Half the success of Lemmy is not becoming the three ring circus of Reddit.
How long will it last? Idk. I’ve already seen people complaining about AI bots blowing up their instances with requests, mining for data. I’ve already heard complaints of bots manipulating votes on certain subs and accounts.
If that gets worse, Lemmy gets worse.
But for the time being, we’re mostly just a large community of terminally online nerds doing our things and sharing amongst one another, which is what Reddit was supposed to be about.
Decentralized control is probably the biggest asset we have to fight back against these issues. Each instance host has motivation to keep their community in the best shape possible, for users and visitors.
If one instance is having struggles, you can migrate to another - and instance hosts could share tactics and information about the process of management.
Decentralization is more adaptable and brings resilience.
It is easier to compromise one instance, but it is a lot harder to compromise all of them. Meanwhile for centralized social media, if the one is compromised all is compromised.
We might eventually have to get more exclusive, or have separate “public” and “private” modes/communities, maybe like how masto handles post visibility…
I’m not sure if the open internet can ever be fully trusted, especially now with roving packs of predatory crawlers scraping for genuine human OC for their plagiarism machines.
I do not, ActivityPub uses HTTP signatures to make sure messages and requests from other servers are legit,
Essentially, it adds a “signature” header which contains a link to a users public key, a list of headers in the message and a signed hash of all the headers and the request.
A delicated bot to scrape ActivityPub posts is possible, but generic bots shouldn’t work. If a delicated bot is made, people can block its keys or server anyway.
Half the success of Lemmy is not becoming the three ring circus of Reddit.
How long will it last? Idk. I’ve already seen people complaining about AI bots blowing up their instances with requests, mining for data. I’ve already heard complaints of bots manipulating votes on certain subs and accounts.
If that gets worse, Lemmy gets worse.
But for the time being, we’re mostly just a large community of terminally online nerds doing our things and sharing amongst one another, which is what Reddit was supposed to be about.
I am offended and in agreement
Decentralized control is probably the biggest asset we have to fight back against these issues. Each instance host has motivation to keep their community in the best shape possible, for users and visitors.
If one instance is having struggles, you can migrate to another - and instance hosts could share tactics and information about the process of management.
Decentralization is more adaptable and brings resilience.
It is easier to compromise one instance, but it is a lot harder to compromise all of them. Meanwhile for centralized social media, if the one is compromised all is compromised.
As evident with the owner of X trying to pressure Steve Huffman to burn down Reddit as well.
We might eventually have to get more exclusive, or have separate “public” and “private” modes/communities, maybe like how masto handles post visibility…
I’m not sure if the open internet can ever be fully trusted, especially now with roving packs of predatory crawlers scraping for genuine human OC for their plagiarism machines.
Private communities will be in 1.0, along with some other visibility modes.
Legendary.
I doubt they’re crawling stuff over AP, you usually need a HTTP signature for that, and no bot is going to bother with those.
Most crawling would just be spamming the web interface.
If by HTTP signature you mean an SSL certificate signed by an authority, those do not present a burden for bots to obtain any longer.
I do not, ActivityPub uses HTTP signatures to make sure messages and requests from other servers are legit,
Essentially, it adds a “signature” header which contains a link to a users public key, a list of headers in the message and a signed hash of all the headers and the request.
There’s a better explaination here: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/security/
A delicated bot to scrape ActivityPub posts is possible, but generic bots shouldn’t work. If a delicated bot is made, people can block its keys or server anyway.
Signatures are only used to deliver activities to inboxes. The Activitypub json data of posts is usually available without any auth.
A lot of servers require signatures on GET requests as well, for private posts and to block specific people/servers.
Sorry, forgot to whom I was speaking.
Why mine for data when you can just set up your own instance?
To me, one of the really big issues with Reddit is moderators/admins on power trips who randomly ban users for no clear reason.
Sadly, this is very much an issue on Lemmy too. Just read a post about some dude who got banned from some community for downvoting the wrong post.
But at least you can always create a new account on a different instance.