FYI: Reddit trademarked some community names (Digg link)
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in the flotilla...
Is this a snowcrash reference?
Lol, nah. It's our confederation of anarchist instances
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Yours, solarpunk and maybe Blahaj? Sorry to hit you with an impromptu game of 40 questions
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Yours, solarpunk and maybe Blahaj? Sorry to hit you with an impromptu game of 40 questions
Haha no, it's ours and anarchist.nexus, but we may add more soon
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I agree with your overall opinion, but I just don't agree with how the problem was presented. Your statement, with more of the surrounding context:
... lemmy.ml, works more like that than you realize. e.g. a change is soon going to give lemmy.ml veto power in what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances ...
The key words here are "allowed to be acknowledged as existing". Not acknowledging a community's existence means not federating it. .world does that with db0's piracy community because of EU laws, and it's basically an instance-imposed community ban. Pyfed has/had a hard-coded denylist of community names in the source code that stopped them from being federated, and the result was none of the instances running unmodified Piefed were able to access them.
I wouldn't have an issue with if you said a change in Lemmy "gives lemmy.ml exclusive control over promoting what communities show up as popular in other instances". They don't have the ability to censor the existence of communities that go against their views just the ability to censor their promotion. That's a big problem, but it's not as catastrophically bad as them having the power to censor the actual content on other instances.
The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”
Begging your pardon, but that is not what I said. You included my actual phrase in your quote even:
allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances
(emphasis now added) I am not sure why you think we are disagreeing here, when it seems we are in perfect accord. e.g. in your words, it:
is a problem—but it only affects discoverability when browsing for popular communities, and instance admins can (and should) turn that off.
Yes, that, exactly. It only affects new instances, not existing ones, it is only discoverability, not acting as a blocker to actually bring in those communities, and yet it is something that admins need to be aware of now and turn off. Almost like the instance admins cannot trust that the code will run according to their principles, without some modifications.
I concede that my phrasing sounds entirely different when you leave out the "to new instances"... but that is precisely why I put that wording in there?
Anyway, getting back to the - ahem - central point (pun intended), the aspect under discussion here is that centralization gives admins & mods too much power, whereas defederation places that power into the hands of the people.
I’ve seen this in the mod logs where someone has a relatively innocuous comment removed just because the mod disagrees with them, then they are suddenly banned from both that community and 10 or 12 other communities. All run by the same moderator.
Lemmy.ml is extremely famous on the Threadiverse - dare I say, infamous? - for doing precisely this. And now those same developers are increasing the trend towards centralization by baking right into the code something that will increase the trend towards centralization even further. Not by an enormous leap of course, but step by little step is precisely how such things have always gone? I never said the word "catastrophically", just that it was a step that I felt like was in the wrong direction.
i.e. "The Fediverse doesn’t work like that" is a statement that encourages complacency, as if it never happens here. It does, albeit to a MUCH smaller degree than on Reddit or Digg. If the statement had said "The Fediverse does not do that to nearly the same degree", then I would agreed, but I took issue with the binary logic of exclusively only yes vs. no, and pointed to where the answer is not quite "entirely no / never" here on the Fediverse too. "we all can easily fall prey to authoritarianism, unless we fight against it."
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I agree with your overall opinion, but I just don't agree with how the problem was presented. Your statement, with more of the surrounding context:
... lemmy.ml, works more like that than you realize. e.g. a change is soon going to give lemmy.ml veto power in what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances ...
The key words here are "allowed to be acknowledged as existing". Not acknowledging a community's existence means not federating it. .world does that with db0's piracy community because of EU laws, and it's basically an instance-imposed community ban. Pyfed has/had a hard-coded denylist of community names in the source code that stopped them from being federated, and the result was none of the instances running unmodified Piefed were able to access them.
I wouldn't have an issue with if you said a change in Lemmy "gives lemmy.ml exclusive control over promoting what communities show up as popular in other instances". They don't have the ability to censor the existence of communities that go against their views just the ability to censor their promotion. That's a big problem, but it's not as catastrophically bad as them having the power to censor the actual content on other instances.
The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”. Not acknowledging a community’s existence means not federating it. .world does that with db0’s piracy community because of EU laws, and it’s basically an instance-imposed community ban. Pyfed has/had a hard-coded denylist of community names in the source code that stopped them from being federated, and the result was none of the instances running unmodified Piefed were able to access them.
