The best part of the fediverse is that anyone can run their own server. The downside of this is that anyone can easily create hordes of fake accounts, as I will now demonstrate.
Fighting fake accounts is hard and most implementations do not currently have an effective way of filtering out fake accounts. I’m sure that the developers will step in if this becomes a bigger problem. Until then, remember that votes are just a number.
This was a problem on reddit too. Anyone could create accounts - heck, I had 8 accounts:
one main, one alt, one “professional” (linked publicly on my website), and five for my bots (whose accounts were optimistically created, but were never properly run). I had all 8 accounts signed in on my third-party app and I could easily manipulate votes on the posts I posted.
I feel like this is what happened when you’d see posts with hundreds / thousands of upvotes but had only 20-ish comments.
There needs to be a better way to solve this, but I’m unsure if we truly can solve this. Botnets are a problem across all social media (my undergrad thesis many years ago was detecting botnets on Reddit using Graph Neural Networks).
Fwiw, I have only one Lemmy account.
I see what you mean, but there’s also a large number of lurkers, who will only vote but never comment.
I don’t think it’s unfeasible to have a small number of comments on a highly upvoted post.
If it’s a meme or shitpost there isn’t anything to talk about
Maybe you’re right, but it just felt uncanny to see thousands of upvotes on a post with only a handful of comments. Maybe someone who active on the bot-detection subreddits can pitch in.
I agree completely. 3k upvotes on the front page with 12 comments just screams vote manipulation
True, but there were also a number of subs (thinking of the various meirl spin-offs, for example) that naturally had limited engagement compared to other subs. It wasn’t uncommon to see a post with like 2K upvotes and five comments, all of them remarking how little comments there actually were.
Reddit had ways to automatically catch people trying to manipulate votes though, at least the obvious ones. A friend of mine posted a reddit link for everyone to upvote on our group and got temporarily suspended for vote manipulation like an hour later. I don’t know if something like that can be implemented in the Fediverse but some people on github suggested a way for instances to share to other instances how trusted/distrusted a user or instance is.
An automated trust rating will be critical for Lemmy, longer term. It’s the same arms race as email has to fight. There should be a linked trust system of both instances and users. The instance ‘vouches’ for the users trust score. However, if other instances collectively disagree, then the trust score of the instance is also hit. Other instances can then use this information to judge how much to allow from users in that instance.
This will be very difficult. With Lemmy being open source (which is good), bot maker’s can just avoid the pitfalls they see in the system (which is bad).
I got suspended multiple times because my partner and daughter were also in our city’s sub, and sometimes one of them would upvote my comments without realizing it was me. It got really fucking annoying, and of course there’s no way to talk to a real person at reddit to prove we’re different people. I’d appeal every time and they’d deny it every time. How reddit could have gotten so huge without realizing that multiple people can live in the same household is beyond me. In the end they both just stopped upvoting anything in the sub because it was too risky (for me).
That’s such a hilariously bad metric for detecting a bot network too. It wouldn’t even work to detect a real one, so all that policy ever did was annoy real users.
Hearing that, I wonder if they were using an IP address based system. That would cause real problems for people using a VPN, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
RIP u/unidan
I think it’s the 3rd party app or VPN thing that would have saved your friend.
nope, i tried manipulating votes from apollo once and got a warning
Were you on a VPN?
nope, so that’s probably it
I got that message too when switching accounts to vote several times. They can probably see it’s all coming from the same ip.
On Reddit there were literally bot armies by which thousands of votes could be instantly implemented. It will become a problem if votes have any actual effect.
It’s fine if they’re only there as an indicator, but if the votes are what determine popularity, prioritize visibility, it will become a total shitshow at some point. And it will be rapid. So yeah, better to have a defense system in place asap.
Yes, I feel like this is a moot point. If you want it to be “one human, one vote” then you need to use some form of government login (like id.me, which I’ve never gotten to work). Otherwise people will make alts and inflate/deflate the “real” count. I’m less concerned about “accurate points” and more concerned about stability, participation, and making this platform as inclusive as possible.
In my opinion, the biggest (and quite possibly most dangerous) problem is someone artificially pumping up their ideas. To all the users who sort by active / hot, this would be quite problematic.
I’d love to actually see some social media research groups actually consider how to detect and potentially eliminate this issue on Lemmy, considering Lemmy is quite new and is malleable at this point (compared to other social media). For example, if they think metric X may be a good idea to include in all metadata to increase chances of detection, then it may be possible to include this in the source code of posts / comments / activities.
