Idea: if you mod a community on a lemmy.somewhere you should be able to migrate it to lemmy.elsewhere which would include all post & comment links being forwarded and subbed users having their subscription updated to reflect the new location.
I’m aware this would be a way down the road as user account migration alone is still not great but it would be a great feature for the fediverse to have to avoid centralisation and mod/server admin wars.
Yeah there HAS to be a way to cache all the posts comments replies etc at a certain point. Maybe every so often it flashes a cache on your server; saves everything; and lets you either create new with what you had OR move or.
I feel like this opens up the doors to “impostor” instances opening up, copying content from another instance and re-uploading it elsewhere. I can already think of tons of opportunities to commit various types of fraud this way, honestly.
There may also be legal issues with importing user account data and content, as well.
Every instance is doing this, right now. When you post on one instance, every instance with a single subscriber to the community gets sent a copy.
On kbin, even the media is stored on the instance. It helps distribute the load. Instances share posts between instances which can then each support many users.
In terms of “taking over” a community. Not so easy.
See, I could take [email protected] from my instance, do some SQL hacking and turn it into a local community. But, that would only work on my instance. Everyone else would still be following the original and the original would still exist.
For it to work it needs to be a co-ordinated community move.
Mods pick an instance with as much of the original data already federated as possible. They communicate the new home. People start subscribing, the old group is made read only with a message linking the new one.
To keep existing posts though other instances would also need to SQL hack. So adding some features to communicate and automate the SQL effort would be a nice thing.
This is indeed a very important feature. It needs to take into account that if similar name community exists on another server how the merger would proceed as well in terms of exporting and importing cache of posts and comments.
But generally it should be easier to transfer from one instance to other.
It’s going to be incredibly necessary in the long run. Decentralized means some proportion of important communities are going to be on servers that will eventually be shut down for various reasons. Not everybody who’s running an instance now will run it forever, but there may be communities with important conversations that folks will want to preserve.
Mastodon has account migration and Lemmy community migration should work similarly.
There are a handful of other options out there too if ya search for em. Mine backs up / copies subscriptions, blocks, and a handful of profile settings.
It’s a community to coordinate idea suggestions as well as image tracking. Perhaps this could be flagged up over there with a link back here or cross-posted.
Dude running a separate Lemmy sever would be very expensive for most people as you would need a significant amount of computing resources to host your on instance.
I just personally wouldn’t want someone duplicating and creating me an account on another instance. Maybe if it’s developed in the future you just get a notification asking if you’d like to follow this community to such and such instance. At that point you get a prompt to accept or deny. I’m fine with that.
And somehow be redundant/mirrored/backed up. Hacks, crashes, instance owner gets pissed, decides to take their sandbox and everything in it. Lots of ways and reasons that communities wlll disappear and a way to recover might be helpful.
All of this could be there with the matrix.org protocol. The matrix protocol saves the comments and content in a directed graph, and that graph is copied to every instance, once one views it. It may not scale though.
But it has benefits, such as encryption (making communities private or gated when under attack)
I’ve been out of this loop for decades, but can see a train wreck if this vulnerability isn’t addressed.
Matrix says, “The functionality that Matrix provides includes:
Creation and management of fully distributed chat rooms with no single points of control or failure…”
I don’t know what ‘fully distributed’ means. But one potential way of securing everything might be through something like torrenting. Have all Instances on several servers, such that the loss of a single server or Instance couldn’t wipe out a community. If that happens more than a few times, I could see federating setback considerably.
That’s my two cents, and I’ll leave it to the smarter and more capable folks to resolve.
when a user on a server is in a room it is “hosting” the room so if the server the room was made on goes down, everyone who’s not on that server can still talk in the room, that does make the hardware requirements higher compared to XMPP for sure which is a downside but I do feel like the positives outweigh the negatives personally at least
Proper backup protocol raises HW requirements. But if you want to do something right, it’s just the cost of doing business. There’s the old saw, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again?” But there may not be an opportunity to do this one over.
I foresee moneyed interests working steadily, diligently, relentlessly (with paid labor!) to help this entire effort fail. The success of this concept represents the loss of inestimable billions to today’s dominant platforms. Those corporations will, as always, work hard toward their self interests.
It should, but the Lemmy devs are swamped right now to add more features. Before, they had a pretty small dev team too. Now that there’s a lot more eyes on Lemmy, hopefully we’ll get more features while they iron out the stability issues.
