Probably, but there’s clearly not a lot of interest at present, and anyone running one such instance would absolutely incur scrutiny nonetheless.
It’d probably be simpler to send the information to a trusted moderator on some specialized community through some dead drop, rather than going through the hassle of making a whole system for throwaway accounts, at that.
I’m not suggesting you host a normal instance, I’m suggesting making a fork that makes the instance logless and allows anonymous burners.
The important thing is to be a black hole for investigating origins of posts, right?
A logless instance that does not keep track of accesses/ips/etc would mean that even in the case of a subpoena there’s nothing to turn over, and the ability to make burners with just an id and a password would ensure nothing is trackable.
You will need to make some adjustments to prevent botting but other than that this takes care of cross referencing, in my book.
Basically the same stuff that companies like mullvad do for their VPN hosting.
Why not simply set up an instance yourself with the features you’d like to see?
Anon identities may not work in the strictest sense but I’m sure something like throwaway accounts made without email addresses or something along those lines would be doable.
Only if your conception of better/worse is focussed on user count rather than user quality.
No, decidedly not. Unless out there there is an instance whose users are all all-around paste eaters, every instance has some users worth keeping in some conversation, furthermore political alignment says nothing about insight or competence in fields unrelated to politics.
A nazi is just as likely to know how to fix an obscure bug in some game or program than a tankie or a liberal, people are more complicated than their political allegiances and blanket removing an instance does us a disservice as much as it does them.
Refraining from defederation won’t change that.
Refraining from making the fediverse an archipelago where people refuse to talk to anyone who had the misfortune of picking the wrong instance is going to make that better, yes.
Not everyone who made an instance on lemmy.ml is a tankie. I almost did, and the only reason I didn’t is that they very gracefully and clearly state that Lemmy.ml is the flagship but not the largest instance.
Tankie mods don’t moderate in good faith though
Yeah, that’s why I’m suggesting making mods of other instances review ban appeals.
If you ban someone because you’re butthurt your precious red-brown alliance is being besmirched, mods from instances that don’t suck Stalin’s dick on the daily will hopefully call you out on it and force you to reverse the ban or defederate.
My hope is to make it so defederation is not something we do to undesirable instances, but that they do to themselves.
The latter is preferable because it requires an instance to be so ideologically far gone that its own denizens would agree with this over replacing the mod team, whereas the former only really needs a bad enough opinion of the instance from its neighbours, which IMO is not a good standard.
Man, I genuinely don’t know.
I’d expect this to be some sort of public cross-instance structure that is readonly to users so we could spectate the conversations and maybe up/downvote, where you could see what essentially amounts to the meeting minutes in the form of a normal thread?
But before we even get there there’d need to be an agreement and either a fork of the core lemmy code to implement this or we’d need to get the lemmy devs on board and LMAO good luck with that, we’re literally discussing creating a system to divest them of their power and they’re ideologically authoritarian.
I fucking hate tankies, but.
The problem i have, every time this conversation happens, is that cutting them out doesn’t solve anything, and that I don’t want to be coddled.
The 2 main issues we have, as lemmy at large, is that there are some wildly uneven standards enforced across instances and that we have no say about that. There was that hugbox instance that would ban people for being rude and yeeted itself into the void, there was hexbear that got de-federated for its mods actively encouraging being subversive (despite its users receiving intolerable psychic damage after 5 minutes in any lib space where people are free to call them names, or was that lemmygrad?) and now we’re talking about removing lemmy.ml for the fact that its mods are somehow sentient pieces of actual shit.
And while I agree to all of those reasons, I don’t think defederating is the answer.
Every time we fragment the fediverse we make it overall worse.
Average users don’t even understand what they’re looking at when it comes to decentralized networks, let alone can they understand that there’s politicking between instances and such. If I were told “you can make an account on instance x or y, but they don’t talk to eachother so if you want to see stuff on instance y you can’t make an account on instance x” as a rando, I would go back to reddit, the only reason I didn’t is that i really hate the app and I am tech/net savvy enough to handle this.
I am a tad more radical when it comes to speech than most, and I accept that, but I do believe that these people have no power so long as they can’t abuse moderation, so the answer to the question “how do we handle open propagandists”, to me, is to create perhaps a “moderation neutrality charter” and making it very clear which instances subscribe to it, having each instance’s moderation team maybe be required to weigh in on appeals to bans from other instances to ensure a certain amount of balance.
That would take care of that real quick. They can subscribe to the charter and start abiding by neutral moderation standards agreed to across the board by some democratic standard, or they can defederate themselves.
That’s actually something twitter does right with the idea of community notes, that for the note to be published it needs to be agreed on by multiple parties that don’t usually agree in those votes, to ensure there is a bipartisan agreement.
I know this is perhaps too lofty for a ragtag group of essentially microblogging self-hosters, but a man can dream.
I use names off the list of 22 fallen angels from the Book of Enoch.
It’s a really interesting piece of hebrew apocrypha that details the circumstances leading to the flood. Feels much more high fantasy/pagan myth than the modern bible/torah.
The reason there is no such thing in elections, is to prevent vote buying/extortion.
In Italy it’s such an extreme problem that any ballot where the party is not marked with a cross on the party logo and (if present) a block capital name next to it on the provided line, is automatically discounted, because stuff like writing a name a specific way or using crosses, checks, dots, or other symbols was used to track vote buying/voter intimidation in mafia controlled territories.
Some vote counters and polling station overseers would be on the take and keep track of if the votes they expected to see showed up when counting ballots and report back.
If you were able in any way to prove something beyond the equivalent of an “I voted” sticker it would immediately be used to ensure people voted a certain way or to exact some sort of backlash on those who didn’t.