I know a few professors and researchers who do research on social media and associated technologies, I’ll go talk to them when they come to their office on Monday.
This also vaguely reminds me of some advanced networking topics. In mesh networks there is the possibility of rogue nodes causing havoc and different methods exist to reduce their influence or cut them out of the process.
!remindme - oh wait…
@remindme@mstdn.social 1 day
:)
@Lumidaub Ok, I will remind you on Monday Jul 10, 2023 at 9:36 AM PDT.
I have been thinking about this government id aspect too. But it’s not coming to me.
Users sign up with govt ID, obtain a unique social media key that’s used for all activities beyond the sign up. One key per person, but a person can have multiple accounts? You know, like that database primary key.
The relationship between the govt id and social media key needs to be in a zero knowledge encryption so that no one can corelate the real person with their online presence. THIS is the bummer.
These downvotes indicate that some of the assholes have now migrated.
I feel like this is what happened when you’d see posts with hundreds / thousands of upvotes but had only 20-ish comments.
Nah it’s the same here in Lemmy. It’s because the algorithm only accounts for votes and not for user engagement.
Yeah votes are the worst metric to measure anything because of bot voters.
I always had 3 or 4 reddit accounts in use at once. One for commenting, one for porn, one for discussing drugs and one for pics that could be linked back to me (of my car for example) I also made a new commenting account like once a year so that if someone recognized me they wouldn’t be able to find every comment I’ve ever written.
On lemmy I have just two now (other is for porn) but I’m probably going to make one or two more at some point
I have about 20 reddit accounts… I created/ switched account every few months when I used reddit
If you and several other accounts all upvoted each other from the same IP address, you’ll get a warning from reddit. If my wife ever found any of my comments in the wild, she would upvoted them. The third time she did it, we both got a warning about manipulating votes. They threatened to ban both of our accounts if we did it again.
But here, no one is going to check that.
Congratulations on such a tough project.
And yes, as long as the API is accessible somebody will create bots. The alternative is far worse though
May I ask how do you format your text? My format bar has disappeared from wefwef.
I don’t use wefwef, I use jerboa for android.
**bold**
*italics*
> quote
`code`
# heading
- list
Ah ok. Yeah I thought the markdown was the same as reddit being markdown but it used to have a toolbar.
Thanks for response.
Also I’ve wondered why don’t they have an underline markdown.
Fun fact: old reddit used to use one of the header functions as an underline. I think it was 5x # that did it. However, this was an unofficial implementation of markdown, and it was discarded with new reddit. Also, being a header function you could only apply it to an entire line or paragraph, rather than individual words.
I had all 8 accounts signed in on my third-party app and I could easily manipulate votes on the posts I posted.
There’s no chance this works. Reddit surely does a simple IP check.
I had one main account but also a couple for using when I didn’t want to mix my “private” life up with other things. I don’t even know if it’s not allowed in the TOS?
Anyway, I stupidly made a Valmond account on several Lemmy instances before I got the hang of it, and when (if!) my server will one day function I’ll make an account there so …
I guess it might be like in the old forum days, you have a respectable account and another if you wanted to ask a stupid question etc. admin would see (if they cared) but not the ordinary users.
Reddit will definitely send you PM’s for vote manipulation
I would think that they need to set a somewhat permissive threshold to avoid too many false positives due to people sharing a network. For example, a professor may share a reddit post in a class with 600 students with their laptops connected to the same WiFi. Or several people sharing an airport’s WiFi could be looking at /r/all and upvoting the top posts.
I think 8 accounts liking the same post every few days wouldn’t be enough to trigger an alarm. But maybe it is, I haven’t tried this.
I’d just make new usernames whenever I thought of one I thought was funny. I’ve only used this one on Lemmy (so far) but eventually I’ll probably make a new one when I have one of those “Oh shit, that’d be a good username” moments.
You can change your display name on Lemmy to whatever you want whenever you want.
Oh neat! Thanks!
I think the best solution there is so far is to require captcha for every upvote but that’d lead to poor user experience. I guess it’s the cost benefit of user experience degrading through fake upvotes vs through requiring captcha.
If any instance ever requires a captcha for something as trivial as an upvote, I’ll simply stop upvoting on that instance.
Yes that’s what I meant by degrading user experience
I could see this being useful on a per community basis. Or something that a moderator could turn on and off.
For example on a political or news community during an election. It might be worth while to turn captcha on.
I have like tens of accounts on reddit.
