4 ms·

Lemmy's main problem is that the software is a buggy, insecure mess. I speak from helping with a small Lemmy* where a couple of subs decamped. (Both are going v

Lemmy's main problem is that the software is a buggy, insecure mess. I speak from helping with a small Lemmy* where a couple of subs decamped. (Both are going very well, and one has actually taken off like a rocket.) The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is a bit underspecified in practice, and you're gonna have to test combinations of actual running code. We've been having a bizarre time just trying to talk to Kbin reliably, i.e. software intended to do the same Reddit-alike job as Lemmy. We almost have two-way Mastodon story and comment flow working, except when the Mastodon has authorized_fetch switched on. Etc etc etc, the problems are a string of little glitches. OTOH, it basically works well enough to sustain discussion, both local and federated. So everything else is fussing, really. * https://awful.systems/ https://awful.systems/ official refuge of SneerClub and TechTakes

dragontamer 3y ago
> The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. Yeah. I'm optimistic on this front. Bugs are one of those things that "everyone agrees upon", although you're right in that the Lemmy development environment hasn't taken off or expanded as much as it probably should have. Still, bugs will be fixed because its low-hanging fruit. Everyone gets bothered, someone will get bothered enough and then a patch will be submitted. The advancements from 0.17 to 0.18.0 to 0.18.5 have grossly improved Lemmy in substantial ways. There's enough bug-progress that I'm happy. There's plenty more bugs, but progress is largely all that I care about. -------- The deeper concern of mine, and I alluded to this earlier with my "Naive" comment, is that Lemmy is very ideological right now. Ex: There was a week or two where people were against Lemmy Search Engines, worried that they'd track us. (Thankfully, someone made search-lemmy.com and life is better now). But now we're running into a "Privacy / anti-tracking" problem, directly in relation to this new-user / trolling issue. The most direct solution to the trolling problem is to have a way to track new-users and their early posts to see if they're a bot, troll, or otherwise a fake malicious account. Reddit does this through its Karma system. But Lemmy is fundamentally against Karma-tracking at the moment, meaning an _actual_ solution to this "trolls just create a new account from an unmoderated server" cannot rely upon karma (right now). I'm hoping that the politics shift enough that we can start talking about Karma-tracking (or other simple statistics that grossly diminish trolling behavior), but its going to be a while before everyone gets convinced IMO. --------- I think the "Adults in the room" know about the problem. But there's also the need for the underlying community to believe in the problem and have an ideological shift to successfully keep the community in unison. Or to get more specific: I know the Beehaw.org server wants to join everyone else in the federation. And we all know why they aren't doing so, and everyone respects everyone else's opinions and situation. Until this trolling problem is... addressable (not necessarily solved, but "addressed", so that we have tools to deal with it), it will be best for some instances to just remain de-federated (especially from open-registration servers who are prone to these coordinated trolling-assaults).
- davidgerard 3y ago
  Blocking obnoxious servers on the lemmy/kbin network works well enough, same as on Mastodon. There aren't Mastodon-like lists as yet, but there are some servers that just aren't worth talking to. Blocking obnoxious individuals from your server helps keep them from crapping up the home versions of the groups. Our only worry about the software is that it's run by weird tankies. But if they become intolerable we're pretty sure there will be enough people to maintain a fork. Probably with our admin as a main guy, lol. Nobody actually wants that to happen, to be clear.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >I think the "Adults in the room" know about the problem. But there's also the need for the underlying community to believe in the problem and have an ideological shift to successfully keep the community in unison. much easier said than done. That's the one big issue on surges of traffic driven through controversy, you get "Witches": "The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." - Scott Alexander [0] Most people by nature are apathetic, so the ones who do get riled up and change more often than not tend to be the highly opinionated ones. This could make for excellent power users who will provide tons of content, or venom that turns the entire community sour. It sounds like Lemmy has handled this much better than Voat, but identifying the "witches" without disupting the "libertarians" is quite the subtle but ambitious endeavor. I think the key is simply transparency: be ready to show that an active but disruptive user has been nothing but combatative to the community, and explain why certain servers can't be federated as of now. Some will twist the words, but overall a good policy should feel like common sense (even if it takes a lot of designing to properly establish). [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    This sounds like a libertarian-exclusive problem to me, and Lemmy's culture leans away from the Libertarian / Reddit style. The overall plan seems to be: major centers of relative openness (sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world), a few hybrid locations, and finally well curated gardens (ex: Beehaw.org). The different groups will federate, or de-federate, with each other as they see fit. You're right in that the more libertarian-leaning instances (ex: sh.itjust.works) are experimenting with lack of controls... but even they see various instances as toxic and are willing to ban them wholesale. I don't think anyone is going with the extreme-libertarian Reddit style "everyone is welcome" anymore. There's too many shitty communities out there who are attracted by that. The overall "Most are welcome" signposts are good enough for now.
Obscurity4340 3y ago
Do you see the main issues inherent to Lemmy as likely to be remediable?
- davidgerard 3y ago
  oh sure. As I said, it's good enough to do the one job.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  IMO, all code can be fixed. Especially if large groups of people agree upon the problems with the code. Its the politics / contradictions at the social level that leads to true difficulties. Mastodon has proven that these moderation issues can be solved. The question is if the Lemmy devs (and community) can politically agree that Mastodon-like moderation tools are a good idea to prioritize. That's where I'm worried. I guess its not a big deal because there's bigger fish to fry right now, so to speak. (Plenty of simpler bugs that everyone agrees upon). But eventually, the fundamental user-tracking / karma-system / vs defederation / design of anti-trolling tools becomes political and ideologically based. What happens to the community then? Hard for me to say. I hope that the overall community accepts the problem and agrees its a problem worth fixing (even at a slight tracking / anti-anonymity features getting pushed to Lemmy-core). If not, maybe the problem can be solved with bots (aka: IRC) that helps track Karma-like scores and whatnot across servers and helps auto-moderate content that enters a particular server or even community/sublemmy. I think I can "imagine" solutions to these problems. But what I can't foresee is what the community will deem an acceptable solution or not. ------------------- Mastodon is a very good model though and has led the way by showing what kind of tools are needed to curate a community. I see that Lemmy kinda-sorta wants go to about things a different way though.
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    Do you think Lemmy be re-established or forked in a similar sense in which Lemmy itself is a "fork" of Reddit, if that makes sense?
    - 3y ago

