Ah yea, everyone that has an opinion that isn’t mine is dangerous and deserves to be silenced. I totally agree. I think lemmy.world should refederate, and then defederate a second time, just to make sure they get the message.

There wereultiple cross-posts daily pointing to specific threads posted on hexbear to organize brigading.

Yeah, I do remember that. That’s why I’m not signed up there. They weren’t changing anyone’s minds with their shitstirring and were doing it for their own enjoyment (which is damaging to all communities, even nonpolitical ones, if people avoid your platform due to trolling).

That said, it was a past problem, and posters on lemmy.world are still out there complaining about Hexbear like they’re relevant. I’m speaking about the current situation.

I’m not advocating for them to re-federate with lemmy.world (I have no dog in the race, anyway, being a part of neither instance) but I do remember watching the Hexbear mods/admins shutting down the actual brigading of threads before lemmy.world de-federated. Not sure it was a solvable problem, anyway, Hexbear is rather antagonistic in ways I don’t agree with.

Have you considered you are just observing this:

Hexbear is for communists to talk to communists. They get plenty of the “default” liberal opinions from waves hands around vaguely and are entitled to their own community, no?.

Obviously if you go into Hexbear and just start posting anti-China stuff they’re going to ban you. It’s not like the English-speaking world is bereft of anti-China news articles.

You got it. I even reported it.

For what it’s worth I’m not even vegetarian. I’m interested in pet health and there really isn’t any studies I can find saying vegan cat food is bad for cats… which I found very surprising. My cat is diabetic so I can only feed her prescription food anyway.

None of these article titles go anywhere when searched on google.

The articles from the Journal of Animal Science can’t be found on this archive: link

Do you have the DOI for any of these articles?

It seems like it should be easy to find real studies showing vegan diets are bad for cats. I hope this isn’t AI generated.

“feculate carnivore” returns no results on google. Oblate carnivore returns results for obligate carnivores, looks to be that obligate/oblate is used interchangeably?

I haven’t heard either of these terms as a native English speaker. Perhaps they are regional terms, or terms from another language?

Yea, I agree. It’s good enough. Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like it was a bad solution, it’s just not perfect and people ought to be aware of limitations.

I used a small instance in my example so the problem was easier to understand, but a motivated person could target someone on a large instance, too, so long as that person tended to vote in the posts they commented on.

Just for example (and I feel like I should mention, I have no bad feelings towards this guy), Flying Squid on lemmy.world posts all over the place, even on topics with few upvotes. If you pull all his posts, and all votes left in those posts from all users, I bet you could find one voter who stands out from the crowd. You just need to find the guy following him everywhere: himself.

I mean, if he tends to leave votes in topics he comments on, which I assume he does.

It would have to be a very targeted attack and that’s much better than the system lemmy uses right now. I’m remembering the mass tagger on Reddit, I thought that add on was pretty toxic sometimes.

Also, it just occurred to me, on Lemmy, when you post you start with one vote, your own. I can even remove this vote (and I’ll do it and start this post off with score 0). I wonder how this vote is handled internally? That would be an immediate flaw in this attempt to protect people’s privacy.

While not a perfect solution, this seems very smart. It’s a great mitigation tactic to try to keep user’s privacy intact.

Seems to me there’s still routes to deanonymization:

1. Pull posts that a user has posted or commented in
2. Do an analysis of all actors in these posts. The poster’s voting actor will be over represented (if they act like I assume most users do. I upvote people I reply to etc)
3. if the results aren’t immediately obvious, statistical analysis might reveal your target.

Piefed is smaller than lemmy, right? So if only one targeted posting account is voting somewhat consistently in posts where few piefed users vote/post/view, you got your guy.

Obviously this is way harder than just viewing votes. Not sure who would go to the trouble. But a deanonymization attack is still possible. Perhaps rotate the ids of the voting accounts periodically?

I think they should be public. They’re already accessible for mbin posts and anyone administrating a lemmy instance. It should be clear to all users that their votes are already not private.

Someone could make a lemmy instance just to get voting behavior and make a website with cool graphs and stuff today and the only thing that could stop them is defederation. If Lemmy gets popular, this is just an inevitability.

Imagine if a large instance decided to do that today. Imagine if lemmy.world released lemmy.world/votes. Would people defederate just for that? Remember: Mbin already displays scores and I don’t think anyone has defederated over it.

Might as well put it on the interface so everyone understands it isn’t private. Rip off the bandaid.