Additionally, if your server disappears *cough* VLemmy *cough* you should be able to load a backup from somewhere and register your channels on another server. I realize this is still a crawl-walk-run scenario and that’s going to be far in the future. But we can still hope for it.
But that also makes it incredibly easy for communities on defederated servers to set up shop elsewhere.
And those communities may be the sole reason that the server was defederated in the first place.
I think a possible outcome is that the larger instances would have to put a stop to open creation of new communities, to prevent toxic groups from setting up shop and moving all their objectionable content and users into the space.
I think it can be solved with a two step process. First, the mods of the community and only them can make a request to move from instance A to instance B, and second, the admins or mods of instance B approve the request, importing only the posts and comments from federated users.
Allow the admins of the instance to enforce their rules?
Say you have an instance with a “no-NSFW” rule, for people who don’t want to randomly come across NSFW communities. Their admins could take care of the curating of rule-breaking NSFW communities without having to resort to defederating from the entire instance. This doesn’t have to be an outright block but just a filter that could prevent the community to show up in “All”.
That will break federation in a very bad way. Imagine you’re on such instance which doesn’t want NSFW content, but you subscribe to a NSFW community. Admins block it and you don’t even know it, you just don’t see your community anymore. What do you do? Create another account elsewhere? The whole point of federation is to use one single account EVERYWHERE. Otherwise it’s no different then Reddit and Hacker News - just two random online sites and you have to create a bazillion of accounts everywhere.
Admins should not block anything coming from outside instances. Admins should never defed. Instead you, as a user, should have all the tools to moderate your own feed. If you give away your rights and freedoms, you’ll lose them forever and you’ll be abused on Lemmy the way you were on Reddit.
then the question is why the hell did you make an account on an instance that doesn’t want to interact with NSFW content (presumably it’s in their rules) when you want to interact with NSFW content; like I don’t see why you’d do that if you knew the rules beforehand
Do you understand what the point of federation is? The point is to have one single account to interact with the whole Fediverse. It shouldn’t matter where you register your account, all Fediverse should be accessible to you.
that’s not the point; the point is to not have a single group dominate the site and to make it easier to avoid bad actors (bigots + fascists, because there’s a lot of that online) by just blocking the instance they live on
the “one single account” thing is a bonus, but definitely not the main reason for federation
If you want your freedom – whatever that means to you – you go to an instance that represents those values. Admins that run their own instance get to decide how they moderate that instance. And that includes blocking (or defederating) whole instances, communities, or individual users. You don’t have to sign up to one that does something you don’t like.
Besides, you don’t seem to understand the importance of moderation. If it wasn’t for the ability to defederate, we’d have tons of fake instances with fake users creating fake posts. Not to mention people going out of their way to make others feel miserable. Do they have the right to spew their hatred? I have my opinion, but it doesn’t matter. I happen to also have the right to join an instance that has a policy to take care of that stuff so I can browse for things that actually interest me.
Do you people even understand what is the point of federation and Fediverse? Because it seems you don’t and I’m tired explaining… In short, you should use Reddit instead.
How long have you been part of the fediverse? (A term which tends to not be capitalized, by the way. *nerd snort*) It’s not about you getting to interact with every instance using just one account. It’s about putting the power into the hands of ordinary people. Including the power to associate or disassociate with certain people, communities, and content. That includes an admin’s ability to go “I see you’re not sufficiently moderating your instance. We will defederate until you’ve taken steps to ensure your instance sufficiently moderates with common-sense rules.”. Whether that is due to some content policies or to block an instance from which a ton of spam originates.
Just how with email a provider can choose to block or automatically mark-as-spam any email coming from a server they don’t trust, for example because it’s a known source of spam. It’s actually how a lot of the internet works. And it works as long as well-intentioned people are in positions to make such decisions. And if a server or service goes rogue, they get the equivalent of defederated.
Incorrect. I’m fine with instances that host a variety of content. Including stuff I don’t want to see.
However, I’m allowed to join an instance whose admins take a stance against bigotry for example, and therefore take better care that such content isn’t allowed to freely go through their instance. That way I and a thousand of other users don’t need to all block the content they don’t like manually. It’s my instance admin’s choice, and my choice to go with their instance.
This was perhaps a bad example. Though there’s the possibility of posts not being marked for NSFW that should be (and the instance not enforcing such), and ones that are mostly harmless but still labelled as NSFW for one reason or another. One person’s NSFW is not the same as another person’s NSFW. Feel free to replace the example rule with something else.
