I'm not asking this to bait you. It's not a trick question. I genuinely want to know.

Biden himself has stated multiple times that he wants to "reach across the aisle" (his exact words) and work with Republicans. You know, the same Republicans that are banning abortion and LGBTQ+ people? The same Republican party that has literal white supremacists in its political ranks? I earnestly want to know why you still back a party that openly wants to work with fascists.

The only answer I've ever seen liberals give is that the Republicans are worse... and they are, yeah, but if your choices are pure evil, and the guy who works with pure evil, doesn't that suggest that both of them should be opposed? And as we've seen, a democratic government won't fight to protect marginalized groups from the bigoted laws the Republicans are passing, so even voting for them to protect those groups from fascism just isn't working.

And what do you make of Biden telling his wealthy donors that "nothing will fundamentally change." and Biden boasting about the economy while rent skyrockets people live out of their cars and struggle to feed themselves? How can you call yourself a leftist or a even progressive if you stand by that?

Again, I'm not saying these things to be abrasive, I genuinely want an honest answer.

To any kbin.social users who aren't a quivering, cowardly , come and have a good faith debate about politics. Is there even a single one among you that has the heart of a poster?

If none of you reply, I'll be forced to conclude that you're too scared to set foot on our turf and want to stay in your pathetic echo chamber rather than engage in manly combat in the marketplace of ideas.

Based on monthly users, Hexbear should be 7th, but we're listed as 9th.

https://the-federation.info/platform/73

Also, there's no users graph on Hexbear's the-federation.info page, either.

https://the-federation.info/node/details/55154

Lemmy experienced a CSAM attack this week, with some significant ramifications for the entire network. It started early in the week, where new accounts created on lemmy.world posted Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) on multiple communities. This prompted the lemmy.world admins on Monday to set the registration to application only, with no more open signup on the server. The next day the CSAM attack continued, this time from accounts made on other servers that posted to communities on lemmy.world. As a response the lemmy.world admins closed the lemmyshitpost community, as that seemed to be the main focus of the attack.

This problem with CSAM on Lemmy differs from the problem that Mastodon has with CSAM, as reported on earlier this summer. When the Stanford Internet Observatory report found CSAM on Mastodon, it often existed below the surface, with the vast majority of users never encountering the material. The attack on Lemmy seems to have been executed with the purpose of getting people to see the material, as quite some people reported seeing the material.

One of the major impacts of this attack relates to technical design choices that Lemmy has made. Images that are posted on server A get send over and stored on server B, when someone on server B follows a community on server A. Images that are posted on lemmy.world, the biggest Lemmy server, exists in the databases of most other Lemmy servers as well. This means that due to the attack on lemmy.world, many Lemmy admins do now have images of CSAM in their database. With it comes liability for the admins, as well as reporting requirements. IFTAS has a good overview of the resources for admins to navigate these requirements.

Other aspects of Lemmy have confounded the issue of third party servers unwittingly hosting CSAM. It is currently not possible to federate with other Lemmy servers, and receive the text of a post, without also receiving and hosting the images of a post. Mastodon for example does allow servers to reject images while not rejecting text. Selective deletion of images in the database on Lemmy is also hard to do, and as a result, servers decided to delete all federated images in their database.

One of the ways admins deal with this new threat is with a new AI scanning tool called Lemmy Safety, created by the admin of the dbzer0 lemmy server. It scans all images in the Lemmy database for potential CSAM, and automatically deletes the images, and can also be used to scan newly incoming images. While this can help in the short term with making sure there is no CSAM material, it might interfere with legal obligations that administrators have. In various jurisdictions, administrators are required to report to the relevant authorities when they become aware of CSAM. Again, this collection of resources by IFTAS is a good start with helpful information.

It is clear that this is a complicated problem for volunteer admins to deal with. Multiple administrators concluded that the risks and complications of continuing to host Lemmy servers is not worth it. Other servers, such as lemm.ee have made extensive plans on how to deal with the situation, such as disabling image uploads, and applying a custom patch to prevent images from other servers to be saved on their server. They also float the idea of an invite-based registration system.

On the Matrix chat channels for Lemmy admins, tension is rising, and people are frustrated with the lack of acknowledgement and communications from the developers @dessalines and @nutomic. The developers have not communicated anything about this on either their Matrix chat channels or on their Lemmy. On their GitHub, the dbzer0 admin proposed to expand his automated CSAM scanning to allow for saving and review potential hits, instead of outright deletion. Developer @dessalines stated that this “is not something we have time for rn.” For servers that are operated under US law however, administrators are mandated to save CSAM they encounter, report it to the authorities, make it not visible for users, and restrict access to the saved material as best as possible. The outright rejection by the main developer to build tools that can admins satisfy these legal requirements does not help the confidence of admins who are worried about their responsibilities.

Meanwhile, new reports are starting to pop up of a new type of CSAM attack. Posts that are titled ‘Tiktok Cringe’, and first show a few seconds of a random tiktok video, and then switch to CSAM material. This makes it really easy for moderators to miss the content, unless they watch the entire video. At this point, it is unclear if this was an isolated incident, or part of a bigger attack. How this situation will develop in the near future is out in the open, but I’m sure we’ll come back to it soon.

Social network Minds has been working on implementing ActivityPub, and are now mostly connected to the fediverse. Minds, which launched in 2015, has a strong focus on free speech and cryptocurrency. As such, multiple outlets report the far-right nature of its user base. Minds reported that they joined the fediverse in a not particularly clear post. So far it seems like posts made on Minds are visible on Mastodon, but comments made by Mastodon users on a post made by Minds, are not visible on the Minds’ platform itself. The culture and ethics of Minds seems to differ significantly from that of most fediverse servers, and if Minds becomes more prominently visible within the fediverse, this will likely lead to friction and conversations around defederation. On the other hand, it does give another indication that ActivityPub is becoming the standard protocol for other social networks to implement.

