Not going to lie, I got banned so I made my own World News Community. This community differs because there’s no silly bot, I’ll happily listen to the communities voice, and we’re a bit more lax on rules policing.
Feel free to come on by and comment. I would love to foster a News community that’s active in discussion.
looks
So, I don’t know what the beef between the !world@lemmy.world mods and you was, but…
That’s a lot of activity for a new community. On Lemmy.today, I see 82 upvotes for the first article, which was apparently a week ago…and I assume that this is the first announcement.
https://lemmy.today/post/17163696?scrollToComments=true
lemmy.world shows the same thing for it.
Normally, Lemmy doesn’t show users who have upvoted a post. Only admins can see that.
But Kbin and Mbin do, including on federated servers.
So, I can look at the upvotes for that post; mbin shows them on the “favorites” tab.
Fedia.io is an mbin instance.
When I go to the most recent !world@quokk.au post on Fedia.io, however, all of those votes that your community is reporting disappear. It shows virtually no upvote activity.
https://fedia.io/m/world@quokk.au
In fact, no post in that community has more than four upvotes. Most of them, you’ve upvoted. But I don’t see a lot of other users there. One or two.
Now, that might just be some kind of mbin bug. But the posts on !world@lemmy.world look pretty much the same on lemmy.today and fedia.io. It shows real users generating those upvotes.
Now, okay. Maybe it’s just me being cynical and skeptical. But this is your home instance, yeah? You wouldn’t have anything to do with that instance possibly reporting incorrect vote totals on posts on your new community, right?
And keep in mind, I’m not saying that more competition for communities is a bad thing. More options, let users choose what they want. But I’d also think that having an instance report accurate numbers to help them make that choice is important. And if they aren’t accurate, that ain’t a great start for the community, in my book.
EDIT: Looking further, it looks like it’s just a very high upvote count for a new community relative to age and comments, but I was able to look at the users doing the voting on another instance, and the users doing so don’t appear to be bots; that’s coupled with some oddity of vote propagation; I detailed this in a follow-up comment. Sorry, Deceptichum! I don’t believe that there’s any funny business going on.
“This magazine is not receiving updates” is why it’s out of sync. It’s no different than a Lemmy instance which isn’t syncing updates from a community. You’ll be able to see the community, and sometimes see some content on it, but it’ll be missing most of the votes. Also, when you first subscribe to a community, you’ll get a handful of recent posts, but none of the votes, so you’ll see content with the voting all wrong.
Mbin might also be flaky about syncing with Lemmy instances, but that’s not the reason in this case that the votes are out of sync.
I looked over the votes for a couple of the posts in !world@quokk.au. I’ve seen voting in that past that seemed faked, but nothing in this community jumped out at me.
As much as I’m in favor of a !world community that isn’t on lemmy.world, because there’s clearly some kind of rot going on there, I’m not sure how good an idea it is to have someone who’s habitually gotten their own stuff banned in the past be the boss of a new community. He didn’t get banned for tangling with the mods, he got banned for advocating violence, abusing the report feature, and things like that.
Of course, diversity is good, obviously. Let’s see what he does with it.
I never abused the report system. That was the mod of News abusing the rule, I only ever reported stuff hurled at me which never ever got removed even when it was very obvious personal attacks or other people doing exactly what I had a comment removed for.
And I 100% will admit that I’ve called for the removal of Israel. I don’t view that as the negative FlyingSquid does.
Every mod has their own personal biases. Mine are just further to the left of American liberals, so we clash.
I moderate differently than I comment. Moderation for me is only about removing spam etc or obvious bad actors, people voting are what determines what’s visible not what I’ve decided should be allowed.
Can you link to some examples of people abusing you? You don’t have to spend a ton of time on it if you don’t want to. I’m just curious.
Moderation is never completely fair. It can’t be. I’m just saying that by some coincidence, the moderators that interacted with you are some of the only ones who I tend to agree with a lot of the time.
It’s not just FlyingSquid. I think calling for “removing” Moscow, or Washington, or Israel, or Gaza, or Ukraine, for whatever reasons of geopolitical argument, would lead to your removal from most communities outside of the instances that tend to get defederated.
You can hold whatever views you want, but surely breaking the community rules on purpose by speaking about them, and then getting banned, isn’t a confusing outcome.
Maybe so. It could work fine. Definitely having you be a member of the community instead of someone coming from above, and open about what you’re doing and why, is a step in the right direction. I’m just saying that moderation is hard and thankless work that is going to bring you into contact with a lot of obnoxious people, and refraining from becoming obnoxious or unfair yourself, as you deal with that day in and day out, is a lot more difficult than it seems like it would be.
