Defederated from Feddit.nl. Update: Refederated!

Just subscribed, good to see you there.

I might migrate !casualconversation@lemmy.world there too in the coming weeks

Thank you!

With the refrigeration, which do you consider the canonical community to follow now? You mod both, right? Are you going to keep the bit posting to both?

Let's also hope it's only temporary.

That assumes that it's not abandoned like rammy.site was, if you don't know rammy.site was a general purpose Lemmy instance a while back which was abandoned by its admin and then some right-wing grifters decided to hijack it and use it to spread hatred. Similarly to this situation they also got defederated, though much more widely then in this case.

The biggest problem is that because they were abandoned eventually the server crashed or the VPS got discontinued or something and now it's gone. If you go to the URL now you get SSL errors and for a while it was showing up as 410 gone. So with Feddit.nl even though you can go and view the contents on it right now if it's abandoned it will likely meet a very similar fate in the near future. Meaning that the community is on it are doomed and will either die or have to migrate elsewhere.

Fair point, i’ll be patiently waiting for the dutch takeover ;)

Ik had geen idee.

Don’t tell our plans…

Mama, dieser Mann sprich aber ein lustiges deutsch :)

Can't wait for GEKOLONISEERD

Go for it. Dutch seems easy. I learned the chorus to Super Max! in like thirty minutes.

Nope, in order to not overload lemmy servers, the lemmy software does not federate pre-(re)federation content. That is one reason why I find it a bit ridiculous to wield the biggest stick you have, defederation, so freely.

Oh, sorry I haven't tried in a while. Looks like it's back up! Thanks!

One of the reasons I have my own email domain and random email addresses for certain services.

And then there's those of us who don't use email for all practical purposes. I haven't sent an email in anger for a donkey's age; the only reason I have an email at all is because of all the people in North America who think email is the wave of the future.

Yeah I still don't have an email associated with my reddit account. Which shocks people... although I haven't logged on in months, so maybe it's now required for legacy accounts

Sadly yeah. We absolutely should use email signup because it filters our the absolute lowest effort bots, but it does nothing against higher quality bots or humans. Not only can you easily spin up new emails on the fly, but many emails allow ways to make the email appear unique (eg, Gmail ignores dots and anything after the + sign), there's plenty of temporary email services with a variety of domains, and if you own a domain, you can trivially create unlimited emails until they catch on and ban the entire domain.

Inactive admins are also an issue, but if malicious users are determined enough, it doesn't matter that much how active an admin is. An active admin can mostly help by making IP banning an option (imperfect, but will work on many humans) and can temporarily turn on approvals to make it easier to weed out low hanging fruit. Nothing will work against someone determined enough, but could at least reduce how many instances they can turn to.

Sure. But we changed our sign-up policy recently. Users are now informed during sign-up that temporary email accounts are banned.

We have another announcement regarding this soon.

In case anyone's wondering, you can use the old.reddit.com interface to sign up without an email.

Out of curiosity: is this an issue of federating content from feddit.nl's communities, or an issue of feddit.nl's users messing with LW?

Thanks for doing this. I've not had to see any of it because you guys are on top of dealing with it. (Although I also don't sort posts by new, so I probably wouldn't see those posts before they got removed anyway.)

Were they the source of the csam attack posts the other week when we removed picture uploads temporarily?

Thank you!

No we're talking about spam attacks. Trolls posting nsfw images to communities

Thank you for defederating with them; I can’t unsee the horrible auto play video that showed up on my feed. Some people are really sick

You certainly buried the lead, Jesus Christ. Thanks for staying on top of all this and being transparent.

1st, great communication- No response because there is no problem. That's a terrific reason for instance administrators to ignore messages. I should have read their minds and known, geesh my bad. 2nd- I used the report feature on august 26th and did not receive a response until a week later. The response wasn't even a fix, it was just asking if I was still having a problem. So thats clearly not the best way to contact admins. That leaves @ ing admins on major posts to get a response. Its annoying, but so far the only effective way. Lastly, If a user creates dozens upon dozens of new communities, solely because they might become popular and then sits on them/isnt active in them, I would say thats an abuse of the system. I suppose we should all start registering any community that could potentially become big. Then when they do become popular, we can gatekeep who is worthy enough to mod them. Plainly, power-mods shouldnt be a thing.

best admins in the fediverse ❤️

If defederation worked more like a shadowban, I would agree with you. .world defederating with feddit.nl could result in no one from .world seeing any content posted by anyone from .nl, but .nl can still see the content from .world. It's unfortunate that .nl couldn't participate anymore, but it's better than that community ceasing to exist.