At first I thought this was a great idea. But need to understand a bit more about the security implications for those that subscribe and post to the communities that want to do a move.
It’s one thing to trust your credentials to the host server, but quite another to implicitly trust the community mod who wishes to move.
How would the old posts migrate? How would integrity of the constituent posts be preserved? How easy would it be to inject comments into to historical posts and republish them on the new, official, server? Could you be held liable (whether officially or through reputational risk) for posting content that wasn’t really yours?
Maybe there are good mechanisms to maintain integrity of data? I’m just not sure what they are.
I think there may be implications to this that are not obvious.
Possibly some kind of democratic voting system would work? Or maybe the mods must all vote to do the move. Just an idea from when I saw another instance do a vote (for federation) using emojis, on a post, and they just counted them basically.
(edit: The mastadon method seems feasible though posts need to move too.)
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
Posts must be on topic.
Be respectful of others.
Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
Yeah there HAS to be a way to cache all the posts comments replies etc at a certain point. Maybe every so often it flashes a cache on your server; saves everything; and lets you either create new with what you had OR move or.
I feel like this opens up the doors to “impostor” instances opening up, copying content from another instance and re-uploading it elsewhere. I can already think of tons of opportunities to commit various types of fraud this way, honestly.
There may also be legal issues with importing user account data and content, as well.
Nothing is stopping anyone from copying content already.
Legal issues - possibly, but then everything you write or do is federated already.
Every instance is doing this, right now. When you post on one instance, every instance with a single subscriber to the community gets sent a copy.
On kbin, even the media is stored on the instance. It helps distribute the load. Instances share posts between instances which can then each support many users.
In terms of “taking over” a community. Not so easy.
See, I could take [email protected] from my instance, do some SQL hacking and turn it into a local community. But, that would only work on my instance. Everyone else would still be following the original and the original would still exist.
For it to work it needs to be a co-ordinated community move.
Mods pick an instance with as much of the original data already federated as possible. They communicate the new home. People start subscribing, the old group is made read only with a message linking the new one.
To keep existing posts though other instances would also need to SQL hack. So adding some features to communicate and automate the SQL effort would be a nice thing.
🥱
This is indeed a very important feature. It needs to take into account that if similar name community exists on another server how the merger would proceed as well in terms of exporting and importing cache of posts and comments.
But generally it should be easier to transfer from one instance to other.
It’s going to be incredibly necessary in the long run. Decentralized means some proportion of important communities are going to be on servers that will eventually be shut down for various reasons. Not everybody who’s running an instance now will run it forever, but there may be communities with important conversations that folks will want to preserve.
Mastodon has account migration and Lemmy community migration should work similarly.
And Lemmy should also have account migration.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985
I made a tool that does this until we can get something baked into Lemmy itself: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
There are a handful of other options out there too if ya search for em. Mine backs up / copies subscriptions, blocks, and a handful of profile settings.
Mastodon migration is still somewhat limited.
Your posts don’t transfer over, being the big catch.
(Most everything else does, though)
Ok, Calckey migration, then.
Just thought I’d flag this up: [email protected]
It’s a community to coordinate idea suggestions as well as image tracking. Perhaps this could be flagged up over there with a link back here or cross-posted.
Does a bot post issues raised / commented on Lemmy, back into GitHub? Or is it just one directional?
I think they are still figuring that out.
Cheers!
server gets defederated, server moves to new server, defederation bypassed.
This is part of why it’s better to have users block servers instead of servers block servers.
I disagree. If one is that important, I say those mods need to create their own instance.
Dude running a separate Lemmy sever would be very expensive for most people as you would need a significant amount of computing resources to host your on instance.
Not true.
How so
I’m running one. It doesn’t require a lot of resources.
If you end up with a crazy substantial amount of users it can get dicey, but if the community is that amazing the donations would probably roll in.
Interesting. What are you using to host your instance. Are you using a cloud service like AWS or are you running it on your own hardware?
A dedicated server. A bottom dollar one. Most of them you can scale up if anything takes off more than you expected.
They would still need to be able to migrate the community to their own instance.
Yeah I understand that but I just disagree with automatically moving people around between instances.
Why?
