Sigh....

All of those ideas are bad.

1. Captchas are already pretty weak to combat bots. It's why recaptcha and others were invented. The people who run bots, spend lots of money for their bots to.... bot. They have accessed to quite advanced modules for decoding captchas. As well, they pay kids in india and africa pennies to just create accounts on websites.

I am not saying captchas are completely useless, they do block the lowest hanging fruit currently. That- being most of the script kiddies.

2. Email domain filters.

Issue number one, has already been covered below/above by others. You can use a single gmail account, to basically register an unlimited number of accounts.

Issue number two. Spammers LOVE to use office 365 for spamming. Most of the spam I find, actually comes from *.onmicrosoft.com inboxes. its quick for them to spin it up on a trial, and by the time the trial is over, they have moved to another inbox.

3. Autoblocking federation for servers who don't follow the above two broken rules

This is how you destroy the platform. When you block legitimate users, the users will think the platform is broken. Because, none of their comments are working. They can't see posts properly.

They don't know this is due to admins defederating servers. All they see, is broken content.

At this time, your best option is for admin approvals, combined with keeping tabs on users.

If you notice an instance is offering spammers. Lets- use my instance for example- I have my contact information right on the side-bar, If you notice there is spam, WORK WITH US, and we will help resolve this issue.

I review my reports. I review spam on my instance. None of us are going to be perfect.

There are very intelligent people who make lots of money creating "bots" and "spam". NOBODY is going to stop all of it.

The only way to resolve this, is to work together, to identify problems, and take action.

Nuking every server that doesn't have captcha enabled, is just going to piss off the users, and ruin this movement.

One possible thing that might help-

Is just to be able to have an easy listing of registered users in a server. I noticed- that actually... doesn't appear to be easily accessible, without hitting rest apis or querying the database.

Don't make the same mistake reddit did, by assuming active users = engagement.

Look at reddit's stats, active users didn't drop very drastically when everyone left. However, engagement/comments dropped drastically.

Nah, fuck that.

Until reddit releases their IPO, all attempts at "peace" are secretly just trying to keep the boat floating

I give credit to the verge- They have been doing a fantastic job of grabbing the details for the current reddit issues, and doing a fine job of reporting in a non-clickbaity way.

Was a contractor for Walmart.

Got hired on as a lead dev, getting compensated 150k/yr.

2nd day, they told me I needed to switch contracts in order to stay on. New contract paid 50k salary.. with lots of required OT.

But, it's OK they said, you get benefits and PTO.

Fuck that.

Honestly.

Stackoverflow is a horrible place to ask anything.

I have had 100% legit, well documented questions, closed as duplicate of unrelated other question.

Its... honestly, just not a friendly place to go. Full of a bunch of assholes....

Most of the answers actually suck too. Many times, you will find the correct answer downvoted, and incorrect or bad answers upvoted.

{ "type": "comment response", "message", "I too, am certainly a human, and not a robot"}

It doesn't.

If you are on my instance, for example, its hosted out of my own pocket.

I have a TON of spare compute resources laying around, and I am more than happy to donate them to this cause.

Edit- lets also be perfectly honest- hosting lemmy costs FAR less then it costs me to host plex for friends/family.

As someone who hosts a small instance, nothing massive....

Honestly, nothing.

The only benefit I get- is full control over weather my instance is up or two. I know for absolute certain that my instance isn't going to randomly shutdown, and not come back online.

I also have the benefit of having a lot of control over how fast my instance is, and performance optimizations as needed to make it perform as I would like. As such, for me, the performance is outstanding.

With that said,

Basically everything else is downsides.

Having to proactively moderate content originating from your server, is a drag. The moderation tools in Lemmy are absolute dog-shit. Your only option here is to use either 3rd party tools (lemmy-helper), or to just run database queries.

PictRS just keeps growing and growing. pictures gets synced to every instance, and those take up room. Lots of room. PictRS has even less moderation tools then lemmy. If you want to make sure your user aren't uploading illicit/illegal content, is a major pain in the ass. My solution was to run a few scripts to fetch all of the content, and just run it through some AI scanning software to attempt to detect bad content. But, still, a pain in the ass.

Those attacks you read about here on lemmy world. Those happen to our smaller instances too. Every time you hear @ruud@lemmy.world doing an update here- we are also working on plans for updating the instance. Granted- my small user base makes these upgrades much easier and faster. But- we will have to do these updates. (At least on the plus side, my instances isn't constantly under a DOS attack, due to a disgruntled member, or due to a pissed off instance which was defederated)

And, lastly, one downside of lemmy- things don't really go away or get cleaned up. Your database and storage will continue to grow and grow, and grow. Again, to restate, There are basically no moderation or administration tools included with lemmy. You can see reports. You can ban users. And, you can delete posts. Thats about it.

