Just wait until the t-shirt/mug scammers show up with their post bots. Then people will understand why mod helper bots are needed.

I don’t think anyone is arguing against dual DNS servers. The distinction being made is that a second DNS server is not a fallback. Most newbies think “secondary” means it will only be used when the primary is unavailable. That’s not true. A client is just as likely to use a secondary DNS as a primary. If only one DNS uses pihole, then the secondary will serve ads because it’s just calling the upstream DNS resolver.

Personally, I accomplished what OP is talking about with two rPis. First serves DCHP from 192.168.1.10 to .100, second serves .101 to .250. I send the two piholes as primary and secondary DNS. I also use Unbound as the upstream, but that is just personal preference.

Does it only keep the current email address, or a history of them? I am guessing some people who used emails with personally identifying information in the account name may want to switch to a proton mail account.

The entire point of the fediverse is that there is no “we”. Or rather, you can decide which “we” you want to engage with. Look at behaw. When world started exploding with growth, the beehaw instance defederated because they wanted to preserve a smaller community.

I will never sign up for Threads or any other Meta service. However, if the fediverse allows me to interact with my friends and colleagues who have without having to give up all my data to do so, that’s a win in my book.

So feel free to go start or join an instance that defederates from Threads. Just stop expecting everyone else to do so.

Thanks and I hope the devs are able to get to it at some point.

I wish I could upvote this as many times as I have had to block the same communities on all the instances.

Blocking is ok, but subscribing to communities you care about and viewing by subscribed solves a lot of irritation.

I hope you are right about better mechanisms to detect and control Astroturfing. It is what killed Reddit for me, not the whole API mess.

If you want a Reddit example, go look at the “Naked and Afraid” subreddit dedicated to the show. Almost all the activity is from accounts with the same semantic naming pattern and who have the same account pattern in terms of age and ratio of karma.

When you look at what is being posted, it is obvious that Discovery/Max paid some shitty social-media marketing company to “increase engagement”. They will post for a thing, against a thing, opened ended questions, etc. then all the other fake accounts pile in and respond. Creating comment chains 8-12 deep with fake comments to try and keep you “engaged” with their content.

The same thing will happen here. The Astroturfers don’t care about community standards, rules, “shame”, or accounts. They create and burn accounts by the hundreds of thousands. They also make money in this, so they will just continue to optimize for any criteria the fediverse uses to move content to “hot” visibility.

I haven’t seen a platform yet that has a good way to combat this.

It’s already started. There was a technology post earlier that included an affiliate link to a big online retailer.

It won’t be long before Disney astroturfs the entertainment communities and car companies astroturf the tech communities. There is no way to prevent it without requiring a level of privacy invasion that most people would not welcome.

The fediverse is just as susceptible to this as every other platform. Now that Lemmy is counting users in the millions, the enshitifcation will begin. I just hope the communities figure out some novel way to mitigate it.