Could you please create a middle ground between the nuclear option (banning sites) and the whack a mole option of banning users. It would be effective to be able to ban communities (at least temporarily) during bot spam attacks while you wait for admins to police up their site. Could there also be a way for admins to notify other admins that their site is spamming garbage so that admins know that their board is the cause of a problem and what that problem is?

I’m providing a best guess on that. I may be wrong. Who knows maybe it’ll be “xtxt” or xt^2 pronounced “extasy.”

What you just said is the literal opposite of what the fediverse is. The fediverse is NOT social media.

Belief is the acceptance of a claim without evidence. There is evidence that Lemmy and Mastodon can, with time, replace their centralized counterparts.

So do I believe it? No. I know it can happen though. Will it happen? Definite maybe. First, all the users that are bunched up on three big servers need to learn the painful lesson of how a federated architecture works. It’s in their best interests to find small instances of lemmy and have accounts there. Why, because all the huge instances of lemmy are having trouble staying functional. Lemmy.world has 87,000 users and an uptime of 97%. That means it experiences 11 days of downtime a year. Almost a day per month. Sh.itjust.works has around 10,000 users and a 99% uptime by comparison (still 3 to 4 days a year of downtime). Many smaller instances have 100% uptime. Look for yourself.

Another thing future users (not users yet) need to stop using as an argument (excuse) is, “but if I have an account on a site and it disappears, I lose my account.” Well, first, that’s true of the centralized service you’re using. And don’t talk to me about “too big to fail…” arguments. If there’s one thing Twitter, Reddit, and YoutTube have proven, it’s that you are irrelevant and disposable. They may not vanish, but the long lasting stupid they do for the sake of… I don’t even know what… has led to multiple migrations to distributed environments.

Are distributed environments perfect? No. They ARE improving though. And the fact is, in a distributed environment when one instance enacts something that you don’t feel is in your best interest… You go to another instance. No drama, no fanfare… just move.

Makes complete sense. Thank for clarifying.

Agreed. But I wouldn’t say you get nothing out of being a member on Patreon. I run lemmy.ninja. If I had a paying customer (Patreon) ask for something, and I had a non paying user ask for something…

Who do you suppose gets my time first? Now, it may be that I have to tell the paying customer that what they are asking for is only possible if code is changed. In that case I can put a request in on their behalf. However if it is a thing I CAN do, then my time goes to them first, right?

First, stop talking to me like I don’t know this already. Second, these facts don’t make me wrong or you right. The implication of what was said is that you run VM’s on docker. The fact is, you don’t. Stop arguing.

Yeah, that’s not how the math works. Cost of server + cost of maintaining = X. Divide X by the number of users. Example, my time is worth $60 an hour. I spend two hours a week working on the server ($120). I spend $30 a month on the server rental. $150. I have 20 users. $150/20 is $7.50…

The way, what was stated, was stated, indicated that docker runs virtual machines. It doesn’t. It runs containers, right?

If you’re running it using Docker, that’s a container not a VM. And that IS the way you would want to run it, in a container. They’re easy to set up, easy to use, and easy to maintain.

I’m going to tell you a secret…. Yes.

All those things could happen. Some people could run a site that has ads. Some people could run a site that charges a membership. Some sites could have a Patreon membership. Some sites could do subscriptions….

And some sites could be completely free.

The funny thing is, because of the federation, no one will be harmed. Let’s say I startup a site and all I do is pass through the cost of the site to each user. No profit, just what it costs to maintain the server is shared among the members.

Is that unreasonable?

Glad to be of service.

Glad to be of service.

It’s cute how you think I’m going to take legal advice from you. You do you, have a nice evening.

I’m basing what I have said off of work I have done with attorneys in similar situations. I don’t know evidentiary law, but I wouldn’t want to be accused of destroying evidence of something. But my question stands. Why should someone who has doxed someone get away with it by deleting their account? How is that ethical?

That’s a hard question to answer. My position is based on where I live and what legal council I have worked with has said in situations I’ve dealt with. My recommendation is, check with an attorney.

I’m at a loss. You’re saying that things that you said publicly are private? Or you’re saying that they become private because you delete your account? Assume you dox someone. I need to find out if that happened. As an admin I’d be able to see that

1. you
2. publicly posted
3. their data

I would need to be able to provide this to authorities if they provided needed legal documentation. Why do you think that privacy dictates you should be able to commit a crime, and get away with it by deleting your account?

I created a process to remove the bot accounts from my database without crashing my site. I have tested and it looks like all functions are working. If you need help because you suddenly have thousands more accounts than you would suspect ask me for the procedure. I’ll gladly provide it.

I was able to identify bot accounts by looking at creation times. They accounts are grouped by “batches” where the account creation times are within seconds of each other. That’s not typically going to happen with random humans creating accounts.

At this point, I’m not certain anymore. Luckily all the accounts use values that are easy to identify them. I’ll figure out how to remove them. Sorry for the false alarm work.

Thank you for the link to this story. It connected together a few dots and made some things finally makes sense.