I’m curious what value you get from a bot? Were you using it to upvote your posts, or to crawl for things that you found interesting?
The latter. I was making bots to collect data (for the previously-mentioned thesis) and to make some form of utility bots whenever I had ideas.
I once had an idea to make a community-driven tagging bot to tag images (like hashtags). This would have been useful for graph building and just general information-lookup. Sadly, the idea never came to fruition.
Cool, thank you for clarifying!
IMO the best way to solve it is to ‘lower the stakes’ - spread out between instances, avoid behaviors like buying any highly upvoted recommendation without due diligence etc. Basically, become ‘un-advertiseable’, or at least less so
The lack of karma helps some. There’s no point in trying to rack up the most points for your account(s), which is a good thing. Why waste time on the lamest internet game when you can engage in conversation with folks on lemmy instead.
It can still be used to artificially pump up an idea. Or used to bury one.
This is the problem. All the algorithms are based on the upvote count. Bad actors will abuse this.
So maybe more weight should be put on comment count? Much harder to fake those.
deleted by creator
So, the question becomes how do we rank posts and comments in a way that is not based on either upvotes or down votes or number of comments? I could see a trust value being made for each user based on trusted users marking others as trusted combined with a personal trust score, but that puts a barrier on new users and enforces echo chambers.
What else could be tried?
that puts a barrier on new users and enforces echo chambers
Only if trust starts at 0. A system where trust started high enough to not filter out posts and comments would avoid that issue.
deleted by creator
That’s where all the harm comes from
Agree. Farming karma is nothing compared to making a single individual polar-opinion APPEAR as though it is other’s (or most’s) polar-opinion. We know that other’s opinions are not our own, but they do influence our opinions. It’s pretty important that either 1) like numbers mean nothing, in which case hot/active/etc. are meaningless or 2) we work together to ensure trust in like numbers.
Maybe you move public perception of a product or political goal.
To push a narrative of some kind. Astroturfing basically.Lack of karma is a fallacy. The default Lemmy UI doesn’t display it but the karma system appears to be fully built.
The data to build it is there. Ftfy
Tallies are maintained in the db in real-time. No calculating needed
I just mean that the karma system ala Reddit did more than just keep track of it and display it afaik. The data is in the db but a fully done karma system it is not. I could be wrong.
Corporations could use it to push their ads to the top
This is near inevitable if this platform takes off.
Advertisers gonna advertise.
Just rip them in the comments and boycott their brand
Edit: or even meme them into the ground. I could start a parody account if I saw someone advertising. I could pretend I’m them and align myself with nazi values in satire ads hypothetically.
This is exactly why they wouldn’t risk officially advertising here. Not enough control over the platform leads to too much risk to brand perception.
I was actually talking to someone that works in advertising and for big companies this is unlikely. Pepsi for example pays a lot for the guarntee that their product ads won’t appear near posts they don’t want them to. Since Lemmy advertising would only be through regular posts where they have no control over this, they likely wouldn’t risk the potential detriment to brand perception.
Now this can change if the potential reach of Lemmy is big enough but that size will be different for each company.
Probably true. it’s the agencies who are desperate and likely to be looking to chatGPT to outsource ad copy who are going to be looking to capitalize.
No community is really above being targeted, because the good campaigns done by people in the niche tend to be indistinguishable from good posts.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding karma, but Memmy appears to show the total upvotes I’ve gotten for comments and posts, isn’t that basically karma?
I don’t think other people can see it though. On Reddit bot accounts would rack up karma so that when they switch to posting spam it looks like they have a lot of karma and are someone who posts worthwhile things.
I’m using wefwef and can see what everyone score is on any given comment as well as their overall score when I go to their profile
Yeah I was wrong. I use Jerboa mostly.
same on Memmy for me
I can click on you and see the same stats for you… though the numbers seems too low when I eyeball it compared to your comments, but I’m thinking maybe it’s just total points for a single lemmy server?
I guess I was wrong. I shouldn’t have assumed. I’m using Jerboa.
EDIT I was wrong! Lemmy does have karma, even listed in the API, though for some reason it doesn’t show this to you itself. So, those of us just using Lemmy directly have been under the mistaken idea that it didn’t do it, and those using third party apps are seeing it: https://lemmy.world/post/1250922?scrollToComments=true
~~That’s interesting, because on the Lemmy website, there is no total upvotes number visible. It only shows the total number of posts and total number of comments. It then shows the list of posts and comments, and you can see the scores for each, but there’s no total. Memmy must be calculating this itself. This seems to be something third party app developers are adding which is not present in actual Lemmy itself, in order to try to replicate Reddit Karma somewhat.