Defederations as they exist now are like being in a restaurant. There are two employees, one makes the food, the other makes the drinks. It starts out with being able to order either, or both, right from the comfort of your table. However, the owner of the restaurant decides that he just doesn't care much for drinks, and kicks out the drink-maker. The drink-maker opens a new store across the street, but he does not serve food, only drinks, and the restaurant you started at doesn't serve drinks, only food. Yes, technically, you are still free to go across the street to get some drinks, or stay here for some food, but boy, wouldn't it be nicer if that owner never decided he didn't like drinks? Sure, not EVERYONE in the restaurant cares, but a pretty significant amount of them probably would. They might just go down the street to McReddits. Sure, the food there is pretty bad, but at least they can get both food and drinks without having to go across the street.

I never said I didn't understand. I'm pointing out a problem that can, and I believe, will, lead to issues with user retention. If one is punished for the bad actions of someone on their instance that they have no control over, it will lead to frustration. I know this because it has happened to me twice now- once with vlemmy disappearing due to someone posting something bad that spooked the admin, and now feddit.nl because someone posted something bad that spooked these admins. I'm not saying it's not understandable, I'm merely saying that a problem exists.

Each user can block other users. Moderators can block users. It can be handled the same way that other sites (yes, like reddit) do it. I'm also not opposed to defederation when it is essentially a single-user ban- for example, if there is an instance with no communities, no signup requirement, and has nothing but malicious bots- that's banning a bot farm, not "defederation" as it's commonly understood. But with something like this- where feddit.nl is actually a rather large instance- so many people are essentially being punished for absolutely no fault of their own.

Yes, but I outlined my reasons for wanting no defederation. VLemmy was perfect- refused to defederate, actively moderated- until the issue with image federation spooked him. Also, saying "illegal content" is a bit meaningless on a globally distributed platform. On both instances- feddit.nl and VLemmy- many users outlined very similar rationale to me when the issue of defederation came up, and you and I both know that defederation is not used only for unmoderated instances. Lemmygrad is aggressively moderated and defederated from most instances because the owners find the political views expressed there distasteful, and that's not the only one.

It just introduces so much personal bias into the fediverse, where individuals who don't like Thing A defederates from instances that allow Thing A, cutting their entire instance off from it. Again, yes, you can join other instances, but that quickly gets annoying trying to find another instance that aligns with your Thing A-positive or neutral views. This is what I'm referring to when I say that it will kill the momentum- users getting frustrated and having to make multiple accounts to essentially dodge a completely unjustified ban (assuming they weren't the ones doing the Bad Thing that caused the defederation) will lead to burnout and lost user retention.

As I also said, there will certainly be an impulse to say "good riddance, we don't need them anyway", but I think it'll lead to more problems. The fediverse has existed as a small pocket of internet for a while. However, things don't shrink as easily as they grow. If lemmy continues to get time and money and resources poured into its development for an ever-shrinking userbase, it won't just go back to how it was. Growth is hard to undo.

I didn't say they SHOULD work outside the law. What are you talking about? When I say "pedo instances", I don't mean ones that post real life CASM.

Ah yes, the two things- acceptable things and CASM. EVERYTHING IS ONE OF THOSE THINGS.

I think this issue could be addressed on the front end.

The reason you would want a server that is federated with everything is so you can access all content at once instead of switching between accounts on different instances. If you could log into multiple instances at once with a single username and see content from both in the same feed it wouldn't matter if they are defederated. I think this federation thing ought to be, as far as possible, transparent to the end user.

The way this currently works feels odd to me - it doesn't really behave like a decentralised Reddit, because your account is tied to a specific instance and the content you see depends on which instance you pick. It feels like an awkward middle ground between a centralized service like Reddit and just having a completely separate forum site for each community.

Feddit.nl rules explicitly state no illegal content, so it seems to be not so much inviting illegal content as a failure to moderate account creation and post content, like OP alluded to.

feddit.nl invites illegal content? Someone should let them know that, they're doing an outstandingly bad job at it if that's the case.

In general sure, but not for problems like this. That wouldn't address the issue in the OP at all.

That won't change how we would handle instances with bad actors?

Absolutely agreed. I hope that becomes a feature soon, I know it is or was being worked on.

It is a gung-ho way, but I understand why I'm being downvoted. People hear "I want to have the ability to view anything" or "I don't like being told what I can or cannot view on the internet" as "I want to view CSAM" or "I am actually a Nazi", which should result in an emotional reaction. It's just not what I'm saying.