Reddit is starting to suck more and more everyday so here I am. A couple of questions -
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I created my account at lemmy.ca, but most people I have seen have lemmy.world accounts. Am I missing out on anything by not having a lemmy.world account?
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Reddit has an offical subreddit for Reddit news. Does Lemmy have any offical communities?
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On Reddit, you can’t post on some subreddits if you do not have enough karma or if your account is not old enough. Are there any rules like that on Lemmy?
Thank you!
No, you’re not missing out on anything. You can have multiple accounts if you wish, you can have one. Short of an instance going down that you have your account on, you can interact with it all.
Official as in a centralized server with all the “main” stuff? No. Each server might have its own News community.
There isn’t yet, but with the way Lemmy mods are going, it won’t be long. Starting to get some whiffs of mods banning people because they’ve voted wrongly on posts. Lemmy is unique in that it lets mods see what you’ve up/down voted.
Use the ability to block entire instances, communities, or users as much as you want here. There’s not some low-number limit like there was on Reddit. You’ll stay much more sane that way. Like if you don’t want your whole front page filled with furry porn daily, blocking lemmynsfw is a good option, without nuking all nsfw content, etc.
Never. I joined lemmy specifically for the furry porn 🥵 jk
Thanks for the help!
It’s important to remember that if the admins of your server defederate (disconnect, not sync) with a given server, you will not have access to that instance’s posts. This is where multiple accounts can come in handy.
In response to your #3 point - this is absolute fucking ridiculous. This type of bullshit will kill Lemmy.
If the philosophy behind the platform proves true, it will just kill those instances.
Votes being public is one of my main turn offs of Lemmy. Anyone can host their own instance that federates with everyone and peek inside the database and see everything you’ve ever up voted or downvoted. I have personally done this just to confirm my suspicions that it is possible. I don’t vote on a lot of things I otherwise would because I don’t want people making assumptions about me. For example, if I see a copy/paste bot spamming a pro trans comment, even though I agree with the message, I might want to downvote because it is a spam bot. But I’m afraid that if someone sees that comment in a list of my downvotes without any context, they will incorrectly think I’m transphobic.
You could also not care what the type of person who would go to THOSE lengths (see: mentally unwell) thinks…
When that type of person controls your access to content, you typically are going to care. The people who see those votes are the ones that control if you get to participate or not.
In a broken shitty community unlikely to contain many people?
Yes.
Hell, one of the lead contributors to Lemmy and an admin of lemmy.ml is like this. If that person sees you say anything negative about China, you instantly get banned.
I think you should pitch in on this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967
I get what you’re saying: assumers (individuals who vomit conclusions based on little to no info) have access to this sort of info as much as decent people do. And if they’re in a position of power, they can ruin your day.
However:
(In this example the right thing to do, if you notice that a post is being potentially downvoted due to transphobia, is to check the voting patterns of the poster. If they’re transphobic they’ll be downvoting any trans-positive post; if they’re just against bots they’ll be downvoting other bot posts regardless of message. Due diligence is not a “nice to have”, it’s obligatory - and, alongside basic reasoning, it’s what tells activists and slacktivists apart.)
Votes being public is news to me. But regardless, how does anyone even do it? The apps and web uis I have seen don’t show that anywhere so do you think people are querying the API directly just for such a weird use case? I don’t find that likely.
You need to be an admin or mod to see the votes. There are discussions to make the votes public for everyone.
Thanks for the clarification
Yes, as the other person said, you need to be an admin or mod. As an admin, you have raw database access. I crafted an SQL query using a couple of joins of I think 3 tables, and I was able to provide a comment or post ID, and it would return a list of people who have upvoted or downvoted it.
The problem is though that anyone can be an admin. You could set up your own instance and do this if you want.
Interesting, I was of the understanding that the individual vote attribution doesn’t leave the community’s home instance and only aggregated counts are federated.
Given an instance spun up for this purpose would very likely not host any communities I’d be interacting with, it wouldn’t get much more information than you can already get through the UI/API
Am I wrong on this?
If I’m understanding what you’re saying then yes, you are wrong about this.
I hosted my own instance and was able to see the usernames of people who voted on communities that were not hosted on my instance. To prove my point, I had posted the list of votes on a comment that was claiming it was impossible to do this.
Well that’s not good news. This feels like a bit of a problem because a lot of people probably wouldn’t vote on stuff they otherwise would, out of fear of attracting the attention of some nutjob with too much time on their hands.
It kinda flies in the face of the “downvote (and maybe report) then move on” attitude that most of us will have taken on from Reddit.
I wonder if the devs have plans to correct this as I don’t see how this won’t limit engagement from good users aware of this and amplify toxic ones (due to people not downvoting out of fear of retaliation).
I think the devs like this design. They are currently contemplating making votes public for everyone. There is a discussion on their GitHub about it. They opened the discussion and asked if the users want to make all votes visible on the UI. If it happens, I will probably stop voting altogether.
Yeah so much for diverse opinions
With #3, someone correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t believe your run-of-the-mill moderator can see upvotes and downvotes. But instance admins can, just by nature of having access to the server data. Federation wouldn’t work if instances couldn’t communicate upvotes and downvotes across the platform to other instances, so short of finding some way to encrypt all the data, it’s an unavoidable consequence of the standard.
Not yet, but it has been implemented in the backend, the front end needs to catch up https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4386
Oh yikes, before I clicked the link I thought you were about to tell me that they were working on user data encryption. Not sure I am keen on enabling even more surveillance to be accessed by who knows who. Will definitely have to start worrying more about which communities I even let on my feed, in case I downvote some bigoted shit from someone’s personal community that shows up in All and they start witch-hunting users who took the bait.
To be fair, if a mod bans me based on my vote, maybe I’m better off their community
It’s not so much the banning I’m worried about as the brigading. If someone develops some mod tool that starts tracking downvotes in your community user by user, they could then essentially assign some sort of social credit score to people and harass them out in the wild.
People can be creeps online, too. I’ve seen more than one situation on Reddit before where people end up getting stalked by other users who harass them anywhere they see them. You say the right thing in front of the wrong person on the wrong day and they can just snap, becoming way too obsessive.
If some troglodyte spams hate speech that ends up in my All feed and I downvote them because that stuff deserves to be buried, I don’t want to have to worry about being potentially stalked and singled out by a weirdo who can connect their downvotes to me because they posted everything in their self-moderated community. Votes suck and internet points are dumb, but the system serves its purpose of providing an anonymous way to direct content and conversations in productive directions. Good stuff is elevated, bad stuff is buried.
Number 3 cough cough lemmy.world cough cough
What do you mean when you say they’re banning people because they’ve “voted wrongly” on posts? What does that entail, just curious?
This is the context I am basing that claim on: https://old.lemmy.world/comment/11766380
Ok so abusing the reporting system totally justifies a ban. But voting I think it’s just that the mod is unhappy about the vote direction; I really meant that I thought you meant there was like some objective reason. It’s just spite. That’s not really a desirable behavior but what can you do. We’re all human.