As Lemmy works itself: On Reddit, in addition to your posts and comments having visible scores, your username also has an aggregate score, which Lemmy does not have. At least, when I go to your profile, I can see the scores for your posts and comments, but I cannot see any aggregate score for you as a user. That’s what Reddit Karma is. I don’t know what black magic formula Reddit calculates it from, as old Reddit and new Reddit show different Karma numbers for the same user, but whatever algorithm they use, it’s an overall user score that Lemmy does not have (so far, at least). ~~
While the Lemmy UI doesn’t expose the data is available via the API. That’s how clients like Memmy are getting it.
Yep! I just saw this other post where I learned I was wrong. That’s what I get for just using Lemmy itself. https://lemmy.world/post/1250922?scrollToComments=true
The lack of karma also makes it worse. Usually if I saw a discussion that felt kinda off I’d check the accounts age and karma. Made it easier to sniff out bots.
The karma though is what drove Reddit adoption to an extent. Gamification helps. It helped Reddit, it helped robinhood stocks app.
Maybe fediverse needs some gamification.
Or maybe not. Facebook and YouTube seem to be doing fine just using the line/unlike button.
The nice things about the Federated universe is that, yes, you can bulk create user accounts on your own instance - and that server can then be defederated by other servers when it becomes obvious that it’s going to create problems.
It’s not a perfect fix and as this post demonstrated, is only really effective after a problem has been identified. At least in terms of vote manipulation from across servers, it could act if it, say, detects that 99% of new upvotes are coming from a server created yesterday with 1 post, it could at least flag it for a human to review.
It actually seems like an interesting problem to solve. Instance runners have the sql database with all the voting record, finding manipulative instances seems a bit like a machine learning problem to me
There’s an XKCD for that: https://xkcd.com/810/
One other thing is that you can bulk create your own instances, and that’s a lot more effort to defederate. People could be creating those instances right now and just start using them after a year; at least they have incurred some costs during that…
I believe abuse management in openly federated systems (e.g. Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix) is still an unsolved problem. I doubt good solutions will arrive before they become popular enough to attract commercial spammers.
deleted by creator
Then they will just distribute their bots equally to other legit servers, and by that, defederation is not a viable solution anymore.
One other problem are real human troll farms
If they can do that, they could’ve done it on a traditional site anyway
You can buy 700 votes anonymously on reddit for really cheap
I don’t see that it’s a big deal, really. It’s the same as it ever was.
Over a houndred dollars for 700 upvotes O_o
I wouldn’t exactly call that cheap 🤑
On the other hand, ten or twenty quick downvotes on an early answer could swing things I guess …
For the companies who want a huge advantage over others, $100 is nothing in an advertising budget.
I have a small business and I do $1000 a week in advertising.
Yeah, 700 upvotes soon after a post is made could easily shoot it up to the top of even a popular sub for a few days (specially with the lack of mod tools rn), with others upvoting it purely because it already has alot of upvotes.
I don’t know anything about advertising but what are you doing that costs $1000 a week? I am legitimately curious.
You have no idea about business expenses do you. I work in the events industry, corporations hold single evening events for their higher up employees for 10s of thousands in only technical expenses, before the venue asks for rent, or the catering etc. A single month of any basic service on the enterprise level starts from 5 grand.
You have no idea about business expenses do you.
Figure out punctuation first.
super relevant, not everyone speaks english as a first language.
Then those people should not try to insult others for their lack of knowledge about business while displaying a lack of proficiency in English.
Advertising is incredibly expensive. I pay upwards to $1/click for one of my services targetting a specific group.
If you hate ads, use something like Ad Nauseum instead of UBlock origin. You’ll cost companies hundreds of dollars a day.
deleted by creator
Honestly, most of them :). If you’re reasonably wealthy (make above average wage), every ad you click will cost advertisers at least 25-50¢. The value of your clicks will go down a little depending on a few things, but anything on a website that serves its own ads instead of going through a 3rd party network (think Reddit ads) will stay in the 25-50¢ range, if not more
deleted by creator
To me, the draw of Lemmy is that it’s not the same as it ever was here. I don’t know the internet before ads, this place is great!
Cause the problem, sell the solution. What a degenerate.
Reddit admins manipulated vote counts all the time.
Reddit also created fake users to post fake content… At least in the beginning of reddit.