A contributor to the Tusky project (an open source Android client for Mastodon) leaves the project, and writes a blog post alleging financial mismanagement. The other contributors write an extensive explanation of the situation, denying the allegations. While the situation itself is not particularly impactful for the fediverse, it is a good illustration of how difficult the organisational aspect of collectively building software on the fediverse is.

cross-posted from: https://lemmyloves.art/post/49728

I posted a bit ago on a different account, and yeah here we are. I actually set it up!

Federation Policy

There are some instances that have been initially defederated from, most of which are just are either toxic or host illegal content across the fediverse. Defederation will only be reserved for spaces that present consistent moderation problems, host illegal content, or are hate filled. Whenever a defederation is considered a post will be made to discuss and gather community input.

Instance Management

So, same deal as over on literature.cafe. If this instance ever needs to go down, I will give at least a 30 day warning prior and make a good faith attempt to keep the instance online as well as be transparent as to why a shutdown is being considered. A financial statement will be posted monthly. This instance will likely cost more than literature.cafe long term, so if you are planning on joining and are able to donate it is greatly appreciated. I also take daily secure backups.

I am attempting to find at least one extra admin for the instance as well, but I at least plan on having a backup "break the glass" admin account like I do have on literature.cafe

Community Creation

Community creation is currently disabled and is only for admins. This may be reconsidered in the future, but if you want a new community to be made please go to !requests@lemmyloves.art and request there. For those on other instances who want to view a current list of communities go to !411@lemmyloves.art

Right now due email functionality on the instance is busted due to the host blocking the ports temporarily until the first invoice is generated for the instance. So, remember your password if you sign up for the time being or just ask to have your password reset if you forget it.

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2178314

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/3715524

The beta for groups will release later this week, which won't be federated initially. Federation will be added afterwards.

Looks like it will have some interesting features like videos, polls, and events, as well as moderator tools like limiting what a user can do.

Some links:

https://mastodon.social/@dansup/110931821965407984

https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/110931868347117511

https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/110931984467276917

https://mastodon.social/@pixelfed/110932004988109773

Credit to https://literature.cafe/u/Janvier

Absolutely do NOT federate with Hexbear, but for reasons that have little to do with Hexbear’s politics.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the Threadiverse (Lemmy + Kbin centered Fediverse), and I’ve come up with some observations that are true in August 2023 I think every new Lemmy instance should consider. I’ve split it into five parts to avoid Lemmy’s 10k character post limit.

1/5 – The Threadiverse is shrinking

There was a huge boom in Lemmy activity during the Reddit mod protest, but Lemmy and Kbin are not as mature as Reddit was when Digg dramatically enshittified. There wasn’t enough organic growth to capture the rain squall, and now the flood of users is flowing back to the ocean. It’s visible in the active user data, as well the pages of undermoderated single poster communities littering the wider Threadiverse where the last activity is two months old. New Lemmy instances continue to appear, but the total number of active users available for them to share continues to steadily decline. There’s a couple of obvious culprits for this:

Lemmy instances frequently become unavailable for unscheduled maintenance, due to operator inexperience and the rough edges of the software
Third party apps are still in beta stages or unreleased, and the interface leaves a lot to be desired, leaving many disappointed with the user experience.
Moderation tools are still in their infancy. Poorly moderated communities and inactive mods create the potential for very toxic experiences.

This does not mean the Threadiverse is failing; Reddit will continue to decline in quality, and if Threadiverse software and community continues to improve, we will reach an inflection point. Another major Spez event after that milestone will kill Reddit like Reddit killed Digg. To reach this goal, each new instance needs to bring something more to the table than extra space for fewer people to spread out in.

2/5 – Hexbear is a successful Lemmy instance

I support your account of Hexbear’s predecessor. I don’t share your background and naturally had a different experience. I think its useful to explain the history here for the benefit of other readers to better understand Hexbear’s current contrarian character, even if it is filtered through my limited experience.

Hexbear has its origins in the subreddit ChapoTrapHouse (CTH), a community that began its existence when Reddit was an open platform for fascist propaganda. Several subreddits were dedicated to mocking black people, spreading jewish conspiracies, bullying fat people, othering queer people, and sexually harassing women. My interaction with CTH was limited as a Redditor, but their participation as an antifascist group who were fighting back against those trends was a welcome presence. When the mainstream media started making a story about the racism, homophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, and the bad press threatened advertising revenue, Reddit banned the most overtly embarrasing subreddits. In an act of ‘enlightened’ centrism, Reddit banned CTH along with them. Perhaps Reddit blamed them for drawing the press’ attention, perhaps they didn’t want to be accused of being left-wing by going after fascists exclusively. But in any case, CTH needed a new address. That’s how Hexbear became one of the earliest Lemmy instances.

With several years to grow from a Reddit refuge to a full-blown social platform Hexbear has found its audience. They have site-wide movie nights where films are free-streamed and co-watched in chat. They’ve developed an internal stalinist-emoji based language (incidentally famous for causing problems because federated sites display the images at full resolution.) They have very active moderation, responding swiftly to non-party users stepping out of line with permabans. Dying communities like !anarchism are kept on life support with activity like mods creating regular general megathreads there where the community topic is irrelevant. If you’re transgender or non-binary and are looking to connect with others over North Korea apologia, there’s not a better place on the web to be.

