copygirl

When you say “trans woman” you affirm that they are women, and trans is just an adjective. When you say “transwoman” it can imply that they are something different altogether, and TERFs have certainly used it as such. Like, I dunno, a carpark isn’t a park? That’s the first example that came to mind, anyway.

I use uBlock Origin + vaft from TwitchAdSolutions, which is currently working pretty well for me. I’ve had some issues before, and every now and then the stream can freeze up when an ad is played. But it’s so much better than having to endure even a second of those mind-rotting ads.

At the moment, upvotes and downvotes, while not used that way by many people, is more about what others will see, rather than what content you like. It’s more like a community moderating and rating effort. Upvotes make posts more visible, by pushing them further up in what’s currently popular. Downvotes do the opposite, and in my personal opinion, should be reserved for posts that don’t fit the community they were posted in, spam, or things that break rules – typically the same reason why you would (and should) report a post. They are not “agree” and “disagree” buttons. Topics you disagree with can still spark interesting conversations.

Using the same mechanic, voting, to tell an algorithm whether similar posts should have higher visibility on your own feed, would be incompatible with this existing system. Posts that get a quick reaction or emotion out of you are even further encouraged, while things you simply don’t want to see (but aren’t necessarily “bad”) get punished heavily.

This system works through subscribing to communities you are interested in and actively participating in improving the health of those communities, rather than passively consuming content. That takes some effort, yes.

All in all I think this proposed system is not compatible with Lemmy, and maybe not even a good idea.

A personal instance generally doesn’t have a big reach, unless people actively follow the person who’s posting the doxxing information.* The fediverse may not be a good way to spread personal information of others, throwing up an instance like that is not much different than throwing up a website or forum.

There’s two things I can think of you can do: Contact the company that hosts the website to take it down – I’m unsure about how you go about this, but I’m sure you can find out more about that. And to report the instance to other instance admins to get it blacklisted, perhaps get it on a block list, limiting its reach and thus effectiveness. Get in contact with big instance admins, they likely have chatrooms you could join, and they might be able to help with the other step as well.

*edit: In the case of Lemmy, I suppose it would be people following a community, rather than a user directly. If moderators or admins act on the posted informated and delete it, the deletion will federate as well and any legitimate instance will automatically delete the content on their servers as well. This would also be true for Mastodon and such. If not, the above applies.

I think you’re wrong. Downvotes are literally meant to be to provide a community powered mechanism to push irrelevant content into out of view, as per the community’s purpose. They are not going to be used as part of an algorithm to push more relevant content to you specifically. Of course, that’s not how a lot of people end up using them, so whether it’s an effective mechanism is another question.

Meanwhile, I’m on an instance that doesn’t federate downvotes, so they don’t affect ranking here, maybe for the better?

Shonk.

From what I know, F-Droid compiles apps from source so you can be sure that the code you’re running is actually made from the source code that it claims to be built from. On most other platforms, the developers could be uploading malicious programs that actually have the code changed from what’s shared online as its source code. Then add the fact that other developers can and do look at the code, and what changes are made from version to version.

On Mastodon, when you follow another user on another instance, your instance will send a request to the other, to be notified of new posts made by that user, as well as posts they’ve boosted. When such a new post arrives, a copy will be created on your instance so it can be displayed without nagging the original instance again for the post’s content and such.

Lemmy is similar of course, since it uses the same underlying protocol (ActivityPub). Think of communities as “special users”. Whenever someone creates a post or reply, the community will boost it, so it ends up on every instance where a user has subscribed to that community.

This part I’m not entirely sure on but I believe it’s how things work: The other way to send messages around other than subscription is obviously to send messages directly. In ActivityPub there’s a field that specifies the recipients of a message. When such a message is created, it is pushed to the instances of the recipients. On Lemmy, the recipient is the community you’re posting to. On Mastodon, the recipients are filled with all the users that you @-mention in the contents of the message. So for a Mastodon user to post to Lemmy, they have to mention the community, which is why you see some posts that contain the community’s handle.

Because you can’t follow / subscribe to users on Lemmy, the posts of Mastodon users that don’t involve Lemmy never end up being “federated”, meaning Lemmy instances don’t get notified of these posts, so they don’t end up being “copied”. This is the same on Mastodon by the way. Unless your instance sends out a request to fetch posts from an unknown user, it doesn’t know about their posts, since nobody so far has cared about them.

This makes sense because if you were to try and store all the content from the fediverse you would need a LOT of storage for little gain. Similarly it would be bad to never store the content and always fetch it, because that would generate a bunch of additional traffic, which especially small instances would suffer from.

To summarize: Lemmy doesn’t display Mastodon posts because it doesn’t have a mechanism to subscribe to those users.

Surely you know more than the lawyers Dolphin got help from.

How long have you been part of the fediverse? (A term which tends to not be capitalized, by the way. *nerd snort*) It’s not about you getting to interact with every instance using just one account. It’s about putting the power into the hands of ordinary people. Including the power to associate or disassociate with certain people, communities, and content. That includes an admin’s ability to go “I see you’re not sufficiently moderating your instance. We will defederate until you’ve taken steps to ensure your instance sufficiently moderates with common-sense rules.”. Whether that is due to some content policies or to block an instance from which a ton of spam originates.

Just how with email a provider can choose to block or automatically mark-as-spam any email coming from a server they don’t trust, for example because it’s a known source of spam. It’s actually how a lot of the internet works. And it works as long as well-intentioned people are in positions to make such decisions. And if a server or service goes rogue, they get the equivalent of defederated.

Incorrect. I’m fine with instances that host a variety of content. Including stuff I don’t want to see.

However, I’m allowed to join an instance whose admins take a stance against bigotry for example, and therefore take better care that such content isn’t allowed to freely go through their instance. That way I and a thousand of other users don’t need to all block the content they don’t like manually. It’s my instance admin’s choice, and my choice to go with their instance.

This was perhaps a bad example. Though there’s the possibility of posts not being marked for NSFW that should be (and the instance not enforcing such), and ones that are mostly harmless but still labelled as NSFW for one reason or another. One person’s NSFW is not the same as another person’s NSFW. Feel free to replace the example rule with something else.

If you want your freedom – whatever that means to you – you go to an instance that represents those values. Admins that run their own instance get to decide how they moderate that instance. And that includes blocking (or defederating) whole instances, communities, or individual users. You don’t have to sign up to one that does something you don’t like.

Besides, you don’t seem to understand the importance of moderation. If it wasn’t for the ability to defederate, we’d have tons of fake instances with fake users creating fake posts. Not to mention people going out of their way to make others feel miserable. Do they have the right to spew their hatred? I have my opinion, but it doesn’t matter. I happen to also have the right to join an instance that has a policy to take care of that stuff so I can browse for things that actually interest me.

Allow the admins of the instance to enforce their rules?

Say you have an instance with a “no-NSFW” rule, for people who don’t want to randomly come across NSFW communities. Their admins could take care of the curating of rule-breaking NSFW communities without having to resort to defederating from the entire instance. This doesn’t have to be an outright block but just a filter that could prevent the community to show up in “All”.

Falling in love? In this economy?

Not hating on people who like and enjoy PvP games, but to me it feels like it’s a good way for a developer to make a game that doesn’t actually have that much substance. Lacking content? Nothing to actually do in the game? NPCs are difficult to make interesting to fight? Just have players shoot each other. It’s basically content that creates itself, not to mention (if you have good matchmaking) the difficulty ramps up naturally without you having to write better enemy AI.

I just want to fight stuff alongside other people, rather than potentially making another person’s day just a little worse because I shot them before they shot me, you know? Is that too much to ask?