As this #RedditBlackout accelerates the Fediverse experiment, I feel the urge… the need… to chime in with my 2-cents.
My summary of the current lay of the land: Beehaw saw a wave of pornography spam and decided to shut Lemmy.world off and Defederate from this server. I’m too new to this community to fully understand the wants/needs of each individual server, but I’ve been around the internet long enough to recognize that porn-spam is an age-old trolling technique and will occur again in the future. Especially as small, boutique, hobbyist servers pop up and online drama/rivalries increase, online harassment campaigns (like coordinated porn spam attacks) are simply an inevitability.
Lemmy.world wants open registrations. Beehaw does not: Beehaw wants users to be verified before posting. This is normal: many old /r/subreddits would simply shadowban all 1-year old accounts and earlier… giving the illusion that everything is well for 5+ or 10+ year old accounts, but cut out on the vast majority of spam accounts with short lives. This works for Reddit where you have a huge number of long-lived accounts, but its still not a perfect technique: you can pay poor people in 3rd world countries to create accounts, post on them for a year, and the these now verified accounts can be paid for by spammers to invade various subreddits.
I digress. My main point is that many subreddits, and now Lemmy-instances/communities, want a “trusted user”. Akin to the 1±year-old account on Reddit. Its not a perfect solution by any means, but accounts that have some “weight” to them, that have passed even a crude time-based selection process, are far easier to manage for small moderation teams.
We don’t have the benefit of time however, so how do we quickly build trust on the Fediverse? It seems impossible to solve this problem on lemmy.world and Beehaw.org alone. At least, not with our current toolset.
A 3rd Server appears: ImNotAnAsshole.net
But lets add the 3rd server, which I’ll hypothetically name “ImNotAnAsshole.net”, or INAA.net for short.
INAA.net would be an instance that focuses on building a userbase that follows a large set of different instances recruiting needs. This has the following benefits.
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Decentralization – Beehaw.org is famously only run by 4 administrators on their spare time. They cannot verify hundreds of thousands of new users who appear due to #RedditBlackout. INAA.net would allow another team to focus on the verification problem.
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Access to both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login – As long as INAA.net remains in the good graces of other servers (aka: assuming their user filtering model works), any user who registers on INAA.net will be able to access both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login.
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Custom Moderation tools – INAA.net could add additional features independently of the core github.com/LemmyNet programming team and experiment. It is their own instance afterall.
Because of #2, users would be encouraged to join INAA.net, especially if they want access to Beehaw.org. Lemmy.world can remain how it is, low-moderation / less curated users and communities (which is a more appropriate staging grounds for #RedditBlackout refugees). Beehaw.org works with the INAA.net team on the proper rules for INAA.net to federate with Beehaw.org and everyone’s happy.
Or is it? I am new to the Fediverse and have missed out on Mastodon.social drama. Hopefully older members of this community can chime in with where my logic has gone awry.
I think you’re confused.
Lets say Beehaw.org goes fully extreme and goes whitelist federation only with a small, select group of servers. I don’t know if they’re on the path to this, but this is probably the most extreme stance they could take on this subject.
IAAA.net and NRIATAA.net spin up, but fail to connect to Beehaw.org due to them being whitelist only.
I put in some effort to build INAA.net. I make it user-centric, no communities, purely just an instance for people to join / get moderated and interact with other Lemmys. Once I feel like my community is confidently a “nice group of people”, I send an email over to the Beehaw.org team and ask for a Federation between us. And lets say I keep my userbase strict (but not as strict as Beehaw.org), so that no spammers, porn-invasions, etc. etc. originate from my group of users.
Beehaw.org lets me in. But IAAA.net and NRIATAA.net also let me in, because they don’t care about these issues.
That solves the problem entirely. IAAA.net cannot access [email protected], none of those groups. IAAA.net can’t access [email protected], because INAA.net doesn’t contain any communities at all, its just a collection of users who have made a promise not to be assholes on the Fediverse.
Everyone’s happy with this arrangement, as far as I can tell. There’s no reason for Beehaw.org to ban INAA.net.
And then Beehaw kicks you out, because your server can have people of the sort that interact on IAAA.net and who have those same interactions on Beehaw. Your plan ultimately relies on you believing that the Beehaw admins will trust your ability and judgement to weed out the good users from the bad, over themselves. It doesn’t really matter how many more reiterations of it you want to say, that’s the bottom line.
Drawn out to its conclusion, their plan of defederating instances with assholes on them simply is not sustainable. And based on their own language about it in their recent post I think they know that’s the case but it’s all they can think of for now. You’re just adding layers of complexity on to what is, for now, an unsolvable problem.
“Interact” isn’t the problem. Its the problem of porn-spamming the safe-for-work communities that is the problem.
IAAA.net will organize porn-spamming of undefended instances. Indeed, these groups exist in the real world and I’ve participated in such toxic behavior before. I know they will exist.
But guess what? 4chan and 8chan and all of them? They want users, and reasonable people to talk with too. Plenty of “normies” log into 4chan and aren’t harassed or put off by the culture. IAAA.net (assuming a 4chan like environment, or even 8chan like doxxer group) will accept groups like INAA.net onto their server.
Beehaw bans sites like IAAA.net. That’s also true. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll ban INAA.net.
Why not? I think there’s a set of people out there who just want to log into a server, recognize that they’re trusted around the internet, and are willing to not be an asshole who posts porn-spam onto safe-for-work communities.
Even on 4chan, if you just ask people to not post porn on the SFW sections, people largely follow the request. A couple of assholes who need to be IP-banned break the rules, but by and large, rules are followed if you just ask nicely. That’s my experience. The internet is full of assholes, but those same assholes can be very nice people sometimes in different contexts.
Alright well I’ve said everything that I feel needed to be said, you haven’t refuted any of it but just keep asserting the same things that I have pointed out as flawed arguments. So, have a good one.
I’ve got ideas of who asshole sites are (4chan, stormfront, etc. etc.) and nice sites, and tightly curated sites (lobste.rs), etc. etc. I’ve been on the internet from Usenet says and have personally engaged in ancient moderated vs unmoderated flamewars.
I have experience on knowing how people act on the internet. I’m very confident in my assessment. That your viewpoint disagrees is intriguing to me, but ultimately, I have to stick with my decades of observations on human behavior.