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.
Ah yes. But people who will harass will be timelocked by a 1-week account creation + account proving period will cut down dramatically on Beehaw’s amount of work.
And I don’t think a hypothetical INAA.net instance that follows the 1-week account creation/proving period would be too much to ask for in the great scheme of the Fediverse.
How is this possibly enforced? IP bans are only marginally effective.
I guess I should clarify that I’m not arguing against anything you’ve said here about the ‘middleman’ server. I’m simply talking about the lack of foresight that I see in the Beehaw admins’ approach to safe space enforcement.
For the 1st week, INAA.net allows users to talk to lemmy.world.
After 1+ week of activity, INAA.net allows users to talk to beehaw.org (and continue talking with lemmy.world).
EDIT: The idea is to make Beehaw’s account-ban of [email protected] have teeth. If it takes a full week for trolls to make a new account at [email protected], then Beehaw’s small admin team can handle that. What they can’t handle is the 100,000+ new users that got dumped here from #RedditBlackout.
So if I read you right… your plan is to centralize the decentralization into one “login server” that other servers trust, and then those servers would shut down new user registrations and only people from the “login server” would be allowed access, and somehow only access certain servers after an arbitrary grace period? Do I have that right?
No?
Why would anybody do this? That’s obviously just stupid.
Alright, then what good will a middleman login server do when people can still just register on Beehaw directly? What prevents a bad actor from creating 50 Beehaw accounts, coming up with slightly different answers to the stupidly-simple “why do you want to join this instance” verification question, waiting a few days for the admins to click ‘approve’ on the application, and then being able to hop from account to account to be an asshole to everyone?
Because inevitably, a right-wing conservative instance is going to pop up and Beehaw will ban those guys and vice versa.
My instance will play nice with both, so my users are going to get access to both groups and bypass those bans by just being nice people welcoming to everybody.
…I’m beginning to think you don’t understand anything about the situation, or what Beehaw is trying to achieve. They don’t want to “play nice” with assholes, or with any instance who plays nice with them. If they understood what you were trying to achieve with this, under their current plan of action they would also immediately defederate with your instance.
However, the fact that you’re proposing this shows just how futile their efforts are. You are demonstrating a perfect example of how the Fediverse will circumvent their intentions whether they like it or not - unless they choose to not federate with any other Lemmy server and spend 100% of their time banning accounts.
In your scenario you just think that the admin(s) of INAA.net will be “the good cop” and that Beehaw will trust that you possibly could and would somehow filter out the “good” users from the bad.
But I can imagine a situation, based on my experience, where I’d do what Beehaw.org has done. Online trolls, especially porn-spam, can truly wreck havoc upon workplace office users who are behind porn filters. Its an exceptionally effective technique to harass a community and cause them to be unusable.
Solving this problem is doable, assuming that Beehaw.org is reasonable. Maybe they’re not reasonable, but eventually we’ll have reasonable servers that get porn-spammed / trolled. What then? Might as well start solving the issue today (because it puts us on a path to allow a reunification of Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org, albeit through a 3rd server rather than directly).