dragontamer 3y ago

> The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. Yeah. I'm optimistic on this front. Bugs are one of those things that "everyone agrees upon", although you're right in that the Lemmy development environment hasn't taken off or expanded as much as it probably should have. Still, bugs will be fixed because its low-hanging fruit. Everyone gets bothered, someone will get bothered enough and then a patch will be submitted. The advancements from 0.17 to 0.18.0 to 0.18.5 have grossly improved Lemmy in substantial ways. There's enough bug-progress that I'm happy. There's plenty more bugs, but progress is largely all that I care about. -------- The deeper concern of mine, and I alluded to this earlier with my "Naive" comment, is that Lemmy is very ideological right now. Ex: There was a week or two where people were against Lemmy Search Engines, worried that they'd track us. (Thankfully, someone made search-lemmy.com and life is better now). But now we're running into a "Privacy / anti-tracking" problem, directly in relation to this new-user / trolling issue. The most direct solution to the trolling problem is to have a way to track new-users and their early posts to see if they're a bot, troll, or otherwise a fake malicious account. Reddit does this through its Karma system. But Lemmy is fundamentally against Karma-tracking at the moment, meaning an _actual_ solution to this "trolls just create a new account from an unmoderated server" cannot rely upon karma (right now). I'm hoping that the politics shift enough that we can start talking about Karma-tracking (or other simple statistics that grossly diminish trolling behavior), but its going to be a while before everyone gets convinced IMO. --------- I think the "Adults in the room" know about the problem. But there's also the need for the underlying community to believe in the problem and have an ideological shift to successfully keep the community in unison. Or to get more specific: I know the Beehaw.org server wants to join everyone else in the federation. And we all know why they aren't doing so, and everyone respects everyone else's opinions and situation. Until this trolling problem is... addressable (not necessarily solved, but "addressed", so that we have tools to deal with it), it will be best for some instances to just remain de-federated (especially from open-registration servers who are prone to these coordinated trolling-assaults).