TIL “beginning of Reddit” comprises the time up to and including July 2023.
It marks both the beginning and end
Aaaand…?
Federated actions are never truly private, including votes. While it’s inevitable that some people will abuse the vote viewing function to harass people who downvoted them, public votes are useful to identify bot swarms manipulating discussions.
This. It’s only a matter of time until we can automatically detected vote manipulation. Furthermore, there’s a possibility that in future versions we can decrease the weight of votes coming from certain instances that might be suspicious.
And it’s only a matter of time until that detection can be evaded. The knife cuts both ways. Automation and the availability of internet resources makes this back and forth inevitable and unending. The devs, instance admins and users that coalesce to make the “Lemmy” have to be dedicated to that. Everyone else will just kind of fade away as edge cases or slow death.
maybe we can show a breakdown of which servers the votes are coming from so anything sus can be found out right away. Like, it would be easy enough to identify a bot farm I’d think
Yep, give admins the tools they need to identify this activity so they can defederate accordingly. Seems like the only way.
I wouldn’t be surprised if stuff like this is already in the works but the devs/contributors have a lot on their plate
Upvotes aren’t just a number, they determine placing on the algorithm along with comments. It’s easy to censor an unwanted view by mass downvoting it.
Some instances don’t allow downvoting. It doesn’t really matter, mass upvoting the remaining content has the same effect.
I disagree, i just got massively bandwagon downvoted into oblivion in this thread and noticed that as soon as a single downvote hits, it’s like blood in the water and the piranhas will instantly downvote, even if its nonsensical. Downvotes act as a guide for people that don’t really think about the message contents, and need instructions on how to vote. I’d love if comments got their votes censored for 1 hour after posting.
Better if the votes are permanently hidden to users and are only visible to mods, admins and the system.
I don’t think obstructing or hiding votes is the way to go. Them being public is actually better and it should be transparent to all users. Besides that what prevents spammers and vote manipulators to setup their own instances to see the votes?
I was referring to bots: whether they downvote one post/comment to -1000, or upvote the rest to +1000, the effect is the same… for anyone sorting by votes.
In regards to people, I agree that downvotes are not really constructive, that’s why beehav.org doesn’t allow them.
But in general, I’m afraid Lemmy will have to end up offering similar vote related features as Reddit: hide vote counts for some period of time, “randomize” them a bit to drive bots crazy, and that kind of stuff.
Here’s an idea: adjust the weights of votes by how predictable they are.
If account A always upvotes account B, those upvotes don’t count as much—not just because A is potentially a bot, but because A’s upvotes don’t tell us anything new.
If account C upvotes a post by account B, but there was no a priori reason to expect it to based on C’s past history, that upvote is more significant.
This could take into account not just the direct interactions between two accounts, but how other accounts interact with each of them, whether they’re part of larger groups that tend to vote similarly, etc.
What if account B only ever posts high quality content? What if everybody upvotes account B because their content is so good? What if they rarely post so it would be reasonable that a smaller subset of the population has ever seen their posts?
Your theory assumes large volumes of constant posts seen by a wide audience, but that’s not how these sites work, your ideal would censor and disadvantage many accounts.
If an account is upvoted because it’s posting high-quality content, we’d expect those votes to come from a variety of accounts that don’t otherwise have a tendency to vote for the same things.
Suppose you do regression analysis on voting patterns to identify the unknown parameters determining how accounts vote. These will mostly correlate with things like interests, political views, geography, etc.—and with bot groups—but the biggest parameter affecting votes will presumably correlate with a consensus view of the general quality of the content.
But accounts won’t get penalized if their votes can be predicted by this parameter: precisely because it’s the most common parameter, it can be ignored when identifying voting blocs.
If an account is upvoted because it’s posting high- quality content, we’d expect those votes to come from a variety of accounts that don’t otherwise have a tendency to vote for the same things.
No, I completely disagree and reject your premise.
Many times really high quality content will be voted for by only a small subset of the population.
In general people will vote for lowest common denominator widely appealing click bait. That type of content will get varied voters because of wide appeal. Discerning voters represent a smaller but consistent subset of the population, and this proposed algorithm will penalize that and just lead to more low quality widely appealing click bait.
Sure, the “consensus view of general quality” will depend on the opinions of your user base—but if that’s the source of your objection, your issue is with the user base and not vote manipulation per se.
Your oversimplification makes it sound like this is just my personal preference, and not a natural tendency of humans or social media interactions.
