature of the application…
Moderators/admins can block and remove content on the instace(s) they control, but this does not impact the content of any other instance.
Effective censorship of the entire ecosystem would require control of many instances and defederation from those that are not deemed appropriate.
There is not really a way for the operator of one instance to control the moderation decisions of the operator(s) of any other instance.
This one of tbe reasons I created !dullsters@dullsters.net I do not have to worry about one instances modderation policy or splitting of users. Sure I could go crazy one day, but I have a robust ruleset in place that the comminity has followed without issue.
I think the difference here is there is not some weird, ephemeral person deciding. For example, at the bad place, it could have been a shitty admin, a good admin or actually spez deciding the rules for everyone.
Here we have instances that make up their own rules on who to federate with (who you see), and whether or not you’re banned (who sees you). Also, the admins of your instance can redo moderation order anyway they see fit. It really will be an instance controlled vibe.
The real thing to be worried about is that if certain instances get too big. They have the most users and can control who sees what across the fediverse. For example, if a super large instance doesn’t want any posts on any volatile or controversial topic to be seen (immigration, Nazi salutes, transgender, etc.), they could just have it not show up on their instance and the biggest part of the fediverse would never see it and have no way of knowing they didn’t see it.
What federation protects from is the singular owner of the platform sweeping in and setting/enforcing new rules for some or all communities. This could still happen on one instance, but new instances can mitigate the effects. Single communities can still turn bad, but it will be up to the users to decide whether to stick around or move to other communities.