While Hexbear is more eager to federate with others than others are with Hexbear, its size and activity proves an often overlooked point: Hexbear has become extremely successful Lemmy instance in spite of (or perhaps due to) having extremely limited federation.

3/5 – Moderation, not Federation, is the Threadiverse’s killer feature

Lemmy is not Reddit, and calling Lemmy a Federated or Open-Source version of its inspiration is doing it a disservice. Since Lemmy instances are not venture capital funded, continual growth is not the criteria for success. On Reddit, people who read, post, comment, and vote are the product, advertisers are the customers, and investors set the policy. Return on investment trumps all other concerns, and Reddit must continue to grow to be successful. Lemmy allows for a much more diverse set of definitions of success.

So the 0th step in becoming a successful Lemmy instance is deciding what that success looks like. That’s obviously up to the admin(s), but it can’t be achieved without skilled and dedicated moderators. Moderators do obvious tasks like remove spam and ban hate-speech, but they also encourage community activities, model conflict resolution, and produce content. A healthy community is a well-kept garden, and a successful Lemmy instance must include a collection of healthy communities. Moderators are the gardeners that help a community grow.

Moderation is a difficult and emotionally taxing job. I’ve alluded earlier that Reddit made an unforced error, degrading the moderator experience by killing 3rd party apps, and that Lemmy is missing those same essential tools due to its current stage of development. But Lemmy has an advantage over Reddit in there are plenty of instances where admins will listen to and respect their moderators. Lemmy’s codebase and 3rd party software is improving, and while Reddit may be able to improve their internal moderator support mechanisms, moderators will never be more than exploited rubes for them.

Since moderation is so difficult to do well, and is so essential to the Threadiverse project, the effect on moderators should be the primary concern in making any decision that changes the policy, culture, or performance of a Lemmy instance.

thanks to nutomic for the follow-thru on this

more info on my previous post (see UPDATE in body):

https://hexbear.net/post/363393

if you have reason to believe there are still alts that are not banned, please contact nutomic via DM with info

The system ultimately worked!

Welcome! It’s been a somewhat slower news week, over on the microblogging side of the fediverse, but that makes it up for a busy week of community drama on the threadiverse. Being a young platform that has recently had a massive inflow of new people means figuring out as a group of communities on how to interact together. Lemmy is now seeing this process play out, with multiple ongoing conversations and issues around defederation. Let’s dive right in!

Defederation drama on Lemmy

Over the last few weeks, multiple Lemmy servers have either defederated from each other, or held discussions about defederation. These decisions and conversations have been for quite different reasons, but there is some underlying common threads in the conversations around it. Decisions by individual servers to defederate is usually something I prefer not to report on, but in this case its worth noting the community’s response to it.

A quick rundown of the different events: A Lemmy server decided to defederate from Lemmynsfw.com, a Lemmy server that is dedicated to porn. The NSFW community made a thread (here, but might be down) to complain about the defederation decision. Lemmy’s largest server, Lemmy.world has defederated from a large server that is dedicated to piracy, citing regulatory reasons. The decision was originally published in their discord, leading to pushback from their own community over both the decision itself as well as their communication methods. Finally, multiple servers have held open discussions about whether to defederate from Hexbear, with the end result that Hexbear in turn decided to defederate from one the involved servers. Hexbear is an active Lemmy server that has existed for multiple years seperated from the rest of the fediverse, and only in the last few weeks have turned on federation. The community is strong leftist, and formed after the ChapTrapHouse community got banned from Reddit.

What stands out in these separate events is the wider community involvements and opinion regarding the defederation decisions. On the microblogging side of the fediverse, drama between servers that leads to defederation is usually treated more as a something that only really affects the people on both servers, and people on servers that are not part of the drama either staying out of it, or offering commentary from the sideline.

In the threads on Lemmy dedicated to these decisions, lots of people from who are not directly impacted by the decisions chimed in. Part of this is the affordances of the software, which accentuates the idea that everyone can centrally respond to a specific topic. Another part of it is that defederation on Lemmy has a different and broader impact on the entire community than it has on, let’s say Mastodon. This is most visible in the case of Lemmy.world defederating from the large piracy community dbzer0. For the Lemmy community at large, the piracy community is more valuable the more people are contributing to it. So when the largest Lemmy community cannot contribute anymore, this decision meaningfully impacts the people who are not part of neither the lemmy.world or dbzer0 community.

Community culture on Lemmy also differs from the culture that is more dominant on other parts of the fediverse. On microblogging platforms, defederation and blocking is framed in terms of safety and protection. On Lemmy and Kbin safety also plays a role, especially in the case of defederation between Hexbear and Blahaj.zone. However, defederation tend to also be framed in the context of censorship. The Lemm.ee server, a proposal to defederate from Hexbear was viewed much more critical, with comments focusing more on individual responsibility. In the other cases regarding piracy or NSFW content, people’s hesitation towards defederation gets framed even more in terms of censorship. Overall it feels like the broader Lemmy community is still searching for a shared communal attitude towards when defederation is a proper tool to be used, if such consensus can even be found.

In other news

The Nivenly foundation announced that Kris Nóva has passed away. She was the driving force behind the hachyderm.io server as an admin. She stepped back from that role and became the president of the Nivenly foundation, the ‘nonprofit on a mission to bring sustainable governance and autonomy to open source projects’. Her contributions and work with Hachyderm and Nivenly have made a significant positive contribution on the fediverse.

