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I'm excited by the idea, but I'm honestly pretty confused by Lemmy & Kbin. Reddit accounts and subreddits give an incentive to protect the account and "build up

I'm excited by the idea, but I'm honestly pretty confused by Lemmy & Kbin. Reddit accounts and subreddits give an incentive to protect the account and "build up a history". My Reddit account is 13+ years old, and I don't want to sign up on the "wrong instance" of Lemmy/Kbin. 1. Will apps like Liftoff, Boost for Lemmy, and Sync for Lemmy support Kbin instance accounts? Should I be signing up for Lemmy instead if I want a familiar mobile app? 2. If I register a Kbin account, can I register with the same username on a different "home instance"? Can you login (not federate) to a different instance with a Lemmy/Kbin account? e.g., if I sign up for an account on kbin.social, can I login to lemmy.world with the account since most apps currently only support Kbin instances? 3. What happens if your home instance goes down temporarily? What happens if it goes down permanently? What if there is drama and suddenly many instances stop federating with your home instance? What if my instance stops federating with an instance I participate in? Do you need to start over somewhere else? 4. Are there multi-reddits to combine the same topic from multiple instances? What happens if multiple instances each have their own version of a community? 5. How do you moderate a community on Lemmy/Kbin? How do you deal with spam? 6. How do I link to or save a post? How do I search? I want to sign up, contribute, and give the best chance of it taking off. But I don't understand the future implications of which instance I sign up on.

wraptile 3y ago
> centive to protect the account and "build up a history". My Reddit account is 13+ years old, and I don't want to sign up on the "wrong instance" of Lemmy/Kbin. This is scary. With that much public information all of your accounts are surely pwned and you'll be a prime target for AI based scam attacks. It's probably enough data to build an AI profile that'll be more real than real YOU to other people and all it takes is couple of API calls/scrapes of your reddit account. No one should ever have a personal reddit account that is older than a year.
- Shank 3y ago
  > With that much public information all of your accounts are surely pwned and you'll be a prime target for AI based scam attacks. It's probably enough data to build an AI profile that'll be more real than real YOU to other people and all it takes is couple of API calls/scrapes of your reddit account. What? So? How does the age of the account imply that they’ve stored anything remotely useful/identifiable? People have different standards for privacy and different needs and desires for identity. Just because you disagree doesn’t mean that you should push people in a direction baselessly.
  - wraptile 3y ago
    > How does the age of the account imply that they’ve stored anything remotely useful/identifiable? Simple probability. More posts, more data, higher likelyhood of data point leaks. Keeping extensive post history for some vanity points seems like a very high risk/low reward scenario and people should be discouraged from doing this.
- esjeon 3y ago
  Don't forget that it's also possible to find you using the one year's worth of data. Your interests, the way you talk, what you talk about, etc, can always be learned and compared to other users. There's just no way to stop persistent attackers. > It's probably enough data to build an AI profile that'll be more real than real YOU to other people and all it takes is couple of API calls/scrapes of your reddit account. Human has been reduced to a series of API calls ever since the rise of smartphones. AI doesn't change that.
IshKebab 3y ago
I agree. Just saying "it's Reddit but federated" doesn't answer any of the obvious questions about how it works. E.g. how do user bans work? How do they prevent spam? How does moderation work? Who controls who gets to be a moderator? What are the implications of choosing a particular instance? Etc. etc.
- extra88 3y ago
  I don't know how any of that works on Reddit, why should I worry about it on another platform?
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Because you want to evaluate if you think it's worth using?
    - extra88 3y ago
      If I want to be a moderator, sure, some of those specifics matter because they're the "levers" I'll be operating (if they exist). As a participant, one doesn't need to know any of that before choosing a new platform; the evidence for that is all the previous times one has participated on a platform without that knowledge (or without knowledge of how the specifics have changed over time). To a participant, the outcome is what matters, i.e. one's own participation does not feel constrained while also having the rest of the content seeming mostly devoid of spam and other undesirables.
etler 3y ago
I view it like picking a forum in the old days. It does force you to slow down and be more considerate of what community you're joining and how you interact with that community, but personally I view that as a good thing. It's different than a forum in that all the instances can be connected to each other, so that's an improvement over a standard forum in that you can still interact and get content from outside of your silo. I do agree it's hard to get an idea of what an instance is all about and I think there could be better and more detailed descriptions to help people decide what community they want to be a part of.

wraptile 3y ago

> centive to protect the account and "build up a history". My Reddit account is 13+ years old, and I don't want to sign up on the "wrong instance" of Lemmy/Kbin. This is scary. With that much public information all of your accounts are surely pwned and you'll be a prime target for AI based scam attacks. It's probably enough data to build an AI profile that'll be more real than real YOU to other people and all it takes is couple of API calls/scrapes of your reddit account. No one should ever have a personal reddit account that is older than a year.

Shank 3y ago
> With that much public information all of your accounts are surely pwned and you'll be a prime target for AI based scam attacks. It's probably enough data to build an AI profile that'll be more real than real YOU to other people and all it takes is couple of API calls/scrapes of your reddit account. What? So? How does the age of the account imply that they’ve stored anything remotely useful/identifiable? People have different standards for privacy and different needs and desires for identity. Just because you disagree doesn’t mean that you should push people in a direction baselessly.
- wraptile 3y ago
  > How does the age of the account imply that they’ve stored anything remotely useful/identifiable? Simple probability. More posts, more data, higher likelyhood of data point leaks. Keeping extensive post history for some vanity points seems like a very high risk/low reward scenario and people should be discouraged from doing this.
esjeon 3y ago
Don't forget that it's also possible to find you using the one year's worth of data. Your interests, the way you talk, what you talk about, etc, can always be learned and compared to other users. There's just no way to stop persistent attackers. > It's probably enough data to build an AI profile that'll be more real than real YOU to other people and all it takes is couple of API calls/scrapes of your reddit account. Human has been reduced to a series of API calls ever since the rise of smartphones. AI doesn't change that.

IshKebab 3y ago

I agree. Just saying "it's Reddit but federated" doesn't answer any of the obvious questions about how it works. E.g. how do user bans work? How do they prevent spam? How does moderation work? Who controls who gets to be a moderator? What are the implications of choosing a particular instance? Etc. etc.

extra88 3y ago
I don't know how any of that works on Reddit, why should I worry about it on another platform?
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Because you want to evaluate if you think it's worth using?
  - extra88 3y ago
    If I want to be a moderator, sure, some of those specifics matter because they're the "levers" I'll be operating (if they exist). As a participant, one doesn't need to know any of that before choosing a new platform; the evidence for that is all the previous times one has participated on a platform without that knowledge (or without knowledge of how the specifics have changed over time). To a participant, the outcome is what matters, i.e. one's own participation does not feel constrained while also having the rest of the content seeming mostly devoid of spam and other undesirables.

etler 3y ago

I view it like picking a forum in the old days. It does force you to slow down and be more considerate of what community you're joining and how you interact with that community, but personally I view that as a good thing. It's different than a forum in that all the instances can be connected to each other, so that's an improvement over a standard forum in that you can still interact and get content from outside of your silo. I do agree it's hard to get an idea of what an instance is all about and I think there could be better and more detailed descriptions to help people decide what community they want to be a part of.