...but I already left yesterday. ๐
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Based on my own experience operating websites... my guess is that they keep track of browser strings, IP addresses, and login times - and have some kind of offline job that can study all the same accounts that use the same IP addresses around similar times.
I suspect when when the admin looks at an account they can see information about your IP address history, geolocations, browsers, and detected secondary accounts.
Probably. I mean the most obvious thing would be email.
Though my original reddit account never even had an associated email address.
Also keep in mind they have a lot of tools to try and prevent vote manipulation. Even when there are zero email addresses, for over a decade the Reddit code tries to detect if someone logs out and logs in to grant multiple upvotes to the same posting.
Even when it isn't my own posting, I've sometimes upvoted the same posting from two accounts - and see that the count did not go up the same. That's why I assume there is some kind of underlying awareness within the (server) app that the accounts are related.
On a site like Lemmy and Reddit, vote manipulation is key to getting postings to the top of the page. I imagine Lemmy will eventually encounter rogue federated instances that try to game the system. I remember 10 years ago when Reddit had to start building a lot of anti-spam features into the code. But I really dislike how they black-hole comments based on keywords and I was always opening issues in their /r/Bugs subreddit to complain about their instant removal of comments that had certain keywords (in 2020, posting a link to the BBC about anti-vaccination would trigger it on major subreddits that had their spam filter set high).
Good points all around.
To some extent, that kind of automated moderation is inevitable on a service or site that has millions of users. You just can't scale a site that large without throwing out some baby with some bathwater, especially if the service is free.
But the same moderation tools were never necessary on services with small communities of users. From BBS's in the 80s/90s to message boards, small groups don't need to rely on automated filtering. That's part of the appeal of joining a small instance on the fediverse: it's like a club, where standards of behavior don't need aggressive enforcement.
What's unknown to me, however, is how the fediverse can handle spam and bots and abuse from outside communities. That's not something that BBS's or message boards had to deal with as much.
In a pinch, communities could also deal with the problem by just shutting down federation and being entirely "locals only." For communities who are often targeted for abuse, that might be the smartest thing to do, unfortunately.
Either way, I like the format of it so far. Cross-posting to lemmy.ml, for example, I feel like a "guest" in this group, if that makes sense.
That too, verified email addresses would be the most obvious way.