Incidentally…

@SleeplessOne1917 has implemented support for new block instance feature, finished implementing the remote follow feature, and updated 2-Factor-Auth to account for a backend rework. He also implemented some bug fixes. He has also been working on adding authentication to lemmy-ui-leptos.

You can decouple it by looking to include people who have a broader range of political ideals rather than hiring people further and further to the extremes.

We’re here, we’ve made peace with that the original authors of the project created it because they wanted to have some place where they wouldn’t/couldn’t get kicked off for their political views. That’s fine.

However, as they’re seeing donations from the public and they’re looking to hire people, and the candidates are further to the extremes - that makes this more of a political project than not.

Yes, we can ask our server admins to defederate from those instances… but as long as a criteria for getting paid with the money that Lemmy gets as donations or grants is that you have anti-western views then it is a political project first.

When people make their professional (developer contributing to FOSS software) and their personal identity the same - especially when there are a limited number of people as representatives of the project or organization the personal views run the risk of causing issues for the professional organization.

This was seen before when Richard Stallman’s less than savory views on some current events of the time came to light and the blowback on FSF.

Having the two original developers be pro China at the time, with funding from NLNet is one thing… but to be actively seeking donations and looking to get enough funding that they can hire more developers - and that may include this individual… that runs the risk of bringing more politics into the core group. That in turn runs the risk of having this be “we’re looking for donations to pay these people.”

We’ve seen it in other companies - where someone on social media representing the company says something “off” and gets fired.

The only way for a financial contributions to “fire” a core group contributor is to withhold funding from the project.

I’ll say it quite frankly - I do not want one iota of any donations that I make to go to this individual.

https://www.rainn.org/news/what-child-sexual-abuse-material-csam

While the term child pornography is still widely used by the public, it’s more accurate to call it what it is: evidence of child sexual abuse. That’s why RAINN and others have stopped using the term child pornography and switched to referring to it as CSAM — child sexual abuse materials.

While some of the pornography online depicts adults who have consented to be filmed, that’s never the case when the images depict children. Just as kids can’t legally consent to sex, they can’t consent to having images of their abuse recorded and distributed. Every explicit photo or video of a kid is actually evidence that the child has been a victim of sexual abuse.

Python isn’t a language I am deeply familiar with.

I am more interested in Lemmy growing on its own, in a different direction than reddit - rather than trying to copy reddit and its features (and problems).

This looks like it is going to run smack into TOS problems. You can claim that its going to be playing whackamole with instances, if it is sufficiently problematic then lawyers can get involved.

Creating these copies of reddit content makes Lemmy look like a ghost town. Copying content from people who didn’t consent to having their content pushed onto the Fediverse and federated across multiple instances (how would you handle a GDPR request?) leads to other problems.

I’m not worried at all about the implementation. I believe that its goal and means are flawed and counterproductive to the growth of the Fediverse as its own thing and contribute to making Lemmy hollow budding of Reddit.

People point to early Reddit and say “see all the bots and fake accounts that were created early on? That’s a bad thing - we’re better than that.” (How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts)

This project is copying a reddit in content and culture.

If 90 accounts over the course of 15 minutes comment on a post in Lemmy, how many notifications would be sent to the person on Reddit? How frequently? Does it honor the reddit feature of unselecting “notify me about followup comments?”

This is why the next part of the work is to build a bridge to send notifications to the people on reddit.

You do realize how fast this would be used to spam users on Reddit and then how absurdly quickly it would result in the API keys getting restricted?

To be frank about it, the clips of porn needs instances to follow the steps needed for Section 230 to protect them (see EFF : User Generated Content and the Fediverse: A Legal Primer) otherwise it becomes a huge liability for every site admin who federates with such instances. I am not aware of any instances that have taken the step of registering a DMCA agent with the US Copyright Office.

Additionally, given the nature of the people commenting and the possibility of “oh, I’m 17, is that a problem” without the corresponding tooling for age verification and approved users, the moderation tools need to really get a focus for how to create them, implement them, and federate moderation events out reliably.

Furthermore, a significant amount of porn on Reddit is from amateurs who are trying to monetize or advertise. So far, the Lemmy user base has taken a dim view monetization (other than donations) or advertising. This makes it so that it’s just not worth it for an amateur to need to maintain another social media presence that has little return.

It started there, drifted mainstream, and is drifting back.

There are quite a few instances out there run with different focuses: https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon#serverscommunities

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_after_the_Reddit_blackout

For the past three years dessalines and I have been funded to work on Lemmy full-time by generous support from the NLnet foundation. These donations are paid out when we implement certain new features. But now we are busy answering questions, reviewing pull requests and urgently fixing problems. That means we are unable to work on the milestones agreed with NLnet, and won’t receive payments from them. We are increasingly reliant on user donations to pay our bills. These donations currently add up to 1500 Euros per month, which is not even enough to pay minimum wage for the two of us. Hopefully more users can consider donating, so that we can put our full attention to making Lemmy better for everyone, and possibly add more developers to our worker co-op in the future.

https://lemmy.ml/comment/479066 (posted June 8th)

When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.

Reddit didn’t try make it. It’s a free service from services such as Cloudflare and Google (Reddit uses the google one).