Bean, a Lemmy app for iOS has officially launched. One of it’s standout features is the ability to group communities into a single feed, although this is locked behind the paid version. The Lemmy developers relegated the decision on how to approach duplicate communities to well, the community, and this grouping in the client is one potential way of dealing with the duplication. In a short conversation with the developer, he said he expects to add Kbin support as well, once the Kbin API officially releasesand that other Lemmy apps will do so too. This might hopefully avoid the microblogging problems of the fediverse, where the vast majority of apps only support Mastodon and rarely the other microblogging platforms.

Red Planet Lab, a VC-backed startup, has released a demo of a Mastodon clone with a completely rewritten backend, in order to have it handle Twitter-sized audience (500M+ users). Their demo is done to showcase their product Rama, their new programming platform. Red Planet Lab promises to open source release their ActivityPub server next week. Backend architecture is not the only necessary requirement to have a success product however, as the recent shuttering of Cloudflare’s Wildebeest project indicates. It also has sparked a renewed conversation on the fediverse regarding server sizes: ‘what is a good size for fediverse servers, and can servers be too large?’

other

A Threads engineer posts about ActivityPub, specifically about putting in effort to learn about the protocol. From the thread, it seems there is a team of at least four engineers at Meta who are working on what they call ‘fediverse workstream from threads’. They express an interest in joining the Fediverse Developer Network as well.

Mozilla.social, the Mastodon server of Mozilla that is currently in closed beta testing, seems to be using a front end client based on Elk as a user interface.

A new cross poster that allows you to automatically post your fediverse posts to Bluesky as well. An update by Robert W. Gehl on his upcoming book “Move Slowly and Build Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media”.

Firefish continues its professionalisation steps with a new paid developer, sponsored by Spacehost. Spacehost is a new hosting service for fediverse software, with Chris Trottier being involved in both Spacehost and Firefish. The Verifiedjournalist.org project is looking for someone to take over the project.

The University of Innsbruck has set up their own Mastodon server. (h/t for the tip @gunchleoc)

WeDistribute has a great article on IFTAS, the organisation for Independent Federated Trust and Safety.

An extensive article on hashtags by Chris Messina, creator of the hashtag. The article goes into detail on Mastodon’s proposed changes to hashtags.

She was one of the more respectable big instance admins IMO. She became kind of a celebrity on the platform, in no small part due to the transparency she ran the instance with, posting regular updates about the finances and technical goings-on. It wasn't an explicitly radical space, but it was quite progressive as far as large tech forums go.

She was big on the governance and contingencies thing, so I am sure the operations of the instance itself will continue smoothly (as smoothly as any organization can continue with the loss of a founder).

Rest in Peace.

I for one was excited to see you folks' weird ass posting breaching containment on my normal timeline.

But from my home instance feddit.it it seems I can only see your posts to other instances, not any content from Hexbear itself. I can see some comms like CTH but they haven't been updated in weeks.

I'm guessing you guys switched to whitelist federation and stopped sending us new slop. Can we reopen the slop valves please? Having to switch accounts makes my dumb brain tired.

Anyway welcome to the Fediverse!

How satisfied are you with the current state of the fediverse?, ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou asks. It’s a good question, and I’m not sure of my personal answer. I enjoy my time here, but I also see lots of opportunities for how things could be better. There have been some interesting projects this week of people working on structural improvements within the fediverse, on safety, testing and search. Plus, we take a look at how the Japanese side of the fediverse is doing.

Search, and the lack thereof, on Mastodon has been a hotly contested issue for a long time. There are some technical challenges with implementing search in a federated contest, but the main limitation has always been social: how do you make sure that you have consent of the people who you are indexing? One option is to take the setting ‘Discoverable’, which indicates that your profile can be found by search engines and other discoverability services, and take all the posts by accounts that use the (opt-in) setting Discoverable, and return all public posts by that account. This is the approach taken by a custom patch created by @vyr, which as been used on the Universeodon server for a while.

Now, Eugen Rochko has proposed a similar change for Mastodon proper (without mentioning the previous work by @vyr), stating “It is my decision to unite all discovery features in one setting, because all of this stuff is an expected part of a social network and splitting it up into different settings that everyone has to opt-into one by one just to get the same behaviour they get by default on other social media seems like a bad user experience.”

The definiteness of the statement, and the lack of discussion (Eugen Rochko closed the comment section soon after) as well as the implementation itself lead to quite a bit of discussion from the community. These responses got taken up upon, and a new implementation got proposed a few days later. The current proposal for search is to have two separate opt-in options, one for the discoverability of your profile, and one for the discoverability of your posts.

This seems like a fairly optimal outcome, with full granular control and opt-in to get people’s consent. The process to get there though is more of a mixed bag. The way it is implemented also indicates that Mastodon struggles with its role as a community leader; a significant group of long-term Mastodon users also has feelings that are at best ambivalent about how the Mastodon organisation is run. By not crediting earlier work by others, and making unilateral executive decisions about controversial topics without community input runs the risk of eroding community trust and support in the project.

Official announcement of the Federation Safety Enhancement Project (FSEP). The goal of the FSEP is “to reduce the administration burden for Mastodon admins, and increase safety for Mastodon users, by providing tools that will make it easy and convenient for admins and moderation teams to consistently discover harmful instances and protect their communities”. It is an interesting collaboration between multiple actors who are working on improving safety within the fediverse. Expect a more extensive report on this soon. For now, the proposal itself is worth reading.

