Hello everyone. We recently defederated from the two instances below. In the interest of transparency, I am opening this discussion post as a place for our users to discuss any questions or concerns.

• chinese.lol
• lemmy.doesnotexist.club

Both instances were identified in a recent post (https://hackertalks.com/post/8713785) for harboring suspected vote manipulation accounts. The spoiler in that post names 49 suspicious accounts. A bit of database digging on our side confirmed that all of those accounts are being used solely for coordinated downvoting of a small number of Lemmy users. They are also only the tip of the iceberg; at least 92 other accounts on these two instances also match the same pattern of behavior.

We have reached out to the admins, and have not received a reply. Until we hear otherwise, these two instances are considered unmoderated and have been defederated.

That is all. Have a great Friday!

The Issue

Currently, it seems to be that the majority of instance defederations happen silently on SJW: As of writing this, SJW currently blocks federation with 86 instances ^[1], yet, from what I can tell ^[2], there has not been 86 announcements. For clarity, this is not intended to be construed as an accusation, pointed at the SJW admins, that this is some sort of intentional obfuscation; however, for the sake of transparency and understanding, I think it would be a good practice to open these practices up to the rest of the instance.

Proposal

I propose that whenever an instance is to be defederated, an open (ie unlocked) post should be published by the SJW admins (eg it could be published to [email protected]) detailing the name of the instance that is to be defederated, the rationale for why it is to be defederated (including evidence to support the rationale), and what steps would need to be taken by the respective instance's admins in order for that instance to be r

I propose that the UI version be included alongside the backend version at the bottom of the page. For example, Lemmy.ml does this ^[1]:

I think this information is useful to have for diagnostic purposes, reporting bugs, and for referencing documentation.

I think it could be useful to collect this data, both for administrative and research purposes.

I'm unsure, currently, exactly what data should be collected by the censuses (that would be proposed and discussed here). The data that is collected, should be collected anonymously. Furthermore, participation should be entirely voluntary.

Project: https://github.com/asimons04/tesseract

Demo: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

What it is:

Tesseract is a Sublinks/Lemmy client designed for media-rich feeds and content. It's an alternative front-end that can be hosted on the sh.itjust.works servers side-by-side with the current interface, similar to how oldsh.itjust.works operates.

In addition to the overall improved user experience, it also has enhancements for moderators and instance admins. These are worth checking out, I quite like the modlog.

What I like about it:

• Improved Media Support in Feed and Posts
• Community Browser / Enhanced Discovery
• Better Moderation Tools than Lemmy-UI
• Alternate Sources Menu (All link posts have a dropdown menu next to the link which contains alternate links to the post URL from Ghost Archive, 12ft, and Archive Today.)

Try it:

An open, public demo instance is available at tesseract.dubvee.org. Try it with y

I propose de-anonymising the moderators names in the mod log for transparency.

I'm curious to get all of your thoughts on this. It's no secret that AI has been growing quite exponentially over the last year. I feel that new models are being released almost every other day. With that said many of these models need a tremendous amount of data to train on. It's no secret that reddit sells its users interaction to the highest bidder. This was partially the reason why they made the changes to the API limits that got many of us to move to the fediverse in the first place.

My question is how does everyone feel with knowing that multi-billion dollar companies as scraping this instance and the others, creating extra load on the servers for nothing more than to be able to profit from it?

What can be done to continue providing a free, open network to users but prevent those who are only looking to profit from the data?

edit: fixed title typo

Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.

There's a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we've had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, 'tankie-ism', etc. The subject of the admin's, and Lemmy dev's, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.

What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or

I am in the opinion that some alternative UIs should be available on the instance (domain) – if possible, of course. Lemmy.world already has many alt. UIs, I think we should have something like that. So, here's a list:

• Alexandrite – a nice modern one
• MLMYM – a familiar old-reddit–style one
• Nemmy
• Photon – sleek af
• Slemmy – again, a modern one
• Lemmy Modern UI – web default UI, but better

… and more, check out https://lemmy.world/post/465785

What do you think?

While Threads' integration with Mastodon has caused a big stir on both Mastodon and Lemmy, it is not the only for-profit company moving in that direction. Flipboard has announced it is embracing ActivityPub and gradually phasing in Mastodon integration. I have read elsewhere that Flipboard already works with Pixelfed, too. This is another big corporate participant in the Fediverse: "Flipboard notched more than 145 million monthly users and is tied with Twitter as among the top five traffic referrers on the web" according to this CNET article.

From what I can find online, Tumblr is also still slowly working to bring its 135 million monthly active users to the Fediverse via ActivityPub integration. I can only assume more companies will connect to the Fediverse as it grows.

In general, how do we want t

Should sh.itjust.works preemptively defederate from Threads?

Threads is the not-so-new reddit-like twitter-like public forum platform by Meta, the same commercial company behind internet behemoths like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. They're working on ActivityPub integration so that they can bridge (federate?) with the fediverse. As far as I know, the focus is on Mastodon instances, but in the future that could include Lemmy instances too.