I just personally wouldn’t want someone duplicating and creating me an account on another instance. Maybe if it’s developed in the future you just get a notification asking if you’d like to follow this community to such and such instance. At that point you get a prompt to accept or deny. I’m fine with that.
But that’s not what this conversation is about.
It would be the mod/admin who moves a community to a new instance, and the users would migrate themselves to follow the community.
Neither functionality exists but I agree that users should not be moved automatically unless it’s part of an SSO scenario.
That’s not what I read anywhere but I agree with the way you worded it.
I might have made some of that up but thank you for catching the intent of it.
Absolutely. I don’t think we really have fediverse until we get this.
And somehow be redundant/mirrored/backed up. Hacks, crashes, instance owner gets pissed, decides to take their sandbox and everything in it. Lots of ways and reasons that communities wlll disappear and a way to recover might be helpful.
All of this could be there with the matrix.org protocol. The matrix protocol saves the comments and content in a directed graph, and that graph is copied to every instance, once one views it. It may not scale though. But it has benefits, such as encryption (making communities private or gated when under attack)
I’ve been out of this loop for decades, but can see a train wreck if this vulnerability isn’t addressed.
Matrix says, “The functionality that Matrix provides includes: Creation and management of fully distributed chat rooms with no single points of control or failure…”
I don’t know what ‘fully distributed’ means. But one potential way of securing everything might be through something like torrenting. Have all Instances on several servers, such that the loss of a single server or Instance couldn’t wipe out a community. If that happens more than a few times, I could see federating setback considerably.
That’s my two cents, and I’ll leave it to the smarter and more capable folks to resolve.
when a user on a server is in a room it is “hosting” the room so if the server the room was made on goes down, everyone who’s not on that server can still talk in the room, that does make the hardware requirements higher compared to XMPP for sure which is a downside but I do feel like the positives outweigh the negatives personally at least
Proper backup protocol raises HW requirements. But if you want to do something right, it’s just the cost of doing business. There’s the old saw, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again?” But there may not be an opportunity to do this one over.
I foresee moneyed interests working steadily, diligently, relentlessly (with paid labor!) to help this entire effort fail. The success of this concept represents the loss of inestimable billions to today’s dominant platforms. Those corporations will, as always, work hard toward their self interests.
It should, but the Lemmy devs are swamped right now to add more features. Before, they had a pretty small dev team too. Now that there’s a lot more eyes on Lemmy, hopefully we’ll get more features while they iron out the stability issues.
Yes. It is a must have feature, actually.
Additionally, if your server disappears *cough* VLemmy *cough* you should be able to load a backup from somewhere and register your channels on another server. I realize this is still a crawl-walk-run scenario and that’s going to be far in the future. But we can still hope for it.
deleted by creator
But that also makes it incredibly easy for communities on defederated servers to set up shop elsewhere.
And those communities may be the sole reason that the server was defederated in the first place.
I think a possible outcome is that the larger instances would have to put a stop to open creation of new communities, to prevent toxic groups from setting up shop and moving all their objectionable content and users into the space.
I think it can be solved with a two step process. First, the mods of the community and only them can make a request to move from instance A to instance B, and second, the admins or mods of instance B approve the request, importing only the posts and comments from federated users.
What if an instance were able to block specific communities on other instances without defederating?
Users can already do so, what would instance-level block bring?
Allow the admins of the instance to enforce their rules?
Say you have an instance with a “no-NSFW” rule, for people who don’t want to randomly come across NSFW communities. Their admins could take care of the curating of rule-breaking NSFW communities without having to resort to defederating from the entire instance. This doesn’t have to be an outright block but just a filter that could prevent the community to show up in “All”.
That will break federation in a very bad way. Imagine you’re on such instance which doesn’t want NSFW content, but you subscribe to a NSFW community. Admins block it and you don’t even know it, you just don’t see your community anymore. What do you do? Create another account elsewhere? The whole point of federation is to use one single account EVERYWHERE. Otherwise it’s no different then Reddit and Hacker News - just two random online sites and you have to create a bazillion of accounts everywhere.