This is not just “I like X more”, this is “humans on a large scale act like probabilistic decision trees and will converge on lowest common denominator dopamine fountains without careful checks and considerations”
The latter is necessary for high quality networked media and discussion
deleted by creator
In that situation, what function do the upvotes serve in the first place? If the potential audience already knows they’re going to read and enjoy more content from the same source, do they need to see upvotes to tell them what they already know?
(Remember that without effective permanent karma, upvotes only serve to call attention to particular posts or comments in the short term.)
deleted by creator
I‘m not a fan of up- and downvotes, also but not only for the aforementioned reasons. Classic forums ran fine without any of it.
Classic forums still exist.
Voting does allow the cream to rise to the top, which is why reddit was much better than a forum.
Honestly, I think part of the problem is that companies don’t have an incentive to fight bots or spam: higher numbers of users and engagement make them look better to investors and advertisers.
I don’t think it’s that difficult of a problem to solve. It should be quite possible to detect patterns between real users and bots.
We will see how the fediverse handles it.
deleted by creator
I keep thinking about this. The only reason for votes that a forum cant do, is filtering massive content quantities through an equally massive userbase to get pages of great and revolving posts. In a forum you can just filter with comments/hour and give free promotion to new posts.
Ironically, I agree and upvoted this.
I ironically up vote this also. Agreed to no upvote and downvot.
Lets cut the sorting to chronological order. With options to arrange to new or old only.
deleted by creator
I’ve always wondered if it would help to have to reply in order to give an up/downvote but I assume it would likely just result in more spam. Still, I hope people are thinking of new ways to try things
I like upvotes, otherwise I’d have stayed on forums. It’s also one of the only ethical algorithmic sorting methods as long as you can whitelist your members.
IMO, likes need to be handled with supreme prejudice by the Lemmy software. A lot of thought needs to go into this. There are so many cases where the software could reject a likely fake like that would have near zero chance of rejecting valid likes. Putting this policing on instance admins is a recipe for failure.
I wonder if it’s possible …and not overly undesirable… to have your instance essentially put an import tax on other instances’ votes. On the one hand, it’s a dangerous direction for a free and equal internet; but on the other, it’s a way of allowing access to dubious communities/instances, without giving them the power to overwhelm your users’ feeds. Essentially, the user gets the content of the fediverse, primarily curated by the community of their own instance.
when you say import tax do you mean actual monetary payment? Or a computing power tax? I don’t think I understand
I was reading it as lowering the value of an upvote from instances that are known to harbor click farming accounts. I could be wrong though.
Creating a foreign exchange for upvotes? 1 upvote from lemmy.world account = 25 upvotes from acconamatta.basementlemmy?
Maybe adjust by the number of upvotes coming from that instance (negatively) and by the number of upvotes users of your instance give over their (positively). If one instance spams upvotes, these upvotes loose value. If posts on that instance are popular with your users, the upvotes coming from that instance are more likely to have been made by real users. Maybe we can find a better metric to estimate the number of real, active users on another instance.
That defeats the purpose of decentralization and creates a dangerous precedent. The entire point of Lemmy is that every instance is equally valid and legitimate. If certain instances are elevated above others, we’re on our way to do what Gmail and Microsoft did to email.
I agree it would be a dangerous precedent.
Thing is, though, every instance is not equally valid and legitimate: that’s the reason for defederating from Threads.
Not sure what you mean by what Gmail and Microsoft did to email? Do you mean that they assume many unknown email origins are spam? Though Gmail’s obviously attracted a lot of users, and I myself have moved off it now to paying for my email provider elsewhere, I was under the impression it’s been quite good for email and for pushing secure email, and being good at anti-spam.
I mean that Microsoft and Gmail took over the email protocol and right now if you stand up your own email server with a new domain/IP you basically have zero chance to get your mail delivered anywhere. They’ve positioned themselves as “higher” authority because of the sheer number of users they control and can now control the entire email system.
Same thing could happen with instances if we elevate lemme.world or any other instance to be “more legitimate” so their user votes count higher.
Uh no. Just implement DKIM if your messages are not being sent correctly. Spam is killing email, making admins implement more protocols such as DKIM but that isn’t “google and Microsoft killing email”
deleted by creator
PSA: internet votes are based on a biased sample of users of that site and bots
Thank you for this. I’d upvote you, but you’ve already taken care of that.
I would imagine this is the same with bans I imagine there will be a future reputation watchdog set of servers which might be used over this whole everyone follows the same modlog. The concept of trust everyone out of the gate seems a little naive
