• Head admin @ lemm.ee, a general-purpose Lemmy instance
  • Creator of lemmy-ui-next, an alternative Lemmy frontend
  • Lemmy contributor

ko-fi

  • 3 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle




  • Regarding your question:

    Lemmy federation basically works by copying stuff from their source instance to all other federated instances. So if I write a comment on lemm.ee, other federated instances will get their own copy of my comment. They will also all know that the “authority” for this comment is lemm.ee.

    If an admin on another instance decides to delete their local copy of my comment on lemm.ee, then they are always free to do so (for example, some instances might want to moderate more strictly), but any actions they take like this are limited to their own instance - for the rest of Lemmy, lemm.ee remains the authority for this comment, so individual remote instance admins taking actions won’t have any effect on any other instances.

    As for the original topic of modlog federation, basically it just boils down to this: just like with the comment example above, Lemmy instances also save a local copy of incoming federated mod logs. The Lemmy software does not yet have 100% coverage in terms of federating mod logs (for example, there are no federated logs yet for instance admins banning remote users), but this coverage has been increasing, and I expect this will eventually get to 100% (just needs more dev time really).

    Also, if some instance admins try to tamper with their mod logs, then other instances can still see the real history, because there is no way for an instance admin to delete copies of their mod log from other instances.



  • Most actions federate, any exceptions which aren’t federated yet are generally just there because the federation logic has not been implemented (but improvements are constantly being worked on).

    Generally federating the modlog is mostly just there for informative purposes. As in, we can check what mod actions were taken on instance A through the modlog on instance B (and there is no mechanism in Lemmy for other instances to retroactively remove or hide federated modlog items, btw).



  • I am very sad about the situation with Beehaw specifically.

    I think it’s a very unfortunate case where all parties have the best intentions of building something great with Lemmy, but through different circumstances, relations have soured and involved people no longer think they have a shared vision (which in my opinion is actually not true - I believe that Beehaws vision fits in very well with the direction Lemmy is going, especially with private communities being planned soon).

    I am still hopeful that things can be improved, but we will see.


  • I think something is being lost in communication here. Nothing is being destroyed.

    I keep seeing this disconnect, I think it needs to be emphasized: Lemmy maintainers have been focusing (and continue to focus on) safety and moderation improvements. Anybody can verify this by looking through PRs/commits/RFCs on GitHub.

    I think I understand where the disconnect is coming from - there have been a few responses in some of these threads by Lemmy devs where they tell people to be less rude and demanding, and to contribute if they desperately want some feature. Perhaps as an observer, this sounds like “we do not care about mod tools” or whatever, but reality is just different.

    Perhaps it would be useful to do a more in-depth post about all the stuff Lemmy devs have worked on and are currently working on? I mean things like:

    • When purging a federated user, federate local community removals. (#4505)
    • Mods and admins can comment in locked posts (fixes #4116) (#4488)
    • When site banning a federated user, also remove their content from our local communities. (#4464)
    • Store password reset token after email successfully sent (fixes #3757) (#4489)
    • Require verified email to reset password (#4482)
    • Correctly synchronize collection of community featured posts (fixes #3867) (#4475)
    • Ignore expired bans in CommentReportView::read, just like in CommentReportQuery::list (#4457)
    • Auto resolve reports on removing a comment or post. Fixes #4390 (#4402)
    • … the list goes on and on and on, these are just a very small and incomplete list of examples of already merged PRs which took me 30 seconds to quickly find on GitHub

    I feel like there is this meme developing in Lemmy that maintainers are putting out a message of not caring about mod tools, which anybody with context will know is completely false, but I think most Lemmy users (and even many admins!) just don’t have this context.


  • The core issue here is that there are too many things to do, and too few developers to do them. By the way, for a huge number of these things that need to be done, there is most likely at least one person who thinks it’s the absolute highest priority for Lemmy. Forking would not help fix this issue, it would only make it worse.