davidgerard 3y ago
Blocking obnoxious servers on the lemmy/kbin network works well enough, same as on Mastodon. There aren't Mastodon-like lists as yet, but there are some servers that just aren't worth talking to. Blocking obnoxious individuals from your server helps keep them from crapping up the home versions of the groups. Our only worry about the software is that it's run by weird tankies. But if they become intolerable we're pretty sure there will be enough people to maintain a fork. Probably with our admin as a main guy, lol. Nobody actually wants that to happen, to be clear.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>I think the "Adults in the room" know about the problem. But there's also the need for the underlying community to believe in the problem and have an ideological shift to successfully keep the community in unison. much easier said than done. That's the one big issue on surges of traffic driven through controversy, you get "Witches": "The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." - Scott Alexander [0] Most people by nature are apathetic, so the ones who do get riled up and change more often than not tend to be the highly opinionated ones. This could make for excellent power users who will provide tons of content, or venom that turns the entire community sour. It sounds like Lemmy has handled this much better than Voat, but identifying the "witches" without disupting the "libertarians" is quite the subtle but ambitious endeavor. I think the key is simply transparency: be ready to show that an active but disruptive user has been nothing but combatative to the community, and explain why certain servers can't be federated as of now. Some will twist the words, but overall a good policy should feel like common sense (even if it takes a lot of designing to properly establish). [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
- dragontamer 3y ago
  This sounds like a libertarian-exclusive problem to me, and Lemmy's culture leans away from the Libertarian / Reddit style. The overall plan seems to be: major centers of relative openness (sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world), a few hybrid locations, and finally well curated gardens (ex: Beehaw.org). The different groups will federate, or de-federate, with each other as they see fit. You're right in that the more libertarian-leaning instances (ex: sh.itjust.works) are experimenting with lack of controls... but even they see various instances as toxic and are willing to ban them wholesale. I don't think anyone is going with the extreme-libertarian Reddit style "everyone is welcome" anymore. There's too many shitty communities out there who are attracted by that. The overall "Most are welcome" signposts are good enough for now.

Obscurity4340 3y ago

Do you see the main issues inherent to Lemmy as likely to be remediable?

davidgerard 3y ago
oh sure. As I said, it's good enough to do the one job.
dragontamer 3y ago
IMO, all code can be fixed. Especially if large groups of people agree upon the problems with the code. Its the politics / contradictions at the social level that leads to true difficulties. Mastodon has proven that these moderation issues can be solved. The question is if the Lemmy devs (and community) can politically agree that Mastodon-like moderation tools are a good idea to prioritize. That's where I'm worried. I guess its not a big deal because there's bigger fish to fry right now, so to speak. (Plenty of simpler bugs that everyone agrees upon). But eventually, the fundamental user-tracking / karma-system / vs defederation / design of anti-trolling tools becomes political and ideologically based. What happens to the community then? Hard for me to say. I hope that the overall community accepts the problem and agrees its a problem worth fixing (even at a slight tracking / anti-anonymity features getting pushed to Lemmy-core). If not, maybe the problem can be solved with bots (aka: IRC) that helps track Karma-like scores and whatnot across servers and helps auto-moderate content that enters a particular server or even community/sublemmy. I think I can "imagine" solutions to these problems. But what I can't foresee is what the community will deem an acceptable solution or not. ------------------- Mastodon is a very good model though and has led the way by showing what kind of tools are needed to curate a community. I see that Lemmy kinda-sorta wants go to about things a different way though.
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  Do you think Lemmy be re-established or forked in a similar sense in which Lemmy itself is a "fork" of Reddit, if that makes sense?
  - 3y ago