Ech

Demands software they didn’t develop and servers they don’t run abide by their self-proclaimed criteria

Tells others to “get over yourself”

Why bother deciding? Just get rid of both.

Jacked-a-lot-l

Brain trauma builds character!

Looks like the Joker - the J-Man.

Ah, that makes sense. I had initially assumed the infinite train cars was a “happy” accident of generation quirks.

What do you think the buildings are connected by…?

Nothing here is written in stone. If shitty people take over, there’s absolutely nothing to stop them throwing out the rules as written, or just ignoring them.

But also: If the idea is that we should just trust the admins: Why have any rules at all?

All we have here is trust. These rules are more so the admins proclaiming their intended goals and actions. Again, there’s nothing to stop an instance admin from doing whatever they want. Could it be more verbose? Absolutely. But as for the claims that the new rules show any deviousness on the part of the current admins, or that having better written rules will inherently protect anyone? Those don’t really hold any merit, imo.

While I don’t think it would be unwarranted, it’s also not specifically necessary. They can interpret that line to mean anything they want. It’s a volunteer run, privately hosted reddit clone. It doesn’t need to be as intricate as US law (which I not sure why that’s “baseline” for anything).

5.0.1: Before using the website, remember you will be interacting with actual, real people and communities. Lemmy.World is not a place for you to attack other groups of people. Every one of our users has a right to browse and interact with the website and all of its contents free of treatment such as harassment, bullying, violation of privacy or threats of violence.

This seems less about users bailing and more about instance admins deciding to do so. The latter have a much higher level of overhead and stress to deal with, so it makes sense to see as the highs of the Reddit protests fade out.

Seriously. Very discomforting looking at that.

That one in the corner is just Rik Mayall.

And? That’s still not saying anything about people with more than one account.

I never said they couldn’t? Just making an observation about what their declared preferences suggest.

Also, they’re the ones advocating for all-inclusive access. Personally I think everything works well enough as-is. If a user gets annoyed or tired of an instance, they can quite easily hop to another. No need to restrict the abilities of admins just because wants to browse chapotraphouse on their main.

Sounds like you’d like it better over there full-time.

Don’t blame the generation, it just makes you sound like an old man yelling “get off my lawn”.

I’m assuming that they are also Gen Z, with the whole college roommates thing.

It’s certainly a conundrum. I remember people mentioning something in line with your suggestion of a “chain of trust” during the discussion around the bot signups when they were noticed. I just worry it’ll be prone to abuse, especially by larger, more popular instances that will wield more sway if given the power to legitimize other instances or block them out entirely.

I’m also not sure what adjustments are possible in regards to how federation works. If I understand it right, defederation really just shuts the blinds on one instance against another. The offending instance will still receive all the posts and comments from the other one and will be able to vote and comment, and any instances not defederated will still receive all of that interaction from the “blocked” instance. To truly deal with an instance full of bots, it would need to be blocked entirely, which is pretty extreme and I don’t know how that would interact with Lemmy as it’s programmed right now.

That would certainly be one way to handle it, but it brings up a few issues to my mind.

One, like I brought up in my comment, it would be pretty contradictory to a decentralized platform like Lemmy/the Fediverse. Every instance is run the way the admins wish, and having a forced banlistwould be pretty contrary to that idea. If a central authority controls the platform, it isn’t very decentralized, is it? That said, even if we accept an enforced banlist, how effective can it be?

It would need to be handled by a person or group beyond reproach, there would need to be an ironclad way of telling which instances are homes to bots, and it would need to be constantly maintained to add instances as they were found out. None of these really translate to the real world, unfortunately. And even if we get lucky on all of those points and it worked out for a while, introducing a way to block instances off from the entire platform without approval is a pretty big risk if it ever falls into problematic hands down the road.

And if it’s not enforced, we’re left relying on all the instances agreeing, which is just not going to happen. Some instances will decline to work together out of principle, disagreement, or just contrarianism. And then we have all the “dark” instances that are left unmaintained and updated. I’m not sure how much of a problem that latter group would be, overall, but I figure it would lead to some issue or another. Maybe I’m over estimating the effect non-participants would have, but even if that’s not such an issue, what happens when big instances have disagreements, or start their own banlist? Then it’s just a fractured mess that isn’t really helping anybody, doing more to hinder efforts against bot havens than it is helping.

All in all, I just don’t see a good way of it working. I know I’m not really offering solutions here. I’m really just poking holes everywhere, but that’s kind of my point. I hope I’m wrong and there’s a way to address this that I just don’t see. I really like this whole decentralized thing and I want it to work out!

This is (most likely) a case of poor or absent instance administration, and it looks like it’s being managed well enough, but I do wonder what recourse there is against bad actors setting up their own instance, populating it with bots, and using them outside the influence of anyone else. For one, how do we tell which instances are just bot havens? Obviously we can make inferences based on active users and speed of growth, but a smart person could minimize those signs to the point of being unnoticeable. And if we can, what do we do with instances that have been identified? There’s defederation, but that would only stop their influence on the instances that defederated. The content would still be open to voting from those instances, and those votes would manifest on instances that haven’t defederated them. It would require a combined effort on behalf of the whole Fediverse to enforce a “ban” on an instance. I can’t really see any way to address these things without running contrary to the decentralized nature of the platform.