this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2023
5 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43849 readers
835 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This manual approval of new accounts was implemented to battle spam and floods of newly created bot accounts. Sadly, it is a necessary evil as people do not seem to be able to behave themselves (and create bot account to spam), as is always the case.
I disagree. That would not solve the issue with spam bots. Furthermore, the word centralization is forbidden in conjunction with Lemmy in a single sentence :) You cannot create a decentralized self-hosted federated platform and have a centralized account approval server. That goes againts everything decentralization stands for.
First, moderation is not censorship. Second, it's up to whoever is hosting the instance to moderate as they see fit. I'm sure there are or very shortly will be plenty of unmoderated instances
We are in total agreement on that! I think a better solution to what I'm suggesting would be a simple indicator on the join-lemmy.org site on whether a server allows automatic account registration to join the server or if it is invite only. Would that be agreeable to you? I think that would obviate the need for any other solution I've mentioned here.
That is possible, implementable a clear in its functionality. You can try to open an issue im the websites GitHub repository and see what the developers and others think. Alternatively, you can try to implement this functionality yourself and create a PR for it.
Thank you for the suggestion, I'll go ahead and do so. I sincerely appreciate the input, that is actionable.
I don't know that it is meant to be a drop-in reddit replacement. That's an assumption that goes too far IMO. I think it's certainly intended to have a lot of similar functionality as reddit, but the nature of it being decentralized tells me right off the bat that it's not a drop-in reddit replacement. That being said I do think there is a balance in striving to make it easy for people to onboard, especially reddit users looking for something else, but I also understand that keeping out bots and spam is critical.
It's easy to say it should be changed because we don't know what would happen if they changed it, but if the site did become overloaded in spam, that would be even more of a detriment than slowing the growth because people have to wait for approval. At least while others are waiting for approval, the people already here can use and enjoy the platform. If you get rid of that and it becomes loaded with spam, then no one gets to enjoy the platform.
But if the protocol for Lemmy is already decentralized, it would still be entirely up to the admins of the server to allow instant account approval or not, would it not? Lemmy.ml is not the entire lemmy protocol, Lemmy.ml gets to decide the rules here, and banning hate speech accounts from approval is a totally legitimate decision on their part because they don't want that kind of spam here.
That's what mods are for on reddit, so I'm currently failing to see the problem. Moderators exist on Lemmy servers right? That's how reddit solves the problem, why can't that work the same way on Lemmy?
The admins of the server have every right to ban users they don't want on their server or to make their server invite only, I am absolutely not contesting that. Their space, their rules. A violation of the servers rules should absolutely result in a ban.
I think the difficulty with a place that has such a low userbase that then grows rapidly is not having a lot of established active moderators. There's a lag time to some extent to getting active and responsible moderators. Plus not being a moderator nor an admin on Lemmy, I don't know the capabilities they have at hand, but I know with reddit the moderator tools were built up over time. All of the automodding capabilities they have now didn't exist at the beginning, and the automod tools are what allow them to handle such high numbers of users. I suspect Lemmy probably doesn't have extensive automated moderating tools at their disposal at the moment if I consider other deficits that Lemmy has at the moment.
How do you feel about a simple tag/indicator on the join-lemmy.org site that indicates whether a server has open registration or is invite only?
You are completely right. Disabling the approval feature equals unmoderatable instance (when the bots come), because a human (a moderator) simply cannot compete with a Python script posting spam every few milliseconds. Such instances are therefore instantly defederated by others in order to protect themselves.
Would automod functionality and keyword ban list for usernames serve to alleviate those concerns you have? If not, is there any solution you would propose that you think may work to solve that issue?
Sure, they would. But for that, you would need to implement them first, and implement them right, which is a highly challenging endeavour. I could imagine that this is on a backlog for Lemmy development, but it will take a while before any usable implementation is applicable.
Cool, then we're in agreement! I've opened a github issue per your suggestion here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2899
The only reason I don’t think that could happen is because unfortunately people would abuse the fact that there accounts can’t be removed