The fediverse promotes interoperability between platforms and products and services via ActivityPub, but putting this in practice can be hard. For developers, there are scant little tools available to make sure that the product they are making is actually interoperable in practice. To help with this, the Social Web Incubator Community Group held a meeting about organising towards testing tools that developers can use to test is their platform is indeed interoperable with the other platforms. For non-developers who are interested in the fediverse, the most important takeaway is that for all its lofty ideals, getting full interoperability on the fediverse is really difficult. There is a lack of tools, documentation, but also knowledge of what tools actually are available is often lacking or hard to find. For developers, it’s worth checking the notes here, and the presentation by Johannes Ernst (@J12t)

The Misskey flagship server misskey.io reorganises themselves into a company, Nikkei Asia reports. Misskey continues to grow rapidly, especially in Japan. Misskey.io has recently restricted new signups to only people from Japan in order to be able to handle all the growth. I published a more extensive report on Misskey and the Japanese side of the fediverse this week, here.

The Lemmy developers held an AMA, and I wrote a report on the major themes in their answers, which you can read here. Much has been said about the political views of the developers, who explicitly identify themselves as Marxist-Leninist. What interested me was their views on software and the fediverse. And here they are surprisingly hands-off, something I did not expect beforehand. At some point they explicitly state that the fediverse “will grow whether we want it or not”, which surprised me, considering they developer the third most popular software on the fediverse. This gives them significant influence in whether and how the fediverse growth, but so far they seem reluctant to admit to this power.

Mastodon starts selling merchandise, with most of the items already being sold out again.

IFTAS, Independent Federated Trust And Safety, has written a blog post to introduce themselves, and launch another survey for a Needs Assessment.

Wired has posted an extensive description of how to migrate your posts from Instagram to Pixelfed.

Threads has added support for “rel=me” links, allowing you to verify your Threads account on Mastodon. The Verge has a simple guide on how to use this. What stands out is the comment by Threads developer Jessel, who says: “my hope is that folks take this as a sign that we’re embracing open standards seriously”.

Techmeme continues to add further support for the fediverse. They’ve linked to fediverse accounts as commentary for a while. Now it also links directly to their Mastodon post for you to comment, like or share, similar how it links to their post on X.

Lemmy held a Canvas event, similar to /r/Place on reddit, where people can place a pixel on a canvas every few minutes. Here is the final result.

Tweakers is one of the largest Dutch tech news website. They published an article on all Reddit alternatives, going in large detail on both Lemmy and Kbin.

An extensive wiki with practical guides for fediverse software.

A tool to discover new Lemmy communities.

edit: the have blocked the piracy comms, not the instance

Basically I made a post on blahaj and someone from kbin commented on it somehow even though we're not federated with them; I only happened to see the comment because I decided to look at how big the emojis looked to blahaj users so I went over to the same post on blahaj and there it was

Sometimes there's a real humdinger of a comment, like a real that I'd like to reply to, but I find that it only shows up on lemmy.ml and not here. Is that expected behaviour?

Trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong here.

so right now im having some pretty major annoyances with how federation is implemented by lemmy as a whole. defed makes it so you cant see whole threads, so looking at AMAs on lemmy.ml from hexbear are essentially useless unless you are viewing the main post, same with technical questions. which means lemmy cant replace reddit for a wide variety of uses. what i guess im asking is, can this be fixed, or is it innate to activitypub?

this is gonna be a huge problem as more and more instances are made. you could see someone make a question post but then you could create duplicate answers, wasting many people's time completely because you cant see each other. its also annoying as fuck that if i enjoy the community here, i have to keep making more and more accounts to access the fediverse as it inevitably becomes more fragmented. so in order to make sure that everyone sees everything youd have to keep creating accounts which is completely antithetical to the idea of the fediverse.

like i'd be ok with not being able to reply to certain instances, or choosing to block instances myself, but having that decision made for me is extremely lame. like if im in some instance talking about star trek or some shit, WHY does it fucking matter that im on a wrongthink instance so certain users cant see or reply to each others shit???

It's been over a day of federation. Does it take longer, or does someone have to manually add Hexbear?

https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Welcome to another episode! The BBC joins the fediverse, and content moderation remains the most important conversation in the fediverse. My unscientific vibe-o-meeter also sees more discussions around content moderation and the

The BBC has launched their own Mastodon server this week, announcing their presence in an extensive blog post. It is a private server, only intended for accounts from the BBC, such as Radio 4 and 5 Live. The R&D department of the BBC established the server as an experimental project that will run for six months. After that, the BBC will evaluate whether and how to continue.

In the blog post, the BBC talks about the challenges they have run into while setting up a presence on the fediverse. They note that explaining the decentralised, federated model is hard when people are mostly familiar with centralised ownership models, as well as the resulting questions about hosting user content. Moderation is also a bit of an open question, as it relies on trust that other 3rd party servers will moderate their users properly. The BBC comes from a model where they are responsible for comments (on their own website for example), and have all the necessary tools to moderate comments properly that do not meet their guidelines. Here, they are dependent on other server’s moderation to take action when required.

The entrance of the BBC into the fediverse comes at a time when news organisations are actively exploring how move forward with social media. The situation in Canada is most notable for this, as a result of Online News Act, Google and Meta will have to pay Canadian news organisations for posts made on their platform that link to their sites. Meta has been threatening for a while that the passing of this bill will result in them banning news altogether, and this week actually banned all links to news (both Canadian and international) organisations for all Canadian users. News organisations setting up their own social media server on the fediverse seems to be a possible way out of this impasse, but for now, nothing has been said about this.

Meanwhile, over at Meta, employees at Thread seem to be acute aware of the BBC launching the Mastodon server. A Threads engineer states, in response to the BBC news: “we’ve been following this news internally with excitement. no updates on our side to share yet”. Threads have consistently stated their intent to add ActivityPub support to Threads. They have also stated multiple times not to be interested in hosting news and political content. News organisations posting their own content on their self-hosted fediverse servers thus fits right in with Meta’s thinking. This is something I wrote about earlier as well, and Threads employees being excited about this scenario playing out further points into this direction of why Meta is stating to add ActivityPub support.

