@rimu@piefed.social is working on tools for AI detection. Some of the tools we have now for account purging self-deleting accounts may indirectly impact bots too (as there's a high crossover between spammers and bots).

2w ago

What can we do about the increasing problem of these self-deleting bot accounts?

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

Piefed does this for new accounts that delete themselves. But not for old accounts. Which is good, as otherwise the fediverse would slowly be littered by comments that simply say [deleted].

2w ago

How will Australia's ban on youth access to social media affect instances hosted in Australia?

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

Similarly UK has tried to get 4chan, kiwifarms etc but they have no UK footprint so they just ignore them.

No, that's a matter of enforcement. UK is still trying to fine 4chan - but failing. Australia has just outright said the law doesn't apply to them.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/09/4chan-not-blocked-australia-under-16s-social-media-ban

2w ago

How will Australia's ban on youth access to social media affect instances hosted in Australia?

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

Yes

2w ago

How will Australia's ban on youth access to social media affect instances hosted in Australia?

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

Apparently aussie.zone is asking users to DM evidence of being over 16, and the implication is that of those who don't - he'll ban/delete their accounts.

But absurdly enough, 4chan is exempt from this because all activity on there is anonymous. Not through accounts. So if the Fediverse had anonymous, non-account posting on-top of regular account-based posting then people could post anonymously happily, but anyone with an account would have to verify.

Make it make sense.

2w ago

The biggest problems with Lemmy right now

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

Yes I’m aware the design of the fediverse makes things public. You’ve made that point.

Sorry, let me amend. Whether or not all of these things have to remain publicly visible based on ActivityPub, I don't know - I'm just saying that I think its overall a good thing.

I think hiding your profile is worth the moderation trouble. Users report individual posts, they’re very rarely going through a person’s profile.

I don't. And sometimes users identify patterns of behaviour, and as my example illustrated, sometimes you need wider context to evaluate whether or not a post is deceptive.

Mods banning based on activity in other places also leads to the opposite problem. Some subreddits do it and basically everyone hates it.

Those are usually done by autoban bots, which I very much oppose (and I don't know if they could be blocked on the fediverse - but I am sure many instance owners would take a dim view of it, and suspect that the fact that the fediverse is a federated structure makes many community owners that might use them much less inclined to do so).

And that can still happen anyway on Reddit even with profile concealment if those bots scrape specific subreddits for activity, rather than profiles.

2w ago

[Pluribus Spoilers] A distressing thought about Koumba and the hive...

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

Apparently that's not actually possible.

2w ago

[Pluribus Spoilers] A distressing thought about Koumba and the hive...

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

I'm talking about the current crop of children now, not to-be-born children.

2w ago

The biggest problems with Lemmy right now

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

Admins would still be able to see it. Mods can maybe see for their comm.

Admins seeing it isn't enough. A lot of the time admins and community mods rely on reports of user conduct, where people observe patterns and forward it on.

Moderators also sometimes need to see those wider patterns of behaviour. An example here could be a music self-promoter sharing their song in a music community that does not allow self-promotion. If a moderator could only see posts by that user within communities they moderate, they wouldn't know if they're disingenuously self-promoting - in violation of the communities rules.

This is the same argument used against all privacy. The EU wants to kill end to end encryption so they can catch bad actors. No thank you, I’d rather my messages were private and so was my lemmy profile.

I don't think governments, or all applications should be forced to be public so state entities can go through everything. I'm just saying that the public presence of all content is foundational to the concept of the Fediverse specifically and having it remain as a high-trust instance (or collection of instances). This isn't Facebook. This isn't a Discord chatroom. Or a WhatsApp chat. Private voting, private modlogs and private profiles long-term corrode trust in communities like reddit and lead to long-term damaging trends that degrade the quality of content.

2w ago

[Pluribus Spoilers] A distressing thought about Koumba and the hive...

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

Why would they be handled differently beyond accounting for their smaller frame?

2w ago

What can we do about the increasing problem of these self-deleting bot accounts?

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

They tend to use similar names. Not always though. Not sure if you're talking about the same person.

2w ago

The biggest problems with Lemmy right now

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

I don't think any of this should be private. Allowing users to hide their profile creates conditions beneficial for astroturfing and for bots and trolls to obscure their history.

2w ago

[Pluribus Spoilers] A distressing thought about Koumba and the hive...

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

I also expect some of the survivor group to dwindle over time, as there were members who were not only happy with the status quo, but actively wanted to join up with their loved ones (Kusimayu, for instance), who would probably acquiesce to the stem cell extraction needed to infect them.

I wonder if she would now given she knows they're going to starve within 10 years.

2w ago

Why do .ml users get a bad rep?

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

The thing that is funny about Piefed vs. Lemmy is the level of authoritarian control the admin has over what you see and whether votes count or not. Specifically, they can open each instance connected with them and add a vote weight to the instance. So if they didn’t like ML, instead of blocking the instance, you can set the weight to 0, and then those users would have no idea that their votes do not contribute to a rank at all.

Are any Piefed instances doing any of this right now?

You can take an individual user and set their account to ban comments, ban posts, or both, which effectively shadow bans a user. If they’re remote, the comments, or posts never arrive at the piefed instance. None of this is visible to the end user, by the way, no alerts that this is happening to your account.

I'm not aware of this. In any case, the ban functions on Piefed are undergoing changes right now anyway.

You can be kicked from a community by moderators, an action that you will not even know is happening to you.

When you say "moderators" do you mean admins here or community moderators?

The Admin of a piefed instance can shape the feed silently, and without users even knowing it is happening, through the use of vote weights. Which is a pretty nasty feature if I’m being honest. One of the things people assumed was happening on Reddit was that the feed wasn’t an honest representation of user activity, that the feed itself was ideologically bias (one way or the other), and yet piefed explicitly gives you those tools.

I can see a valid use-case for smaller instances that might want to elevate their own communities within their own local feeds. I think it would be pretty poor if any larger instance used this tool, but I am sure that all of these toggles can display publicly - so users on an instance would know if their experience is being gamed or curated by the admins of a local instance.

2w ago

The biggest problems with Lemmy right now

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

Sorry, so you don't object to post history being public on the fediverse - but simply want it said plainly that "Post history is not private" directly to users?

2w ago

What can we do about the increasing problem of these self-deleting bot accounts?

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

This is what blights so many small reddit alternatives.

The initial wave of users onto reddit clones often include a disproportionate amount of malcontents. A lot of people who don’t play well with others, who are banned from reddit (or at least banned from lots of subreddits) usually turn up first on these reddit alternatives and disrupt the community by repeatedly showing anti-social or disruptive, attention seeking behaviour. It’s not even necessarily related to any political persuasion. This stuff can collapse budding alternatives.

The first wave of new users on reddit alternatives are, in my experience, more likely to have a lot of problem users and since the sites are so small, and usually sparsely moderated, they are much more disruptive than they would be on reddit. The Fediverse is large enough to avoid the problems of that to some extent now (a problem user who makes alts to troll, and bait and harass is a lot more visible on a small reddit clone with 1000 users vs. 50,000) but there's something to be said by growing and ignoring the problems (as Reddit itself had done - which is why it's now a site utterly infested with bots and astroturfers and trolls etc).

The hope here is that the Fediverse can implement useful tools that disrupt the typical pattern of behaviour that these people present so they don't increase and fester as the network grows. Best to nip this stuff now whilst the userbase is manageable.

2w ago

[Pluribus Spoilers] A distressing thought about Koumba and the hive...

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Skavau @piefed.social 2w ago

Yeah, I posted it here specifically because I don't know how the owner of that community would take to me making this observation.