    In other words: if you’re a Rust dev, you can just fix it in Lemmy anyway, so there is no benefit from forking. If you’re not a Rust dev, then after forking, you will have a new repo to create issues on, except you’ll have 0 devs to actually fix them.






  • I kind of get where you’re coming from, but to me it sounds like you’re looking for a different experience than what Lemmy is designed for. It seems you are more interested in aggergating all posts about specific topics (like “books”), and strongly limiting the effect of moderation (as nobody would have final say about how to moderate an entire topic). If I correctly understood the experience you’re interested in, then for sure the design of Lemmy will not match that.

    I don’t think it’s fair to describe this as a fatal flaw, though. Lemmy is not built around the idea of generic, “ownerless” topics, instead, it’s built around communities with clear owners. We have decentralization at the admin and infrastructure level (as in, a single admin does not control the entire network), but this does not really mean we also need to have it at individual community level.

    IMO it’s totally fine that different people create different communities with extremely similar purposes. The entire internet as a whole also works like this - the internet itself is decentralized, but at the same time people can create different websites with very similar purposes (and even domains!), and it works out fine. For example, it’s totally possible for there to exist a news.com, news.co.uk, news.ee, news.fi, etc. Imagine if whenever you navigated to news.fi with your browser, it would also automatically insert content from all the other news websites of all possible domains - it doesn’t really seem like a useful feature, but that’s kind of analogous to what you’re suggesting for Lemmy at the moment.




  • I am not really interested in discussing this with you, as you already have an opinion about lemm.ee and seem intent on spreading false rumors about us. I’ve learned several months ago that no matter how much you give to people for free, there will always be users demanding more, so I don’t think there is any chance of you being interested in what I have to say. I am just responding here, so other users who may end up reading this thread don’t come away with the impression that what you are saying is true.

    First of all, no user has ever been banned from lemm.ee for criticizing the admin team. Our admins have banned nearly a thousand users in the past ~7 months (just think about that for a second - that is a massive amount of bullshit our volunteer admins have had to wade through in the span of less than a year), and indeed the mod log is public, so you can easily check the ban reasons, which are consistently related to violations of our basic instance rules.

    If any moderation team on any of our communities does not follow our instance rules, then such communities are closed. We have in fact had to do this several times before with some conservative-type communities, mainly because they wanted to push the ideas that some people, based on their identities, are less valuable as humans that others. The current conservative community on the other hand is consistently moderating based on our instance rules, and they have incorporated the no bigotry rule into their community rules as well. If this ever changes, then we will take action, just as we have done previously.

    Regarding the allegations against one of the mods, I’m not sure if you’ve seen the event they were referencing, but I think it’s safe to say that this event was extremely misrepresented by the accuser. In any real cases of CSAM, lemm.ee has taken drastic actions. We have purged, banned, defederated, reported to authorities, we have implemented some technical safeguards, and we will continue to take action like this in the future as well.

    Let me just finish off by saying that we are a volunteer team giving up our time for free. I realize that users want admins to be perfect and moderate exactly in line with their preferences, but we are humans, we miss things, we make mistakes, and we can not possibly be available 24/7 or read every single piece of content posted by other lemm.ee users.


  • lemm ee: The owners don’t really moderate and its users reflect this fact. Universally unpleasant userbase.

    This is categorically untrue. You can find our administration policy here, and we frequently ban users for breaking our instance rules. At most you could make the claim that we are lenient when it comes to things like heated arguments, as we often give warnings or temporary bans to users in such cases, but on the other hand, our “no bigotry” rule is very strict, and violations have consistently resulted in permanent bans.

    We of course don’t screen all posts and comments which our users write, so we can only respond to reports, but I assure you that our admin team is constantly going over and responding to the report queue (which is a big effort, and clearly a thankless job).

    By the way, I just want to point out that we have ~3000 active monthly users on lemm.ee, I find it very unlikely that you can make an accurate universal judgement about such a huge group of people.