Beyond overt bans how resilient is the Fediverse (and Lemmy specifically) to the new forms of digital control and censorship?
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Well.. this could be your project/task if you know coding
it's FOSSwrote on last edited by [email protected]The most code I know is turtle LOL (and to be clear I'm talking about the one for like, kindergartners where you draw geometric shapes by lifting and putting down the pen with the commands)
also if I did know something else the first thing I would do would be something like powerdeletesuite for reddit. I know it doesn't get rid of stuff posted to other instances but it would likely auto-delete a lot of them unless the instance specifically wanted to block me from doing so, and a big part of why I do it regularly is that it keeps me fairly obscure. Every time I comment on this people are like "what you put on the internet is forever" and like, yeah, but I don't have to make it easy to find.
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Hey fellow inhabitants of the Fediverse, particularly those lurking on Lemmy,
I've been thinking a lot lately about the nature of information, discourse, and where genuine human connection can still thrive online. It leads me back to platforms like this one.
We often talk about censorship in terms of direct bans or content removal, which is obviously a critical concern. But what about the more insidious forms of control? I'm talking about the subtle fiddling of algorithms, the deliberate hiding of certain content without outright deletion, the 'shadowbanning' that makes you feel like you're shouting into a void. How resistant is the decentralized nature of Lemmy, and the wider fediverse, to those kinds of pressures? It feels like the very architecture here might offer a unique defense, but I'm curious about the community's thoughts.
I know we're not exactly bursting at the seams with users, and frankly, if you're not already clued into how something like Lemmy works, you're probably never finding it through a casual search – SEO seems like a foreign concept here, battling potential duplicate content issues across instances. Is this quiet corner its strength, or its eventual downfall if the 'outside' world becomes too noisy?
Speaking of noise, it feels like nearly 90% of the content generated on the broader internet these days is starting to feel like it's churned out by LLMs. Autogenerated articles, comments, even entire 'conversations' that ring hollow. Is the Fediverse, specifically, a safe haven from that rising tide of artificial content? Does the human-centric, community-driven nature of these instances inherently push back against such automation?
I've looked into ActivityPub and other federation tools in the past, and my observation has often been that they've been adopted primarily by marginalized groups in society, seeking refuge from mainstream platforms. While that's incredibly valuable and a testament to their utility, what could truly happen to extend this concept, to genuinely get more people involved without compromising the very principles that make it appealing – decentralization, human curation, and resilience against algorithmic manipulation?
Just throwing it out there. Would appreciate any insights or theories.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Someone please let me know if I'm wrong, but I don't see how Lemmy could withstand any amount or coordinated cyber attack or operation.
If dedicated security teams from fortune 500 companies can't beat them, I don't see how someone's server in their garage is going to do it.
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Someone please let me know if I'm wrong, but I don't see how Lemmy could withstand any amount or coordinated cyber attack or operation.
If dedicated security teams from fortune 500 companies can't beat them, I don't see how someone's server in their garage is going to do it.
well Lemmy isn't just one thing, its decentralized, and historically decentralized stuff is a lot harder to hit.
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well Lemmy isn't just one thing, its decentralized, and historically decentralized stuff is a lot harder to hit.
I don't really understand how it would be, since things get duplicated across any federated instances. If anything it amplifies the spam since it auto-dupes it everywhere.
You might say everyone could just defederate, but at that point the damage is done, no? Not to mention if they're using bot armies they can just send them at any new instances that spin up.
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The most code I know is turtle LOL (and to be clear I'm talking about the one for like, kindergartners where you draw geometric shapes by lifting and putting down the pen with the commands)
also if I did know something else the first thing I would do would be something like powerdeletesuite for reddit. I know it doesn't get rid of stuff posted to other instances but it would likely auto-delete a lot of them unless the instance specifically wanted to block me from doing so, and a big part of why I do it regularly is that it keeps me fairly obscure. Every time I comment on this people are like "what you put on the internet is forever" and like, yeah, but I don't have to make it easy to find.
Yes/no. Google removed the archive feature on websites due to running out of space. Way back machine got massive dados so stopped indexing for a while.
