A lot of us are in tech and we come across these problems and just troubleshoot our way around them and don’t really think about them, so I figured a “case study” might be helpful. Image unrelated.
Anyway, yesterday I tried making an alt account on lemmy.world. When last we left the situation, I had been notified that my registration application had been denied, but I’d been asked to confirm my email and https://lemmy.world/u/sergio had been created. A couple helpful commenters suggested my account might still be under review.
- Today I tried logging in again. But when I entered my username and password, I got a popup that said “incorrect login credentials”. Maybe I needed to verify my email again? I went to my email, clicked the “verify your email” link, and just got a page with text that said “verify email” and nothing else. Maybe it didn’t like me using my username to log in? So I tried logging in with my EMAIL and my password, and still got that “incorrect login credentials”.
- Maybe something’s wrong with my password? I’m using a password manager but OK, let’s just try changing my password. I clicked on the “forgot email” link on the login page. I entered my email address and clicked “reset password”… and nothing happens. No feedback, and I don’t get an email. (10 minutes so far).
- maybe I should check https://lemmy.world/u/sergio ? Hey, that’s no longer there, I just get an error! I check the user page of another lemmy.world user and it works, so it’s not a server problem. Maybe my application really was denied? Was it really reviewed? What do I do now?
(my intuition is to try again with a different username, email address, computer, and browser from a different location at a different time of day…)
iirc there were talks at some point about limiting federation with new instances due to larger scale abuse and troll accounts, but that was mostly just general discussion, primarily with other instance admins. not something that we ever implemented.
I’m personally against a whitelist approach, such as requiring vouching by another instance, on lemmy.world. some other instances may want to follow an approach like that, but that is mostly something for instances that have a lot stricter moderation in place to e.g. provide a safe® space to their community. especially considering that we host many large communities, switching to a whitelist approach would significantly disrupt new instances from establishing themselves.
one of the topics that were mentioned in that context was some kind of “application” system for federation, where instances would have to e.g. provide some contact details that could be used to report abuse, as there is currently no standard for that. we generally try to avoid defederation whenever possible, unless instances are e.g. completely unmoderated, such as recently the case with feddit.rocks. we usually try to address issues in a more targeted fashion, such as targeting new users on certain instances when they get abused by trolls or just finding methods to target specific posting/commenting patterns.
Ah that could have been it lol
Have you guys ever considered a voting based approach for users to deal with major issues/decisions? DB0, IMO, has a fantastic voting system where donating users carry a full vote, local but non-donating users had something like 2/3rds or a half vote and everyone else was just for “vibes check”
I think with a voting based approach there would be greater participation for the .world user base which in turn would lead to less… antipathy I think for decisions like defederation or federation of individual instances.
we thought about this before, but we only rarely have decisions where a community vote would be relevant. in most cases involving defederation, when we are already at that point, it’s some kind of moderation issue, which wouldn’t be solved by a community vote.
with the example of feddit.rocks, there were several spam accounts created that mass spammed nsfw content in random sfw communities with zero response from the admin, it even stayed up for more than a month there. leaving such cases to community decisions would significantly increase the amount of time we have to spend on moderation.
for cases where it would be relevant, we’re yet to find a good solution for that that isn’t easily gamed by creating a bunch of alt accounts.