• Corgana
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    18 days ago

    I think Lemmy should be huge. Think about how many subreddits exist for every niche. It would be great if those places could exist free of corporate influence.

    Federated platforms are significantly more effective than centralized ones at mitigating the influence of bad actors.

    • @Cornelius_Wangenheim
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      619 days ago

      Lemmy’s design is fundamentally unable to deal with bad actors. The only reason it’s tolerable now is that it’s too small to be worth their time. It would completely go to shit if it ever got huge.

      • @[email protected]
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        518 days ago

        Is that the case? Isn’t the federated structure good to leave an instance once it got bad? And bans and stuff exist just like everywhere else

        • Corgana
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          818 days ago

          Lemmy’s design is fundamentally excellent to deal with bad actors, the whole point of ActivityPub/Federation is that moderation is much more effective while also preserving free speech. I’m not sure what that person on about.

        • Blaze (he/him)
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          418 days ago

          It’s good to leave a bad instance. It’s not the best to deal with trolls avoiding ban evasions by creating alt on every instance.

          • Corgana
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            18 days ago

            Eh, if an instance allows trolls, then that instance typically gets defederated from very quickly (at least it does on my instance). The only reason it is an issue now is that two of the big three instances (.world and .ml) have very lax moderation standards. If the lemmy-verse grows to the size of Reddit, then two lax instances won’t be as big of an issue.

              • @[email protected]
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                218 days ago

                Wait, I know 196 moved to .world but reddit is there too now??? This is going too far!

                Jokes aside, I see your point. Guess they have an authentication system or something. Most lemmy instances have a “tell us why you want to join” field and I think some require emails. Sure, this isn’t perfect but it’s not systemically important to prevent evil doers.

        • @Cornelius_Wangenheim
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          018 days ago

          The problem is the federated nature gives a limited view of user behavior to everyone except the home instance, which means identifying spammers, bots and influence ops and effectively banning them is much harder, assuming the mostly volunteer admins even have the time and desire to do so. Federation also introduces the possibility of malicious instance owners.

          • @[email protected]
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            116 days ago

            I’d argue that it actually makes it much easier not harder. If an instance refuses to moderate itself, it gets kicked out of the network.

            • @Cornelius_Wangenheim
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              116 days ago

              The problem is it takes time to identify them and kick them out. At a large scale, there will be a constant churn of poorly managed and malicious instances getting access to the network and then not getting booted until weeks or months later.