The potential role of a 3rd servers to mediate between Beehaw and Lemmy.world
As this #RedditBlackout accelerates the Fediverse experiment, I feel the urge... the need... to chime in with my 2-cents.
My summary of the current lay of the land: Beehaw saw a wave of pornography spam and decided to shut Lemmy.world off and Defederate from this server. I'm too new to this community to fully understand the wants/needs of each individual server, but I've been around the internet long enough to recognize that porn-spam is an age-old trolling technique and will occur again in the future. Especially as small, boutique, hobbyist servers pop up and online drama/rivalries increase, online harassment campaigns (like coordinated porn spam attacks) are simply an inevitability.
Lemmy.world wants open registrations. Beehaw does not: Beehaw wants users to be verified before posting. This is normal: many old /r/subreddits would simply shadowban all 1-year old accounts and earlier... giving the illusion that everything is well for 5+ or 10+ year old accounts, but cut out on the vast majority of spam accounts with short lives. This works for Reddit where you have a huge number of long-lived accounts, but its still not a perfect technique: you can pay poor people in 3rd world countries to create accounts, post on them for a year, and the these now verified accounts can be paid for by spammers to invade various subreddits.
I digress. My main point is that many subreddits, and now Lemmy-instances/communities, want a "trusted user". Akin to the 1+-year-old account on Reddit. Its not a perfect solution by any means, but accounts that have some "weight" to them, that have passed even a crude time-based selection process, are far easier to manage for small moderation teams.
We don't have the benefit of time however, so how do we quickly build trust on the Fediverse? It seems impossible to solve this problem on lemmy.world and Beehaw.org alone. At least, not with our current toolset.
A 3rd Server appears: ImNotAnAsshole.net
But lets add the 3rd server, which I'll hypothetically name "ImNotAnAsshole.net", or INAA.net for short.
INAA.net would be an instance that focuses on building a userbase that follows a large set of different instances recruiting needs. This has the following benefits.
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Decentralization -- Beehaw.org is famously only run by 4 administrators on their spare time. They cannot verify hundreds of thousands of new users who appear due to #RedditBlackout. INAA.net would allow another team to focus on the verification problem.
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Access to both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login -- As long as INAA.net remains in the good graces of other servers (aka: assuming their user filtering model works), any user who registers on INAA.net will be able to access both lemmy.world and Beehaw.org with one login.
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Custom Moderation tools -- INAA.net could add additional features independently of the core github.com/LemmyNet programming team and experiment. It is their own instance afterall.
Because of #2, users would be encouraged to join INAA.net, especially if they want access to Beehaw.org. Lemmy.world can remain how it is, low-moderation / less curated users and communities (which is a more appropriate staging grounds for #RedditBlackout refugees). Beehaw.org works with the INAA.net team on the proper rules for INAA.net to federate with Beehaw.org and everyone's happy.
Or is it? I am new to the Fediverse and have missed out on Mastodon.social drama. Hopefully older members of this community can chime in with where my logic has gone awry.
How is this possibly enforced? IP bans are only marginally effective.
I guess I should clarify that I'm not arguing against anything you've said here about the 'middleman' server. I'm simply talking about the lack of foresight that I see in the Beehaw admins' approach to safe space enforcement.
For the 1st week, INAA.net allows users to talk to lemmy.world.
After 1+ week of activity, INAA.net allows users to talk to beehaw.org (and continue talking with lemmy.world).
So if I read you right... your plan is to centralize the decentralization into one "login server" that other servers trust, and then those servers would shut down new user registrations and only people from the "login server" would be allowed access, and somehow only access certain servers after an arbitrary grace period? Do I have that right?
No?
Why would anybody do this? That's obviously just stupid.
Alright, then what good will a middleman login server do when people can still just register on Beehaw directly? What prevents a bad actor from creating 50 Beehaw accounts, coming up with slightly different answers to the stupidly-simple "why do you want to join this instance" verification question, waiting a few days for the admins to click 'approve' on the application, and then being able to hop from account to account to be an asshole to everyone?
Because inevitably, a right-wing conservative instance is going to pop up and Beehaw will ban those guys and vice versa.
My instance will play nice with both, so my users are going to get access to both groups and bypass those bans by just being nice people welcoming to everybody.
...I'm beginning to think you don't understand anything about the situation, or what Beehaw is trying to achieve. They don't want to "play nice" with assholes, or with any instance who plays nice with them. If they understood what you were trying to achieve with this, under their current plan of action they would also immediately defederate with your instance.