Another direction that the conversation around the BBC joining the fediverse was transphobia and server blocking. Many trans people feel uncomfortable with the BBC platforming explicit transphobia. As such, some servers decided to block the BBC Mastodon server as a response. This prompted some interesting and constructive discussions about the extend to which server admins should block servers. On a base level, freedom of association is one of the core principles of a decentralised social network, so people being free to block whichever server they prefer is the system working as intended. However, asking critical questions about if doing so meaningfully contributes to providing safety to your users is also a valid way of holding people accountable for the actions they take on behalf of others. If this is something that interests you, I personally found these two exchanges to be valuable to read, where in both cases, I find the value in the comments where people voice their differences.

In last week’s update I wrote about the Stanford report on CSAM on Mastodon, with an overview of the situation and the promise to keep track of what is happening in the fediverse as a response. WeDistribute also published an extensive article about the findings that is worth reading. It zooms in on the recommendations, and also places it into a larger context on what is at stake with regards to internet regulation as well.

The W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group held a special topic call this week, about the Social Web and CSAM, where the Stanford report was discussed in depth. David Thiel and Alex Stamos, of the Stanford Internet Observatory were also present. Meeting notes and audio recording are available here. Some of my notes and takeaways:

Alex Stamos makes a distinction between three different problems: (1) finding, taking down and reporting CSAM where the material is known in databases such as PhotoDNA. (2) the same, but for material that is new or computer generated. (3) situations where the social media accounts of the victims children are actively involved in the creation of material.

For the first problem, infrastructure exists that institutions can use to automate the scanning, reporting and deletion of CSAM. This however is aimed at large organisations and is not build to handle a federated structure. The second problem is something that centralised social networks struggle with as well. The third problem is something that’s not really a part of the fediverse currently, as it is largely adults who use the fediverse, and it is currently mainly happening on Instagram. If the fediverse grows and different audiences join, this might change however. For now, Alex Stamos recommends focusing on the first problem; how to implement a centralised scanning service into a federated architecture.

Another point came up regarding the effectiveness of adding a standard scanning tool is. Here Alex Stamos is clear, stating that scanning for perceptual hashes is an effective way in greatly reducing people’s ability to trade CSAM.

Regarding the reporting of CSAM two problems are noted: a lack of reporting to NCNEC. US fediverse servers are mandated by law to file a report to NCNEC every time they take down CSAM content. It is unclear if this legal procedure is being followed. At the least, there is a lack of awareness and education for server operations regarding this. Secondly there is a lack of moderation infrastructure, both in automated reporting, as well as in ways to safeguard moderators against both CSAM and violent content. An example of the latter would be making images black and white and blurring, when automated scanning suspect it is an extremely violent video.

The work of IFTAS remains highly interesting to me, in this case the work on providing a centralised intermediary service for the thousands of server operators to gain access to automated CSAM scanning tools.

In other news

Software and other technical news

Artemis, the first Kbin app for Android and iOS has launched in public beta.

Automadon is a new iOS app that allows you to create custom shortcuts for your Mastodon account on iOS.

Two new ways to bring the fediverse to your Apple Watch: Stomp allows you to see your Mastodon timeline (via TechCrunch) and Voyager reports having an app in Testflight to check your Lemmy account on your Apple Watch!

Reddit third party app Sync is back, but as a Lemmy app.

Daniel Supernault, the creator of Pixelfed, reports that he has started work on an open source encrypted fediverse instant messenger, based on the Signal protocol.

SpaceHost is a new managed hosting service for the fediverse, which donates a portion of net revenue to the software developers. It is still in early access, and starts with providing Lemmy and Firefish managed hosting.

Cloudflare’s ActivityPub server Wildebeest is no longer being maintained, according to their GitHub.

Community

Nivenly, the cooperative behind Mastodon server hachyderm.io, is having a community discussion and vote on how to approach distributed generative AI system. The blog Nexus of Privacy has an extensive writeup on the discussion and arguments within the community. The follow-up comment by author Jon points to the reasons why I’m linking to this: Community governance efforts are hard, and it’s worth learning from others how they have approached community governance.

The Lemmy developers will host an Ask Me Anything on Monday August 7th, 15u CEST. The thread is already open to post questions in advance. The fediverse does not have a great mode of communication between developers and users, with communication either often happening on Github/Codeberg, or in random comment sections. Providing a more structured place for people to hear more from the developers is a good direction to go in.

What I’ve been reading:

Mastodon’s Mastodon’ts. An essay on “how Mastodon posts work are terrible vectors for abuse, as well as being bad for basic usability.” To me, the lack of ability to remove replies on a post you’ve made is a significant barrier for institutions to adopt the fediverse. Harmful and racist replies can stay up if the admin of another server will not act upon a report, while a block does not prevent other people from seeing the reply. With the renewed interest of news organisations and governments into setting up a presence of the fediverse, it seems likely that this issue will become more pressing.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2920188

This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

Welcome back to another episode! I was still on holiday this week as well, but enough has happened that I wanted to give you a shorter overview of the most important news. It’s been interesting to experience the fediverse as a regular user that doesn’t try to keep up with all the news however. That’s why this episode is still short, focusing on a few highlights that stood out for me. Next week this update will be fully back, including some upgrades!

Mastodon and CSAM

The most important news is the release of a report by Stanford about the proliferation of CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) on Mastodon. The report looked at the public timelines of the top 25 Mastodon servers and found 112 pieces of actual CSAM, as well as over 1200 text posts mainly used to coordinate offsite trading of CSAM, all which is absolutely horrifying. The researchers also share detailed directions for future improvements that are worth reading.