Admins should not block anything coming from outside instances. Admins should never defed. Instead you, as a user, should have all the tools to moderate your own feed. If you give away your rights and freedoms, you’ll lose them forever and you’ll be abused on Lemmy the way you were on Reddit.
then the question is why the hell did you make an account on an instance that doesn’t want to interact with NSFW content (presumably it’s in their rules) when you want to interact with NSFW content; like I don’t see why you’d do that if you knew the rules beforehand
Do you understand what the point of federation is? The point is to have one single account to interact with the whole Fediverse. It shouldn’t matter where you register your account, all Fediverse should be accessible to you.
that’s not the point; the point is to not have a single group dominate the site and to make it easier to avoid bad actors (bigots + fascists, because there’s a lot of that online) by just blocking the instance they live on
the “one single account” thing is a bonus, but definitely not the main reason for federation
If you want your freedom – whatever that means to you – you go to an instance that represents those values. Admins that run their own instance get to decide how they moderate that instance. And that includes blocking (or defederating) whole instances, communities, or individual users. You don’t have to sign up to one that does something you don’t like.
Besides, you don’t seem to understand the importance of moderation. If it wasn’t for the ability to defederate, we’d have tons of fake instances with fake users creating fake posts. Not to mention people going out of their way to make others feel miserable. Do they have the right to spew their hatred? I have my opinion, but it doesn’t matter. I happen to also have the right to join an instance that has a policy to take care of that stuff so I can browse for things that actually interest me.
Do you people even understand what is the point of federation and Fediverse? Because it seems you don’t and I’m tired explaining… In short, you should use Reddit instead.
How long have you been part of the fediverse? (A term which tends to not be capitalized, by the way. *nerd snort*) It’s not about you getting to interact with every instance using just one account. It’s about putting the power into the hands of ordinary people. Including the power to associate or disassociate with certain people, communities, and content. That includes an admin’s ability to go “I see you’re not sufficiently moderating your instance. We will defederate until you’ve taken steps to ensure your instance sufficiently moderates with common-sense rules.”. Whether that is due to some content policies or to block an instance from which a ton of spam originates.
Just how with email a provider can choose to block or automatically mark-as-spam any email coming from a server they don’t trust, for example because it’s a known source of spam. It’s actually how a lot of the internet works. And it works as long as well-intentioned people are in positions to make such decisions. And if a server or service goes rogue, they get the equivalent of defederated.
This seems silly. Just have new users default to having the “don’t show NSFW” setting enabled.
He’s one of the “I don’t want to see something so neither should anyone else” crowd.
Incorrect. I’m fine with instances that host a variety of content. Including stuff I don’t want to see.
However, I’m allowed to join an instance whose admins take a stance against bigotry for example, and therefore take better care that such content isn’t allowed to freely go through their instance. That way I and a thousand of other users don’t need to all block the content they don’t like manually. It’s my instance admin’s choice, and my choice to go with their instance.
This was perhaps a bad example. Though there’s the possibility of posts not being marked for NSFW that should be (and the instance not enforcing such), and ones that are mostly harmless but still labelled as NSFW for one reason or another. One person’s NSFW is not the same as another person’s NSFW. Feel free to replace the example rule with something else.
Meh. I think if users focused more on blocking what they don’t want to see instead of defederating, then this wouldn’t be an issue.
This is only a problem if you’re one of the children who thinks: “I don’t want to see something, so neither should anyone else.”
Yeah exactly, defederation should be limited to instances with incompetent or malicious admins, not with crap communities.
The feature to allow a user to block a server not just a community should help with that.
Let instance admins approve or deny the requests then
A good community leaving a bad server can maybe work if the server doesn’t just turn that off.
A bad community that was hosted on a bad server can continue to be blocked on a server level.
A good server tolerating a somewhat bad community will let users continue to block communities.
Two good communities on one server might grow large and want to split servers.
Yep, I lost my communities when vlemmy shut down
At first I thought this was a great idea. But need to understand a bit more about the security implications for those that subscribe and post to the communities that want to do a move. It’s one thing to trust your credentials to the host server, but quite another to implicitly trust the community mod who wishes to move. How would the old posts migrate? How would integrity of the constituent posts be preserved? How easy would it be to inject comments into to historical posts and republish them on the new, official, server? Could you be held liable (whether officially or through reputational risk) for posting content that wasn’t really yours? Maybe there are good mechanisms to maintain integrity of data? I’m just not sure what they are.
I think there may be implications to this that are not obvious.
Happy to have these concerns assuaged, of course!
Possibly some kind of democratic voting system would work? Or maybe the mods must all vote to do the move. Just an idea from when I saw another instance do a vote (for federation) using emojis, on a post, and they just counted them basically.
(edit: The mastadon method seems feasible though posts need to move too.)