Yeah, the ratio of upvotes to comments looks a little unusual IMO
I suppose that there’s also a broader technical issue here. Like, Deceptichum’s a real user, a regular on various communities I use. He comments, contributes. I don’t much agree with him on, say, Palestine, but on the other hand, we both happily post images to !imageai@sh.itjust.works. I figure that he probably got in a spat with the !world@lemmy.world mods, was pissed, wanted to help get a little more suction to draw users. That’s relatively harmless as the Threadiverse goes. This is some community drama.
But you gotta figure that if it’s possible to have an instance reporting bogus vote totals, that it’s possible for someone to have bogus vote totals at greater scale. So you start adding instances to the mix. Maybe generating users. Like, there are probably a lot of ways to manipulate the view of the thing.
And that’s an attack that will probably come, if the Threadiverse continues to grow. Like, think of all the stuff that happens on Reddit. People selling and buying accounts to buy reputability, whole websites dedicated to that, stuff like that. There’s money in eyeball time. There are a lot more routes to attack on the Threadiverse.
I don’t know if that’s a fundamental vulnerability in ActivityPub. Maybe it could be addressed with cryptographically-signed votes and some kind of web of trust or…I don’t know. Reddit dealt with it by (a) not being a federated system and (b) mechanisms to try to detect bot accounts. But those aren’t options for the Threadiverse. It’s gotta be distributed, and it’s gonna be hard to detect bots. So, I figure this is just the start. Maybe there has to be some sort of “reputability” metric associated with users that is an input to how their voting is reported to other users, though that’s got its own set of issues.
That is how it works, I believe. Each vote has to be signed by the actor of the user that voted.
There have been people who did transparent vote-stuffing by creating fake accounts en masse and get detected, because they were using random strings of letters for the usernames. Probably it’s happened more subtly than that and not been detected sometimes, too, but it’s not quite as simple as just reporting a high number.
I believe that the basic metric of trust is instance-level. That is, it’s the TLS certificates and whether-or-not an instance is federated that is the basis of trust. I don’t think that users have individual keys – I mean, it’d be meaningless to generate one rather than just trusting a home instance without client-side storage, and that definitely doesn’t exist.
Having client-side keys would potentially, with other work, buy some neat things, like account portability across instances.
But the problem is that, as you point out, any solution on vote trust can’t just be user-level keys, unless every admin is gonna police who they federate with and maintain only a network of instances that they consider legit. Once I federate with an instance, I grant it the right to create as many accounts as it wants and vote how it wants. And keep in mind that ownership of an instance could change. Like, an admin retires, a new one shows up, stuff like that.
Your actor (
https://lemmy.today/u/tal)'s public key is:-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY----- MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEA1VR4k0/gurS2iULVe7D6 xwlQNTeEsn0EOVuGC2e9ZBPHv4b02Z8mvuJmWIcLxWmaL+cgHu2cJCWx2lxNYyfQ ivorluJHQcwPtkx9B0gFBR5SHmQzMuk6cllDMhfqUBCONiy5cpYRIs4LBpChV4vg frSquHPl+5LvEs1jgCZnAcTtJZVKBRISNhSp560ftntlFATMh/hIFG2Sfdi3V3+/ 0nf0QDPm77vqykj2aUk8RnnkMG2KfPwSdJMUhHQ6HQZS+AZuZ7Q+t5bs8bISFeLR 6uqJHcrXtvOIXuFe7d/g/MKjqURaSh/Pqet8dVIwvLFFr5oNkcKhWG1QXL1k62Tr owIDAQAB -----END PUBLIC KEY-----All ActivityPub users have their own private keys. I’m not completely sure, and I just took a quick look through the code and protocols and couldn’t find the place where vote activity signatures are validated. But I swear I thought that all ActivityPub activities including votes were signed with the key of the actor that did them.
Regardless, I know that when votes federate, they do get identified according to the person who did the vote.
In practice, you are completely correct that the trust is per-instance, since the instance DB keeps all the actor private keys anyway, so it’s six of one vs. half dozen of the other whether you have 100 fake votes from bad.instance signed with that instance’s TLS key, or 100 fake votes signed with individual private keys that bad.instance made up. I’m just nitpicking about how it works at a protocol level.
Ah, thank you for that, then; that makes sense. And yeah, if there is a per-user key, then I’d expect it to be signing votes.
Good points. I also think the fediverse and Lemmy, in particular, could be attractive to certain bad actors in terms of misinformation and astroturfing, and vote manipulation would certainly help with that. I think some people think we’re safer here from that because of smaller size, etc. - but I think Lemmy users are more likely to be willing to engage (as we wouldn’t be here without willing to take leave of places like Reddit), and influencing the conversations on Lemmy could be a significant boost to someone looking to share misinformation or make a difference in very tight elections.