The Washington Post is reported in detail on this as well. In the article it is not super clear that some servers such as Pawoo, a known bad actor, are commonly blocked. The Stanford report understandably is super limited in providing information on where exactly the information is found, but servers like Pawoo and some of the large Japanese Mastodon servers are the most common suspects. This lead to people voicing their frustrations that they felt like they were getting lumped in for a description of fediverse that does not match their view of fediverse (since they’ve blocked the server).

There are multiple frames of analysis here: the direct response by the community, the secondary response by the community by working on better safety features relating to this, and how this impacts the larger public’s understanding of Mastodon. I have not been available enough the last week to give a proper analysis of the direct response of the community, I’m regret to say. Responses seem to have varied wildly, from ‘the Washington Post article is a hit piece’ to large concerns about the findings. Personally I feel uncomfortable with some more negative responses that focus on mistakes and framing in reporting by news outlets, when in the end, there is a goddamn CSAM material on Mastodon and limited moderation tools to deal with it. I’ll be writing more how different community initiatives are being worked on to improve Trust and Safety and moderation tools, as well as how this report impacts the public’s perspective on Mastodon.

What turned people off Mastodon

Erin Kissane has done excellent research by asking people on Bluesky what turned them off Mastodon. Its an extensive look at 350 people who tell in their own words what turned them off Mastodon. Erin’s work is deliberately structured in a way that resists easy summarisation, so I’ll refrain from that with the urge to simply read it all, it’s worth it.

A few things stood out to me: Eugen Rochko’s responds to the line in the article ‘If I were Eugen Rochko, I would die of stress.’ with ‘Not that far off the truth!’. The Mastodon post for this article got a massive amount of attention, virtually all of it positive. Considering the amount of critiques of Mastodon culture that are in the post, it is nice to see how open people are to the feedback. Thats not to say that everyone is open in all context, and the scolding behaviour that Mastodon is known for is certainly real. However, it shows there are ways to format structural feedback and criticism that are acceptable to the community.

Calckey rebrands to FireFish, with new forks.

Two weeks ago, Calckey rebranded itself as Firefish. An impressive part of this rebrand is how the main server calckey.social got transferred to a new domain, firefish.social, without impact on the users. For example, my new username is now laurenshof@firefish.social, but old posts that are still tagged with laurenshof@calckey.social properly refer to my account. Firefish has put in significant effort in individual account transfers as well. WeDistribute has a writeup on how to transfer from Mastodon to Firefish, which includes a full transfer of your posts, lists, blocks and mutes.

Arguments between the main developer and other contributors of Firefish lead to the creation of the hardfork Iceshrimp. Hajkey, which is run by the admins of blahaj.zone server, was originally a soft fork of Calckey, with several safety features merged back into Calckey. Lead Hajkey developer @supakaity announced that they will not rebrand, and go downstream from Iceshrimp instead. In the announcement post she mentioned that she recently got overruled when trying to implement a feature which was intended to improve the safety of a minority group. As such, she felt that Hajkey aligns better with Iceshrimp, and as such will position Hajkey instead as downstream from that project.

The flagship server for Misskey, misskey.io, is experiencing rapid growth, adding 90k users in the last 2 weeks. Uncertainty around GDPR compliance has led them to discourage signups from European users, @darnells writes. https://darnell.day/misskey-io-20-000-new-users-daily-discourages-europeans-from-signing-up-over

Mastodon client Mammoth has added an algorithmic For You page. TechCrunch has a review of it. https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/26/twitter-rival-mammoth-adds-a-personalized-for-you-feed-to-make-its-mastodon-client-feel-familiar/

Mastopoet is a tool to share Mastodon posts as images, and specifically focuses on the design and visuals. https://mementomori.social/@rolle/110787810442832467

A blog posts by @renchap, one of the Mastodon developers, on a vision for the future of Trust & Safety for Mastodon. https://oisaur.com/@renchap/110742748852023343

The podcast Looks Like New talks about some of “Open Social Media’s origin stories from three speakers who have been involved in the development, culture, and communities of their platforms: Christine Lemmer-Webber (co-editor, ActivityPub), Evan Henshaw-Plath (founder, Nos), and Golda Velez (early participant, Bluesky).” https://news.kgnu.org/2023/06/looks-like-new-how-did-open-social-media-platforms-originate/

The Podcast Moderated Content has a new episode with an extensive discussion on “safety issues with the Fediverse, how Meta might deal with them, and some potential solutions to get ready for the challenges without Meta effectively calling the cops on a huge number of instances.” https://cybervillains.com/@alex/110771803391825598

PCMag has a review of Lemmy and Kbin. https://www.pcmag.com/news/reddit-alternatives-lemmy-kbin

The EFF writes about the FBI raid where the server of kolektiva.social got seized. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/fbi-seizure-mastodon-server-wakeup-call-fediverse-users-and-hosts-protect-their

"The Fediverse has a Mental Health Problem”. https://medium.com/@thisismissem/the-fediverse-has-a-mental-health-problem-4cb4845dfee1

Lemmy has had a massive inflow of bot registrations in the last months. @kersploosh has a writeup of their work on getting admins to delete these suspicious inactive accounts, leading to a drop of 900k registered users for Lemmy. https://sh.itjust.works/post/1823812

Lemmy.world still discussing if they want to defederate from an instance taken over by exploding-heads.