There isn't an easy way to even list users, comments, posts, or activity happening on your instances.... through lemmy itself.

On top of those other issues, lemmy is very chatty, network wise.

Here are the incoming stats, from my "small" instance.

In terms of outgoing, it's very chatty there too. You will find all sorts of weird and random outbound DNS records.

tldr; Its prob not worth hosting your own instance, unless you just really like playing around with infrastructure, networking, databases, and digging through application issues.

Personally though- I enjoy the challenge, and that is one reason I keep doing it.

My ISP has no problem breaking out the fees.

And.... I am indeed, in the US.

So, not seeing the issue here.

not upload CSAM to for trolling communities. Even novel GenerativeAI CSAM. Users cannot upload CSAM images and never submit a post or comment (making them invisible to admins). The images will be automatically rejected during upload

There wouldn't be anything to delete, as it would have never been saved with this.

He said it’s all legal

I mean, if I were trying to recruit people into an illegal pyramid scheme, that is what I would say too.

Guess, I am out of the loop.

After Linus blasted people using ad-blockers (fucking hypocrite), I uh, just blocked his channel.

So, I am starting to really believe his goal is to just drive a stake into the heart of twitter.

Either that, or he is trying to prove a point regarding something.

I don't think there is any possible way, he is so dumb as to make all of these horrible decisions regarding twitter.... This has got to be destroying twitter by design, on purpose.

I mean, seriously.... he has done literally everything that you SHOULDN'T do. Fire the majority of the company. Destroy over a decade worth of very good branding. Alienate all investors. Alienate the user base. Piss off the remaining users more. Drive away advertisers....

FFS, the dude has a company that sends rockets into space, and previously, the world's premier electric car company... What in the hell is his odd obsession with choking the life out of twitter, that has been costing him money left and right due to absolutely horrible publicity.

Oh well, worse-case scenario- at least we already have Jellyfin.

Yup. Nope.

Pictrs is just completely disabled now. Rather be safe, then sorry.

Fuck u/spez

(That was missing from this post.)

Why?

Seemed fun to do. Wanted to support something that gets people away from reddit.

How did I pay for it? I have a miniature datacenter in my house, complete with redundant power. Hosting lemmy is a drop in the bucket as far as my resources are concerned. As such, there really isn't a measured cost for it. The infrastructure was already there and running, and lemmy doesn't consume much of it.

I don't take donations.

Honestly, I want half of the people on reddit... to just STAY on reddit.

There is a lot of toxicity that I don't want here....

I cannot confirm, nor deny.

But, I will say, once upon a time, before the days of netflix, if you wanted to watch things, you needed to spend a fuckload of money, to watch it on cable, with commercials every 10 minutes.... or, you drove to a blockbuster. So, you either did that, or you obtained the movie/tv/etc, via a torrent.

Then, netflix came along, gave you a ton of content, at a reasonable price. And- then, there wasn't really much of an advantage to obtaining media via other alternative means. So, netflix took over by storm, and piracy went way down.

Then, everyone wanted a piece of the action. So, then Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, HBO+, ESPN+, (And insert 50 other network-specific streaming services) jumped into the fray. Then, they all made exclusive streaming contracts. So, if you watch a handful of things, you would need a handful of streaming service subscriptions.

And- again, the alternative option of piracy, became the better option, as you can watch whatever the f- you want, WHENever you want, without having to pay for 50 different subscriptions every month, just to watch a TV series, which they decide to cancel after the 2nd season.

Do you justify?

If the fucking scumbags didn't get greedy in the first place, we wouldn't be in this situation. But, no, everyone wanted an extremely generous piece of the pie, and now everything has went to shit again. Fuck those guys. Isn't like the actual actors/writers staring in movies gets any of the money anyways.

Don't laugh too hard. We are the ones paying the bill for it.

ie, Our taxes are now indirectly ended up directly in Elon's pocket. And, I can promise he didn't cut us a deal.

Its absolutely growing massively, I don't think the DEVs could have expected this level of growth.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

I have been documenting some of the downfall myself-

https://static.xtremeownage.com/blog/2023/what-happened-to-reddit/

And let me just say- I don't think the verge is missing many details at all. They have been ON TOP of this one.

• @ruud@lemmy.world (lemmy.world)

• @nutomic@lemmy.ml (lemmy.ml)

• @TheDude@sh.itjust.works (sh.itjust.works)

• @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com (dbzer0)

What, corrective courses of action shall we seek?

I sent messages to these users, notifying them to come to this thread.