Child Sexual Abuse Material

The Cloudflare tool https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/reference/csam-scanning/ and blog post https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-csam-scanning-tool/

The tool that Reddit and several others use from Google: https://protectingchildren.google

NCMEC is very different than reporting to your local PD office.

I would also suggest a read of https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer

Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM)

Service providers are required to report any CSAM on their servers to the CyberTipline operated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a private, nonprofit organization established by the U.S. Congress, and can be criminally prosecuted for knowingly facilitating its distribution. NCMEC shares those reports with law enforcement. However, you are not required to affirmatively monitor your instance for CSAM.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A

(a) Duty To Report.—
(1) In general.—
(A) Duty.—In order to reduce the proliferation of online child sexual exploitation and to prevent the online sexual exploitation of children, a provider—
(i) shall, as soon as reasonably possible after obtaining actual knowledge of any facts or circumstances described in paragraph (2)(A), take the actions described in subparagraph (B); and
(ii) may, after obtaining actual knowledge of any facts or circumstances described in paragraph (2)(B), take the actions described in subparagraph (B).
(B) Actions described.—The actions described in this subparagraph are—
(i) providing to the CyberTipline of NCMEC, or any successor to the CyberTipline operated by NCMEC, the mailing address, telephone number, facsimile number, electronic mailing address of, and individual point of contact for, such provider; and
(ii) making a report of such facts or circumstances to the CyberTipline, or any successor to the CyberTipline operated by NCMEC.

…

(e) Failure To Report.—A provider that knowingly and willfully fails to make a report required under subsection (a)(1) shall be fined—
(1) in the case of an initial knowing and willful failure to make a report, not more than $150,000; and
(2) in the case of any second or subsequent knowing and willful failure to make a report, not more than $300,000.

Check with a lawyer if blocking an upload that your server has access to because of suspected CSAM constitutes “actual knowledge or any facts or circumstances”.

Another thought is the two parts of locking it down.

How much local configuration would it take to make it so that Lemmy doesn’t show any posts to someone not logged in (since you know that if its on the web even under a really funky hard to type name… someone will find it)? Do you want your vacation planning available to everyone (“I won’t be home from September 15th through the 23rd, so Cousin Dave is going to stop by each day to walk the dog…”)

The other part is specifically against fediverse (which would be the reason for Lemmy rather than some other system) for such a private community. It again gets hard to lock down… not so much a “what gets out” but also a “what gets in”. … oh, Aunt Jane and Uncle John have subscribed to swingers that’s hosted on a nswf instance and that’s not about playground equipment. Meanwhile Aunt Dorthy wants you to do something to prevent Cousin Charlie from seeing all that “stuff” in /all before Carlie accidentally calls him Uncle Long John at a family gathering. … and now you’re going through pics and finding pictures of your aunt and uncle that you really didn’t want to see (and you’re going to be going vegan before you want to think about that turkey baster next Thanksgiving).

And while these are solvable problems… it’s a question of do you want to solve them?

Simpler solutions will work better that you expand into other things as the need arises.

I’m going from:

I saw this post on another instance and tried to reply this exact message but got an error saying I couldn’t.

And suspect they were doing something like browsing Lemmy.ml / all while not logged in and saw it but couldn’t interact with it until they came back to lemmy.world where it was easy to find and interact with.

There is some friction of finding posts from federated content on your own instance, but you will note that I am posting from (and see this on) programming.dev rather than lemmy.world (where this community is hosted).

You need to be logged into your instance, search for the post on your instance, browse it via search, and then you can interact with it there. You don’t need to create an account on the other instance to interact with it.

And yes, that list of steps mentioned above is a lot of friction.

Links are also slightly awkward needing the full path in order to navigate to it on the instance you are signed into… and the editor appears to do it wrong when you let it. The link !programming@programming.dev should let you navigate there, join, comment and vote on a community hosted on another instance.

Lemmy Star Trek server

That would be https://startrek.website

• !risa@startrek.website – Memes
• !startrek@startrek.website – General trek discussion
• !quarks@startrek.website – Trek adjacent discussion
• !daystrominstitute@startrek.website – In-depth trek discussion
• !startrekonline@startrek.website – Startrek Online - the game.

Private slack channels work, but the reduced access to archives now makes that less useful. Spinning up a Zulip instance for family and then using that is quite tempting.

For most non-tech type people, the active asynchronous chat is an easier thing to work with than threaded discussions. And sharing images tends to be something more ephemeral / point in time. You could have a thread in zulip for “Smith Family vacation photos - summer 2023” and then follow that… but the "do you really want to be digging through those a year or two later? They’re still there, but how do you want them?

The other part is the… reduced moderation. Having worked with Stack Overflow Teams, the college intern thinking it’s funny to down vote everyone’s posts… well, that’s not funny. Cousin Charlie doing the same on a family Lemmy can create much more drama than you’d want to administer… and Aunt Jane thinks that it’s just boys being boys and doesn’t see anything wrong with it. Family drama is the worst drama.

This is why the least feature rich system that you need would work best. It’s just chat. No votes, no reporting and minimal administration and moderation because you really don’t want to deal with that.