An instance that includes such gems as

Strange pattern emerging from lemmy.world with an admin advertising their business in the adhd community, allowing virulently Islamophobic atheistmemes community and now repeating the exploding-heads (we have to patiently discuss blocking the instance) course of action instead of a preemptive defederation, it is their last resort though.

The post on lemmy.world discussing it as well: https://lemmy.world/post/2680147

As of this post the blocked instances are here

spoiler

Hello fellow fediverse feds, I'm 100% sure this has definitely been thought of before, but I'm apparently bad at googling the idea, so what's up with this?

There's obvious problems with the federation model:

• It's a moderation nightmare and standards are effectively that of the worst website Federated with
• It's a bandwidth catastrophe, last I heard Lemmy broadcasts every single vote to every Federated server??? At serious scale this is a genuine waste of resources with real carbon cost. I've read mitigations to this that seem to basically be going down the same route of Usenet or cryptocurrencies, such as having trusted servers/shards/whatever bundle transactions, which is a whole new mess
• No cross-server identity management (not an inherent problem though). Super important ™️ clout chasers can try to squat their names on the big sites, but nobody's stopping anyone from doing a "REAL Elon Musk crypto give away" on a new server with the name not taken yet.

So what if users just had an rss-like experience of subscribing to individual communities on any server they pick? Their signed identity could carry meta data to facilitate cross-server connections (DMs go to XXX, also member of X, Y, Z, etc), and servers would only have to worry about serving and moderating their own content. What's lost? Discoverability? That seems lower stakes to centralize than moderation and corporate control.

Obviously the technology already exists: we have centralized OAuth providers and a more decentralized regime could be built off asymmetric encryption, but the attempt to apply it here is where?

Welcome! Don’t let the ironic detachment fool you, this is one of the kindest and most well moderated places on the internet.

Be open to having your opinions challenged because if you’re from the anglosphere I promise you the propaganda and indoctrination run much deeper than you expect. No one challenging your views is doing so out of some desire to personally attack you. Feel free to report if that’s what it feels like because our mods are A1 best in the fediverse and they will attend to that shit. Most of us are just trying not to feel hopeless and powerless, especially those of us in the west. Sometimes that can manifest as vitriolic rhetoric but our mods are pretty good and catching and stamping that shit out.

We all believe that growth happens through struggle and we’ve all had to struggle a lot with each other and ourselves to arrive at the positions we carry. And do not mistake this for a hive mind because there’s actually a pretty wide range of beliefs here and we’re all the better for it.

And we all recognize that we are all fallible and so it’s ok to be wrong about things. We get stuff wrong all the time here. But often times the difference between correct and incorrect is not so much whether “X thing happened like this” vs “actually X thing happened like this” but “X thing happened like this” vs “I do not have the firsthand knowledge or resources to say how X thing happened or whether it’s happening at all”. This is especially true when it comes to current events. (Uyghur “genocide” being a great example of this)

Just keep an open mind and remember that the atomic unit of propaganda is NOT falsehood, it’s EMPHASIS.

And if that comment about Xinjiang is too spicy for you then DM me so I can set you up w/ my homie Mehmet. He’s no Authoritarian tankie totalitarian apologist and he can get you an incredible deal on some Iraqi WMD’s!

Oh and don’t clean the owl, we like them that way!

As you probably know, lemmy.world's admin recently put out a post addressing their decision to defederate from Hexbear before Hexbear had even federated to another instance. Their reasoning can be found here, and I wanted to break down and critique their reasoning.

Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.

None of lemmy.world's rules would be broken by Hexbear's federation, no rule states against ideological instances federating. If lemmy.world was a strictly non-political instance, this would make sense, but lemmy.world promises to "Provide a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all members; regardless of gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, political affiliation, or other similar characteristic. Human comes first."

The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below: “Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.” “The West’s role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.” “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term “rules-based international order.” It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”

The first paragraph, in shitposty-leftist terms says: Keep the shitposting to Hexbear itself, when interacting with lemmy.world users, be polite and informed. The second paragraph is explaining that Hexbear is anti-NATO (not against lemmy.world's rules), anti-IMF (not against the rules), and anti-World Bank (not against the rules). It is a core part of leftist ideology to oppose these things, and calling it "concerning" is ridiculous. The final paragraph is again, explaining Hexbear's stance on the three imperialist organizations and calling for the dismantling of the organizations. This could be interpreted as concerning, but nowhere does it say "the violent takeover of the world" or "genocide" or whatever the people in the comments are saying about us ("Hexbear is a cesspool for genocidal lunatics").

Here are some examples: “I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.” “All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.” https://lemmy.world/comment/121850 https://lemmy.world/comment/1487168 https://lemmy.world/comment/1476084 https://lemmy.world/comment/171595 https://hexbear.net/comment/3648500 Overall community comments: https://hexbear.net/comment/3526128 https://hexbear.net/comment/3526086 https://hexbear.net/comment/3652828 To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made. https://lemmygrad.ml/post/158656 https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/882559 https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/540170 https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/446529

These are comments from people arguing on the internet. Nothing special. Go look at the comments.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected. We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. We made the decision to preemptively defederate. Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. We made the decision to preemptively defederate. Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. We made the decision to preemptively defederate.

Defederation should only be considered as a LAST RESORT. We made the decision to PREEMPTIVELY DEFEDERATE.

Defederation should only be considered as a LAST RESORT. We made the decision to PREEMPTIVELY DEFEDERATE.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. We made the decision to PREEMPTIVELY DEFEDERATE.

WHAT IS IT THEN, LWADMIN? IS IT A LAST RESORT, OR A PREEMPTIVE STRIKE?

Ok, thats just my little rant, if I'm wrong, be sure to dox me and send me death threats and all'at.

Edit: Formatting issues