No, that's just relevant to the mass community lookup tool. Piracy communities can still be federated individually on the Piefedverse (so to speak), and I believe that Rimu has removed that term from that.
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The development code was hardcoded to lemmy.ml for a while, but I already changed this and made it configurable.
That's good news, thank you for this.
They seem to have blocked Nutomic, so won't see this.
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Realistically, won’t matter for us for a few reasons:
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We’re small. As much as I like this place and want to see it succeed, we have a fraction of the MAUs that they do.
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Given the federated nature, it’s pretty much impossible to police. It’s the same as with the age verification checks for social media and porn, you really can’t do much because you could be federated to another instance that passes it along, or is outside of the jurisdiction
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They could go after one instance, but there’s no way they could go after thousands of instances, each which could create the same community name.
So legally could they try to do something? Yes. Realistically no as the size is too small and burden too high.
They only have to make an example of a few to discourage the rest.
The only real safety is with the instances hosted and run in locations difficult for American companies to pursue legal action
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The goalposts didn't shift, you started talking to a different person.
This person says that this issue is small, the impact of exploiting this system would be minor (if it ever happened), and the hypothetical attack on this subsystem is also demonstrably not occurring.
Therefore, treating this issue as if it were some sort of red-line issue or, really, even worth discussing outside of the context of the project itself (where changes can actually be implemented) is misrepresenting reality.
As to your direct point, it wasn't my point but I do agree with it so I'm happy to directly address your argument.
The quote you seem to take issue with was :
Wait, Digg gave the community to a Reddit moderator so Reddit could control the communities with the same name on both platforms? That’s wild.
That’s also how the corporate side of Reddit works. Someone will register a subreddit, and then a bunch of related ones, so anybody who tries to use any of them has to follow the same set of rules — and if you piss off the wrong person in one, they can ban you from all of them. They can also use their “first” or “official” or even “user count” status to bully smaller subs into redirecting to them. Effectively centralising information.
The Fediverse doesn’t work like that.
Or, more plainly:
The Fediverse doesn't allow a single user to scoop up all of the similarly named/themed communities and use that power to dominate those topics of conversation.
Your reply:
Maybe Mastodon does not, but Lemmy, in particular lemmy.ml, works more like that than you realize. e.g. a change is soon going to give lemmy.ml veto power in what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances, which is baked right into the code and there is no way to change it. A third-party listing could have been used instead but… no, this is rather much more on-brand for the Lemmy developers to have chosen.
Your reply references code affecting the Lemmy server instance, that runs once on server instantiation, which uses lemmy.ml as the source to populate the list of communities that users of the new instance will see when they click the 'Communities' link at the top. This is true.
Your inference that lemmy.ml has the ability to veto what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances is a bit of hyperbole. Lemmy.ml is the source of the initial list, true.
But new instances acknowledge communities existing regardless of those community's status with lemmy.ml. The moment that a single user reads a single comment in a community that isn't on the initially seeded list, then it appears in the new instance's community list regardless of the status of that community on lemmy.ml.
If we were a security researcher and were analyzing the scope of this problem we would consider that
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This only affects new instances, so the vast population of Lemmy as it stands now, is not affected by this code at all. Only a hypothetical future population.
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The list on lemmy.ml is not treated as authoritative. Outside of the initial values, lemmy.ml is not checked for any other functions related to adding or displaying communities
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Any attempts by lemmy.ml to game this system are both not happening and also easily detectable as the list is public and can be compared to other instances.
So, this veto power isn't being used. If lemmy.ml were attempting to leverage this power, it would be detectable. In the worst case, if were actively being exploited then it would affect very few people(none of the current Lemmy community), and the people that it did affect are impacted only until a user reads a comment or post from a 'vetoed' community.
Also, this is an open source project so saying things like:
and there is no way to change it.
Simply make no sense at all.
You can change it. Any admin who thinks it may be a problem can change it. I linked to the exact section of code where you can just change the URL and compile the .rs file again to use a different instance.
You could change it so that the URL is read from the options file that the administrator sets prior to launching the instance. You could also submit that as a PR so that future administrators could just apply your patch (independent of it being accepted by Lemmy) because that's how open source development works. That's what the quote that you provided means:
If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it
- Nutomic
It sounds dismissive, because it is. This isn't a product, you're not a consumer. You're going to people who donate their time and telling them to do work in a way that you want it done. They may agree, and you may be able to make good arguments to convince them but if they don't, then brigading social media or spamming their issue tracker with requests isn't going to get it done.
