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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • This is the same argument about banning on Reddit, but as a former mod, my experience is that very few people will actually go through the effort to spin up an alt to keep trolling. A handful will (we had one person who put a note in their calendar to send a “mean” modmail every month for a weirdly long time), but most are just lazy bored posters who have fun messing with people they don’t like, and if they can’t conveniently browse their targets for opportunities, they’ll just go do something else they find fun rather than go through the effort. Despite accounts being basically free and meaningless, banning trolls was unexpectedly effective.


  • CTH did more than just troll, but doing something in addition to trolling doesn’t make you not a troll. Most of the rest of Reddit didn’t experience the fun in-sub content, they just experienced its trolling and brigading, and we don’t need to pretend that Hexbear and r/CTH aren’t largely one and the same. They don’t need federation to do the internal culture stuff you’re waxing poetic about, they need federation to troll.

    And I couldn’t care less whether calling CTH or your thousands of friends trolls is going to make you hostile. THEY were hostile to other people because it was fun for them. The trolling is already here via the OP. It’s tiresome and just degrades forums for their targets and everyone not in on the joke trying to figure out what their issue is. You guys don’t get to spend years trolling reddit just to say “we have a new name now, so you can’t judge us on our prior actions”.

    Maybe admins will wait and see. If somehow it isn’t a huge source of trolling then I fully support federating. But I’m going to say I don’t think the odds are good. And if the admins do what you expect and don’t go back and revisit the choice I can’t say I’m going to think it’s a huge loss.


  • Alternately make non-troll leftists join a non-troll instance if they want to just go out into the wider Fediverse without the stigma. Once they federate they won’t have to be on the CTH-successor instance, they’re choosing to be there. Like I said in my other reply to you, I don’t find the lemmygrad users nearly as trollish as CTH was. It’s not the ideology that’s the problem, it’s the trolling, and they’re pre-announcing they won’t do anything to curb trolling by their users.

    CTH wasn’t just a sub that happened to have some users who also trolled, they frequently organized and bragged about trolling and brigading there. And while mods need to be ready to ban individual trolls, it’s also a volunteer activity and not dealing with a rotating cast of trolls or massive brigades could be worth shutting out some posters who wouldn’t be a problem themselves. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable stance to say “wait and see if it’s a problem”, but I also don’t think it’s an unreasonable stance to say “we know what’s likely going to happen, we’re not robots who have to pretend we were born yesterday”.



  • Eh, so be it. CTH made its own bed and in the thread talking about federating users are demonstrating why people should be skeptical of the value of federating with a troll-prone instance. The mods of CTH back in the day also sometimes asked their users to behave themselves, it didn’t really work. And since their admins have explicitly said they won’t police trolling elsewhere, it’s really nothing more than a passing suggestion.

    In an ideal world, lemmy.world waits and sees if they’re really committed to keeping their shit on local. In a non-ideal world never federating with instances extremely likely to troll is also a pretty good choice.


  • CTH was kind of a problematic sub (quite separate from the claimed “don’t be mean to slaveholders” reason for their banning), so I’m not really opposed to not welcoming a mirror of a sub known for brigades and trolling other communities with open arms. Maybe their new administration/moderation/community is better, but lemmy.world can always federate after they’ve demonstrated that elsewhere.





  • No, Beehaw users posting in Beehaw communities visible on Lemmy.world. There’s no third party interaction on either of those posts (just the Beehaw OP and Lemmy.world comments). Whether or not Beehaw is doing the convenience of sending updates, their content is accessible through Lemmy.world. It might take some action on a user here to trigger a pull, but it’s entirely possible and you shouldn’t expect defederation to prevent an intrusive instance from continuing to get content if they want it.

    I don’t know for sure there isn’t some pathway through another instance causing this, but in my understanding that’s not how federated communities work. There’s the owner instance that has the true version of the content and distributes it around and then local copies on each other server that feed their updates back to the main instance. You wouldn’t ever take a third party’s version of a community because you couldn’t trust its legitimacy.




  • Defederation is a one-way block of incoming traffic from the blocked instance. I’m on lemmy.world and can still see Beehaw content posted by Beehaw users even though they’ve defederated from lemmy.world, but if I comment on that content it will only be visible to lemmy.world users. Beehaw has protected its communities from lemmy.world commenters, but its content is still accessible by anyone for any purpose. Instances that federate with both sides don’t change this.




  • My expectation is that Threads will be too permissive with rules rather than too strict. They’re pretty happy to have LibsOfTikTok on there so they can make money from the stochastic terrorism. The problem I see is that their size means defederation for insufficient moderation isn’t a real threat, so federating instances are stuck with per-user moderation and will be overwhelmed with Threads trolls.

    I suppose it ends up being “their rules are our rules”, but in a “there are no rules and you’ll accept it” sort of way, rather than “adhere to our community standards or we’ll take away 90% of your users”.


  • Yes, I’m talking about what Threads users may see. It’s not clear how the Threads Algorithm will evaluate and prioritize showing Mastodon toots, but even less clear how it will prioritize message-board-like Lemmy content. It may not ever show them because it’s very possible it will either filter or devalue non-microblogging post types to fit with its native format. Whether or not they technically Federate is only half the question because they have the Algorithm deciding what you actually see.