On the whole, I think that’s one of the reasons Lemmy needs better built-in moderation tools than what might otherwise be thought appropriate based on its size. And an overall maturity of the platform to protect against that kind of manipulation.
It’s very obvious that someone is doing deliberate astroturfing on Lemmy. How much is an open question, but some amount of it is definitely happening.
The open question, to me, is why the .world moderation team seems so totally uninterested in dealing with the topic. For example, they’re happy for UniversalMonk to spam for Jill Stein in a way that openly violates the rules, that almost every single member of the community is against, and that objectively makes the community worse. Why that is happening is a baffling and interesting question to me.
I agree. In terms of the .world mods and some of the specific cases you mentioned, I think at least part of the problem is that they are often looking at stuff at a per-comment or per-post basis and sometimes missing more holistic issues.
My guess is that a good portion of that comes down to the quality and breadth (or lack thereof) of the Lemmy built-in moderation tools. Combined with volunteer moderation and a presidential election year in the US, and I’m sure the moderation load is close to overwhelming and they don’t really have the tools they need to be more sophisticated or efficient about it. Generally I’ve actually been impressed with a lot of the work they do, though there have been obvious missteps too.
Everyone talks about Lemmy needing to grow in terms of users and activity, but without better moderation tools and likely some core framework changes, I think that would be a disaster. We have all the same complexities of some place like Reddit, but with the addition of different instances all with different rules, etc (not to mention different approaches to moderation).
I completely agree. I have a whole mini-essay that I’ve been meaning to write about this, about problems of incentives and social contracts on Lemmy-style servers in the fediverse that I think lead to a lot of these issues that keep cropping up.
Hey, thanks for the reply. I don’t know how upvotes syncing works, but when I look at the community on here or .world, I see roughly the same number of upvotes?
Edit: When I look on any Lemmy site that’s synced with it, I see similar. Is this a kBin issue?
It’s my home instance and I am friends with the admin. From what I know they ran an “easy” script to setup the site, I don’t think they’re knowledgeable enough to do stuff like fake votes from the instance (no offence @Marsupial@quokk.au).
The disparity in vote totals is between mbin and lemmy instances.
Ah so that’s an *bin problem yeah? I remember starting off on kBin and it was always acting up with Lemmy.
“This magazine is not receiving updates.” might be why it shows wrong?
As pointed out below, votes don’t get federated if no fedia.io user is subscribed
An instance needs to have a subscribed user to get the posts and comments, which have shown up. The votes, however, are absent.
That’s not quite true. If a community was resolved but no one’s currently subscribed to it, for example because someone searched for it or subscribed and then unsubscribed, you’ll see exactly the situation that you’re looking at. You’ll see partial content and almost no votes.
considers
Fedia.io appears to have a pretty complete history of comments and posts. Lemmyverse.net reports 78 posts, and that’s about how many posts picks up. It doesn’t see the votes, however.
Granted, I haven’t tested the order in which votes are fetched. Maybe comments and posts get priority over votes, and if a user unsubscribes, that terminates fetching votes.
looks further
On lemmyverse.net, the community statistics read:
90 subscribed users. 1.9k active users.
That ratio is pretty dramatically out-of-whack with all other communities on lemmyverse. That’s sufficient to place it in the top 100 communities on the Threadiverse by active users, which I believe includes vote activity.
But it has only 90 subscribers, which is way down the list.
The subscriber count I can believe, for a new community. But for the active user count to be that high, there’d need to be a very high proportion of user account activity, with few subscriptions.
EDIT: Additionally, if one sorts by active weekly users, every other community shown on the same visible page in the lemmyverse community list – the communities with a roughly comparable active user rate – has between an order of magnitude and two orders of magnitude more comments. So basically, very few of these users could be commenting, but a high proportion would need to be voting.
EDIT2: Okay, moist.catsweat.com is another mbin instance that has indexed the community. Unlike fedia.io, that instance does have votes for the past few posts, and while there are a lot of upvotes relative to comments, one can see the users users doing so, and they appear to be real users, not bots. It’s a lot of upvotes for a new community, but that could be just unusual, and I’d believe that the propagation of votes is due to lemmy quirks.
Sorry, @Deceptichum@quokk.au. Just didn’t want to have spammers abusing the system. This is probably legit; I’ll withdraw my concerns.
Interestingly enough, now that I’m having a look, if you filter the top posts of the community, quite a few posters were created 9 or 8 days ago:
I also couldn’t find any announcements anywhere which would draw 2k members in such a short timeframe
I also noticed two new accounts voting on this post:
We don’t have the voting data for previous threads