However, the fact that you're proposing this shows just how futile their efforts are. You are demonstrating a perfect example of how the Fediverse will circumvent their intentions whether they like it or not - unless they choose to not federate with any other Lemmy server and spend 100% of their time banning accounts.
In your scenario you just think that the admin(s) of INAA.net will be "the good cop" and that Beehaw will trust that you possibly could and would somehow filter out the "good" users from the bad.
But I can imagine a situation, based on my experience, where I'd do what Beehaw.org has done. Online trolls, especially porn-spam, can truly wreck havoc upon workplace office users who are behind porn filters. Its an exceptionally effective technique to harass a community and cause them to be unusable.
Solving this problem is doable, assuming that Beehaw.org is reasonable. Maybe they're not reasonable, but eventually we'll have reasonable servers that get porn-spammed / trolled. What then? Might as well start solving the issue today (because it puts us on a path to allow a reunification of Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org, albeit through a 3rd server rather than directly).
That's all well and good and I don't disagree with their goal from an ethical standpoint. I'm just saying that what they're doing with defederting "bad instances" isn't going to solve it, for all of the reasons I stated above as well as the fact that what you're proposing can be done.
As I stated elsewhere in this thread - In my mind I view this like an IT security issue. If you are trying to prevent bad actors from entering your environment, you don’t just cut your connection to the internet… while still leaving wide-open public access terminals in your front lobby for anyone to use as long as they verbally promise not to do bad things.
I don’t know what the answer for Beehaw will be, but I know they won’t accomplish it with their current plan of action.
I mean, the solution is what I listed in this topic?
Beehaw federates with INAA.net.
INAA.net federates with Lemmy.world AND Beehaw (and whoever else comes up).
It seems like your only counterargument remaining is that INAA is going to also get banned/defederated from Beehaw.org for... reasons? Just for talking with other instances? I mean, if they want to sure I guess. But I don't think that's what they're planning to do.
No, it's not. Because then IAAA.net (I am an asshole) starts up, does the same thing and lets in assholes... then Beehaw finally catches on and defederates with them too. Then NRIATAA.net (no really, I am totally an asshole) starts up... and so on, ad infinitum.
And yes, INAA is going to get defederated, because you'd be "playing nice" with assholes (or "both sides", however you want to put it). For the same exact reason that they defederated wth lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, you'd be defederated as well. Nothing nebulous about it, it's the same "...reasons?".
And yes, that's exactly what they plan to do - defederate with any servers who would potentially let in people they don't want / bad actors.
In the end, your proposal solves nothing for Beehaw and only points out the futility of their plan of action.
I think you're confused.
Lets say Beehaw.org goes fully extreme and goes whitelist federation only with a small, select group of servers. I don't know if they're on the path to this, but this is probably the most extreme stance they could take on this subject.
IAAA.net and NRIATAA.net spin up, but fail to connect to Beehaw.org due to them being whitelist only.
I put in some effort to build INAA.net. I make it user-centric, no communities, purely just an instance for people to join / get moderated and interact with other Lemmys. Once I feel like my community is confidently a "nice group of people", I send an email over to the Beehaw.org team and ask for a Federation between us. And lets say I keep my userbase strict (but not as strict as Beehaw.org), so that no spammers, porn-invasions, etc. etc. originate from my group of users.
Beehaw.org lets me in. But IAAA.net and NRIATAA.net also let me in, because they don't care about these issues.
That solves the problem entirely. IAAA.net cannot access !group@Beehaw.org, none of those groups. IAAA.net can't access !group@INAA.net, because INAA.net doesn't contain any communities at all, its just a collection of users who have made a promise not to be assholes on the Fediverse.
Everyone's happy with this arrangement, as far as I can tell. There's no reason for Beehaw.org to ban INAA.net.
And then Beehaw kicks you out, because your server can have people of the sort that interact on IAAA.net and who have those same interactions on Beehaw. Your plan ultimately relies on you believing that the Beehaw admins will trust your ability and judgement to weed out the good users from the bad, over themselves. It doesn't really matter how many more reiterations of it you want to say, that's the bottom line.
Drawn out to its conclusion, their plan of defederating instances with assholes on them simply is not sustainable. And based on their own language about it in their recent post I think they know that's the case but it's all they can think of for now. You're just adding layers of complexity on to what is, for now, an unsolvable problem.