So far Lemmy is vibing. Everyone here is excited and optimistic and willing to put up with a few rough spots to be part of something.

When the Eternal September comes, which it will, how does a Lemmy instance deal with bad actors?

  • Landrin201
    10·
    2 years ago

    The potential for accounts to vanish if the instance they started on is, to me, the single biggest hurdle that Lemmy will face with casual users. I think that the devs need to really consider figuring out a way to make user logins global.

    I said this the other day, but I think it may, unironically, be one of the first times I’ve ever seen a genuine use for a blockchain, but I have no idea how to implement it.

    The reason that the big social media companies came to exist is precisely because people didn’t like having to have a dozen accounts for all their different communities. Lemmy fixes that problem through federation, which is great, but introduces a new problem of “your account could just disappear, making all your contributions vanish.” I know that was technically a problem before big social media companies appeared and everyone was using forums, but it’s a big plus of the current social media giants- you don’t have to worry too much about the company failing so completely that the website gets shut down, which is the only way you’d lose your account, any time soon. People are used to that stability, and will not be happy if they join an instance in the fediverse only to have the rug yanked out from under them.

    If we want this to be a true alternative to big social media, it needs that stability.

    • zkikiz
      12·
      2 years ago

      Your contributions won’t vanish, I can still see comments from people from dead servers on Mastodon because it’s cached on my server. The bigger issue is when you set up a new username on a new server, how can you show that you’re the old person. So ideally pick a server that has policies in place about offline notices, multiple admins, a funding plan, backups, policies about Nazis, etc.

      • FlowerTree@pawb.social
        2·
        2 years ago

        Not fully on Lemmy. While text posts are cached across all federated instances, medias such as images and videos aren’t…

        Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but media uploaded to a community from another instance is uploaded to the users’ instance, not the instance of the community.

        This may change in the future, and I hope so.

        • zkikiz
          1·
          2 years ago

          Images are cached in Mastodon but obviously that gets to be a storage problem at a certain scale so I’m not sure what the cache settings are. It’s sort of ephemeral, obviously the original post still bounces around internally in systems’ memory for at least some time and that’s enough for popular posts of offline instances to hang around.

    • GraceGH@beehaw.org
      9·
      2 years ago

      The other consideration is that impersonation might be pretty possible by making your own server called lemmy.mi or something and then stealing peoples username’s verbatim. IDK if that’ll ever become an issue but I do think its an avenue of attack for bad actors.

      • Ozymati@lemmy.nz
        3·
        2 years ago

        Oh it’ll definitely become an issue - Help help my local community! A calamity has befallen me and I need cash now! - Posted by @0zymati@beehaw.0rg