Some have raised the question, worried about the future of the fediverse or even claiming that it goes against its definition.

What do you think should be done?

EDIT: correction

EDIT.2: The Vote is on! Go make your voice heard. You have until Friday the 29th.

Fediverse instances' status on federation with Threads

English message:

As some of you may have noticed, there's an instance with 1.1M bots reposting reddit posts and comments accross communities in several other instances.  

I expect there are multiple valid opinions on the subject and this thread is meant to get a feeling of everyone's opinion on the situation. 

You might also want to read lemmy.ca's discussion on that here which is a pretty decent thread about the subject.  

Things that I think need to be pointed out:  

• alien.top currently has 1.1M bots, only 6 of those are weekly users logging in. 
• together they've made 1.59M comments accross a multitude of communities in other instances.
• That project claims to be trying to get reddit users to switch to lemmy. 
• They have a portal to allow reddit users to claim and take over their bot persona. 
• alien.top has a single local community, the bots all post on different inst

before people criticize me I am not using my main account because I do not feel safe bringing up these issues there, as these people and issues still are not dealt with. I do not want to put myself in danger, I will not be engaging in or attempting to post polls or votes here.

I would like to start by saying that I've noticed a lot of bad faith or spammy communities pop-up recently. The user is dramaticcat many of the communities break rules 1 and 2, maybe even rule 3 (an example of one such community is [email protected]) as they are purely dedicated to hatred, trolling, and possibly even spam.

Also a small handful of users have also been making threats or calls to violence and while these have been moderated nicely moderators and external instance admins the admins of this instance haven't done anything about this. This is worrying as admins are supposed to enforce the instance rules and remove disruptive users and communities who are in violation of said rules but the ad

Hello everyone, I operate an instance previously defederated by this instance known as lemmy.comfysnug.space and we were defederated because many people didn't like our current rules.

Well we have since changed our rules and are no longer allowing the content that so many people complained about. So we were hoping to be able to get refederated with other instances including this one. What do people think, do we deserve a second chance to be federated again?

(I'm posting from a lemm.ee account because my main is on the Defederated Instance, there's no other real way for me to do this).

Please share your thoughts, concerns and opinions. Try to keep it constructive.

Link to announcement

Some of you may have noticed that there's a new bot in town. But this time, its one of ours.

What should we name it?

Post your entry.

Rules.

• The 5 most upvoted entries will be brought to a vote.
• The winning entry will become the display name of the bot.

The two obvious themes in my mind are gears/some sort of complex machine, or computer hardware/circuits.

As an avid Lain Iwakura enjoyer, I added that screenshot because it's awesome and I think it'd be an extremely cool banner, but there are probably much cleaner designs out there that would be more welcoming to new users. I'm sure you guys will be able to come up with some in short order.

You can look on lemmyverse.net to get a quick overview of some other instance banners.

I really don’t know how the formatting and proportions are supposed to work but I will edit that in as soon as someone clarifies.

Lemmy.world looks like this

This discussion will run for at least a week, and then we can take the most upvoted submissions in this thread and put them up for an official vote.

I've seen a lot of discussion about Threads around the fediverse and I believe our main instance community has had a few large discussions about it (here's a recent one).

I didn't see an Agora discussion post, so I'm making one.

Can we all discuss our opinions on whether we want this instance to remain federated with Threads or not and share our reasons? I'd appreciate it!

So the exploding heads vote is well past a day old now. The vote is almost unanimous to defederate. It's been obvious since a few hours after it went up what the community wants. It's now taken well past two weeks to defederate from an obvious alt right troll and bot platform. Twelve days of silence from admins, then a day long debate thread, then an interminable vote. I requested word on when the vote could be called closed, but my question was acknowledged and ignored.

For my own self, I have at this point no faith in the administration of this instance anymore to be able to handle this. It's very clear that wanting to not offend the alt-right is far, far more important than hearing the wishes of the users, and always has been. However, this is the agora, so I'm open to hear a counterpoint explaining why it's actually very reasonable to spend weeks upon weeks in endless circling debate over whether or not it's fine to joke about murdering marginalized people.

Edit: since my threa

Please consider using my theme on this instance, so that everyone could enjoy a more more modern, efficient UI when browsing sh.itjust.works. It works with Lemmy 0.17, 0.18 and 0.18.1rc. It has a light theme variant, dark theme or both (auto).

Repository with more screenshots: https://github.com/pkrasicki/lemmy-modern-ui-theme-addon

Theme files for download: https://github.com/pkrasicki/lemmy-modern-ui-theme-addon/releases

It's also a Firefox addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-modern-ui-theme

The only downside would be maintenance. Whenever a new version of Lemmy breaks the theme, someone will have to fix it. But I believe that together as a community we can easily maintain our own them