The suggestions in their direction for future improvement section should be implemented sooner rather than later. There’s no point in growing this platform if it’s going to be left wide open for abuse like it is.

I also think, in lieu of lemmy devs making any improvements, another good solution would be for a third party to prop something up that scrapes every lemmy post and runs it through an automated service for detecting known CSAM. The third party service would be forcing at least one of those future improvements on lemmy, as it exists today. Any known CSAM that’s found would be automatically reported, and if the instance owners can’t deal with it, then they would rightfully have to deal with the consequences of their inactions.

Edit: I’m beginning to think reddit was maybe not so bad. Getting mad about more robust tools for moderating CSAM is just sad.

Until whenever it was when Ada complained

Edit: Proof: https://lemmynsfw.com/comment/682757

They changed it after Ada complained about the community

Edit: Proof: https://lemmynsfw.com/comment/682757

The community sidebar used the term “child-like.” That’s pretty disgusting and really disingenuous of the lemmynsfw admins to quietly change that and then pretend like nothing happened. Plus, redditors have already gone through all this with r/jailbait, so it’s not really silly to anybody who remembers that debacle.

Test

I talked to this one pro-Meta federation person yesterday who was really hung up on the fact that they’d be able to hang out with their Meta friends on a more privacy aware fediverse app. I tried to explain how EEE would work in the context of lemmy, and how their privacy dream is all a moot point because Meta will inevitably kill the fediverse and force them to Threads in the end, but the other person just kept going “yeah yeah, I get that… but if we federate, then I’ll be able to hang out with my Meta friends.”

I don’t know, they just had tunnel vision about being able to hang out with their friends, or were in the denial stage of grief about EEE or something.

If you pay attention to my response, I’ve said that if you close them now, considering how many users they’ve amassed in like 1 day you would have to join threads

Yeah, that’s what the defederaters are advocating. You can’t mix Meta with the fediverse, because Meta will consume it. So if you want to participate in Threads, then you have to join Threads.

Assuming the collective fediverse goes through with defederating from Meta, then there’s nothing stopping anybody from creating their own little niche in the fediverse that remains federated with Meta. I wouldn’t argue against that.

You say you understand my point about the threat of Meta consuming the entirety of the fediverse, but then you talk about privacy, which is completely irrelevant to my point. What does privacy matter when Meta gains 95% share of the fediverse communities and then closes them off to only Threads users? In that situation, your privacy is completely gone. You have to join Threads to get back in to the old fediverse that Meta took away.

You’re not understanding that growth on fediverse instances run by Meta is ultimately bad for the fediverse in the long run.

Let me try explaining like this: Imagine there’s an instance called meta.world and it gets hugely popular. Whenever you browse the all feed, it seems like 95% of the posts are from meta.world. Everybody hates that it ended up this way, and everybody tried to fight it, but it just inevitably happened because Meta has the fastest and most stable servers, and because there are a ton of funny users on Threads who only post to meta.world because Threads heavily favors those communities in their app. Then one day Meta decides that they don’t want to support the fediverse anymore, so they close off access to meta.world. So effectively 95% of the “fediverse” as we knew it vanishes, and you have to join Threads if you want access to those communities again.

It’s the threat of that scenario that has a lot of people wanting to block Meta from the start.

It depends on how many communities are on Meta’s instances. Imagine if a year from now, Meta’s instances are all the rage. It’s like lemmy.world on crack, where 95% of the communities you see browsing all are from meta.world. Everybody hates that it ended up this way, but that’s just the way it shook out because Meta has the best performing servers and a huge population of shitposters on Threads creating funny memes who probably don’t even know instances besides meta.world even exist.

But then Meta decides they’re done with the fediverse and decides to close off access to meta.world. Now 95% of the fediverse is effectively vanished, and you either have to switch to Threads to regain access to those communities, or you have to stay on the 5% of the fediverse that’s still left and basically start from scratch all over again.

The argument for defederating is that Meta has an enormous technological and userbase advantage for capturing up all the activity in the fediverse. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the overwhelming majority of future activity on the fediverse happens on Meta controlled instances, if we let them have free reign capturing as much of the fediverse as they can. In that case, with Meta effectively controlling the fediverse, then they don’t really need to play nice anymore. They can introduce a breaking API change and hold all of the non-Meta instances ransom saying to upgrade to their new API, or you won’t be able to participate with their fediverse communities anymore.

So it’s basically a question of do we nip the Meta issue in the bud and preemptively defederate from them, or do we wait until they take over and force us to restart from scratch two years from now.

That YSK thread from yesterday inspired me to create a new account with an anonymous relay email, instead of my personal email. I’m not sure how much I would’ve actually had to worry about if I kept using my personal email, but I figure it’s better to be safe than sorry.

I also probably could’ve just changed the email in my first account instead of creating a brand new account, but I don’t really know how data is persisted or anything. That was another case of better to be safe than sorry.