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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • Ech@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.mlBlackberryPi Handheld
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    4 months ago

    When I was younger, palmpilots and blackberrys were the coolest things to me. Something that was basically a computer you could carry in your pocket? I wanted one so bad! And now basically everyone has something even better. Funny how things change.








  • 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.