1. https://startrek.website/u/ValueSubtracted (startek.website)
2. https://oceanbreeze.earth/u/windocean (oceanbreeze.earth)
3. https://normalcity.life/u/EuphoricPenguin22 (normalcity.life)

I blocked / defederated these instances:

1. https://lemmy.dekay.se/ (appears to just be a spambot server)

I agree 100% with this.

ESPECIALLY, after spez described this movement as "Noise" that will pass in a few days.

100% clear he doesn't respect redditors. After hearing that- I am all onboard with the movement to get away from reddit. I even created https://lemmyonline.com/ to help contribute to this cause.

HEY LOCAL PD OFFICE,

SOMEONE TRIED TO UPLOAD SOME POTENTIALLY CHILD PORN TO MY LEMMY INSTANCE.

No... I don't have an IP for who uploaded it.

Sorry, I don't know where it came from. It just got federated across the fediverse to me.

No... I don't have the content either, it doesn't get saved.

Sorry.... I guess I really don't have any details at all for you.

WELL... if you like lemmy, and you want the reddit-look... there IS solutions to that problem!!

https://old.lemmyonline.com/

If, I were a customer- I would be leaving for sure.

When- you pay a cloud vendor, you are generally paying to ensure a few things....

1. That this stuff doesn't happen.
2. That when this type of stuff does happen, they have a recovery plan / working backups.

And, when this hit the news, and I discovered they are owned by a company with a stake in cyber-security, I'd be jumping to a replacement pretty quickly... and staying far away from this company.

I'd love to see the same comparison with more real-world use-cases.

Code golf, is mostly pretty simple use-cases, which have been optimized many times over.

When, you build out an application with a user-interface, proper event handling, etc.... c++ is MUCH more verbose then c# for example, and they are ranked pretty close together.

Sorry.... watching a sponsored video for world of tanks for the 10th time, or simply safe, or whatever other garbage is there isn't going to make me want to purchase it.

I value my time... If I didn't use sponsor block, I'm still going to skip right past it.... This, just does it for me.

I don't-

I don't miss having to register accounts on each one, answer a bunch of questions, give a birthday, give an email, do a capta.... etc...

Just for that forum to popup on haveibeenpwned.com a few months later.

Knock on wood, password managers are a thing now, and its easy to give each forum a very unique password. But- still. Don't really miss those.

They are going to feel pretty damn stupid when nobody can buy/rent/watch/listen to their content and products...

Because, ya know... any product which can play any form of media, has the potential to infringe on IP....

I say, give them EXACTLY what they want. Give them, a week or two with zero profits, and see how quickly they change their tune.

Actually- they are full time working on this.

The devs... have socialist tendencies(by their own admission, their words, not mine!), and are more then happy to live on peanuts and bread while building software for the better of humanity.

However, donations to the project, do pay for their basic expenses.

Funny note- the way we actually get things to near absolute zero, is by shooting it with lasers.

I go out of my way to avoid cloud-based products. Which- is funny, because I do a LOT of home automation, and many of the cheap products, are cloud-interconnected shit, which will go obsolete in a few years.

Need... a list of reasons? I got you covered. https://static.xtremeownage.com/blog/2022/reasons-to-avoid-cloud-based-automation-products/

You don't see porn on the front page of lemmy either, if you used the "subscribed" view, instead of treating "ALL" as if it doesn't contain everything.

No, because, it does not fix the root problem.

Also, banning things isn't the way to fix things.

I would also be a hypocrite for changing to legalize pot, while also chanting to ban corn-based sugars.

Technically, lemmy does actually track a user's karma.

It's- just not exposed via the user interface... as of right now.

Kinda of like how kbin displays who upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy also tracks this data too, and can easily report on exactly who is upvoting and downvoting.

In the case of this post, for example-

Yes.

https://static.xtremeownage.com/pages/Projects/Solar-Project/

So. my recommendation, take the amount of panels you think you need, and double it.

With the exception my capacity being a bit less then what I actually need. Happy with my solution. Power outages are a thing of the past now. Had a disaster knock out power for the entire area for around a week earlier this year. I was able to run completely off-grid during the entire ordeal, and that includes running the central HVAC.

But- a few notes....

1. Ohio doesn't get the best solar radiance. Install more panels.
2. For DIY, look here: https://signaturesolar.com/ Those guys have the best pricing you are going to find. I use their EG4 batteries. I hear good things about the inverters too.

The same thing that happened when they made shipping nicotine through the mail illegal.

I stock up on a shitload of pure caffeine/nicotine, and store it.

Either that, or I start extracting it from other commonly available foods... (caffeine is present in quite a few foods naturally. )

Or, finally.... there would then just become a black market for caffeine.

The same stuff which happened during the prohibition period many years ago.