If you don't like it fork it and fix it. It is a fundamental concept in open source software that you can always fix problems that you see and other people can use your fixes regardless of what the project thinks. If you think the project is going in the wrong direction then you are perfectly within your rights to take a copy of the code and develop it in your own way and if you can find other people who believe like you do then they can use your changes as they see fit.
But going online and misrepresenting the risk of some code update that you disagree with by exaggerating the scope of the problem isn't how you get anything done except creating needless drama.
The original point here was that:
The Fediverse doesn’t work like that.
The sentence prior to that was:
Effectively centralising information.
And I pointed to an area in the (planned future release of the) sourcecode that did in fact centralize information. You even agreed:
Lemmy.ml is the source of the initial list, true.
I never said that this is the death knell or whatever of the entire project, just that it is a step towards, rather than away from, centralization. Which again, you agreed on.
And imho it is not a good step, i.e. the direction that it is aiming towards is not a good goal to have for the Fediverse. Feel free to prove us all wrong by fixing the code and then getting the devs to agree to use your fix rather than continue to use lemmy.ml as the singular source aka central authority. They might agree actually, though it still did not make the step that I am talking about now a "good" one. Any step towards centralization is a bad one imho, especially when that centralization is put right into the sourcecode (as opposed to e.g. an external, 3rd-party website run by people who could be trusted to be more unbiased, and by unbiased I mean that lemmy.ml is VERY biased towards certain viewpoints, so NOT that, or another alternative could be to gather community listings from all federated instances and then combine them together, rather than have one "master" list to rule them all).
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https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/48662871
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/43560521
TL;DR: The dbzer0 community decided to start banning people for downvoting AI generated posts. They said they'd only ban people who come to a community and do mass downvotes, but Ace T'Ken downvoted four AI posts that showed up in the feed across a period of ten months, and was still banned from several communities by a prominent dbzer0 mod. There was also a side plot involving some person or group of people impersonating every major actor involved in the drama, which is why so many comments in the thread are removed.
There were several other drama threads related to the voting bans:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/50067209
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46410988
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/49344640
I remember a few more discussions from back when all this was new, but didn't have as easy a time finding them.
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.ml mods are exactly the type to ban people from every community because they don’t share the exact same viewpoints as the mod in question.
dbzer0 is getting almost as bad with certain admin and certain topics now too.
Db0 is going further right everyday ever since certain comms thought he was too lefty
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Db0 is going further right everyday ever since certain comms thought he was too lefty
dB0 is cool flatworm is going full authoritarian at times
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dB0 is cool flatworm is going full authoritarian at times
Db0 been more the one to do it but
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Db0 been more the one to do it but
They are the sane one.
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They are the sane one.
They see the way their users lean and say nope, not on my watch we must stay right of those positions
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Db0 is going further right everyday ever since certain comms thought he was too lefty
What's right wing about db0?
Edit: right wing now means "not willing to put up with bad faith and ableism from so-called leftists"
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Yours, solarpunk and maybe Blahaj? Sorry to hit you with an impromptu game of 40 questions
i can't help but be pleased that you associate 3 of my favorite instances with eachother! it makes me feel like i'm acting in a group who's putting good things into the world
in addition to those, and anarchist.nexus (which @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com mentioned), i think quokk.au also belongs (i think they even had a vote to join the flotilla db0 was mentioning, but that they voted no). while these instances are not formally allied via the governance pact of said flotilla, i do find them, and the users on them, to generally have complementary views and stances on the world, how it works, and how it should work.
it's less like a flotilla and more like ships at sea who all hate the royal french armada together. we party at the same ports together, but we're all on different adventures
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Predictions
Showerthoughts
I had no idea Reddit invented having deep thoughts in the shower, or making predictions
Am I the Asshole?
Yea they can keep that one
Reddit didn't invent deep thoughts, but that's not how trademarks work.
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On Digg there's some drama because someone registered the community “/wallstreetbets,” and the admins took it from him and gave it to one mod of the subreddit “r/wallstreetbets.”
One day later I see this discussion about how Reddit registered trademarks for some high-profile subreddits.
This could be relevant for the Threadiverse.
This is why we federate. Is your community name taken by people you don't like or agree with ? Just make your own on another server !
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What's right wing about db0?
Edit: right wing now means "not willing to put up with bad faith and ableism from so-called leftists"
he's been on the warpath against anyone to the left of shit just works