Bit rot and link rot is real..much content from early days is gone. Sure. an llm training farm may have your blog post from 2024 but not from 2010 if the website is down
Or depends how much money a company can make from your data
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well Lemmy isn't just one thing, its decentralized, and historically decentralized stuff is a lot harder to hit.
It makes some things hard and some things easier. For example, you can more easily defend against DoS attacks because there's just more targets.
But decentralized makes it easier for bot manipulation because you can hide your actions across multiple users on different instances and those instances can't easily identify bot signatures like IP addresses to ban many accounts.
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Someone please let me know if I'm wrong, but I don't see how Lemmy could withstand any amount or coordinated cyber attack or operation.
If dedicated security teams from fortune 500 companies can't beat them, I don't see how someone's server in their garage is going to do it.
There are several types of threats, some that Lemmy is quite well protected against, some that Lemmy is very exposed to.
- DoS/DDoS - An attack that overwhelms a system, preventing legitimate traffic to/from the server. I would rate this as a medium risk currently, Lemmy in it's concept is actually quite resilient against attacks like that due to it's distributed nature, I actually don't believe it is technically possible to take down Lemmy completely through a denial of service attack, as you would need to attack all instances and hope no one has a backup. The main reason I still rate the risk medium is the consolidation of communities and users on a few servers like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and lemmy.ee. This makes lemmy vulnerable to a fairly small attack, communities should be spread around the instances to reduce the impact of an attack.
- Government censoring - Low/medium, the government of some countries can order that an instance owner in their country takes down a post/comment, but they don't have the power to order a foreign instance owner to do the same, so lemmy as a whole is not super exposed to this threat.
- Influencing attack/Psyop/Harrassment - Very high, Lemmy lacks an efficient global tool to prevent users from escaping a permanent ban over the whole network. I would not be surprised to learn that Lemmy had a few seemingly normal instances that are being run by national security agencies all over the world, and when they need to they can just set up new users.
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There are several types of threats, some that Lemmy is quite well protected against, some that Lemmy is very exposed to.
- DoS/DDoS - An attack that overwhelms a system, preventing legitimate traffic to/from the server. I would rate this as a medium risk currently, Lemmy in it's concept is actually quite resilient against attacks like that due to it's distributed nature, I actually don't believe it is technically possible to take down Lemmy completely through a denial of service attack, as you would need to attack all instances and hope no one has a backup. The main reason I still rate the risk medium is the consolidation of communities and users on a few servers like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and lemmy.ee. This makes lemmy vulnerable to a fairly small attack, communities should be spread around the instances to reduce the impact of an attack.
- Government censoring - Low/medium, the government of some countries can order that an instance owner in their country takes down a post/comment, but they don't have the power to order a foreign instance owner to do the same, so lemmy as a whole is not super exposed to this threat.
- Influencing attack/Psyop/Harrassment - Very high, Lemmy lacks an efficient global tool to prevent users from escaping a permanent ban over the whole network. I would not be surprised to learn that Lemmy had a few seemingly normal instances that are being run by national security agencies all over the world, and when they need to they can just set up new users.
This makes sense, thanks for the answer!
Consolidation is inevitable I think. The most important feature of a social network is who's on it, and federation is a technical enough concept that it's going to be very hard to convince people not to go to the biggest instance.
I'm not a dev, but I believe the only way to avoid consolidation is to build some kind of neutral signup site that automatically assigns people to an instance based on load/location. This would also be good for adoption cause people could sign up without having to figure out what instances are.
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This makes sense, thanks for the answer!
Consolidation is inevitable I think. The most important feature of a social network is who's on it, and federation is a technical enough concept that it's going to be very hard to convince people not to go to the biggest instance.
I'm not a dev, but I believe the only way to avoid consolidation is to build some kind of neutral signup site that automatically assigns people to an instance based on load/location. This would also be good for adoption cause people could sign up without having to figure out what instances are.
You are completely right about consolidation, most people will use what they believe is the most stable service.
I picked lemmy.zip because the normal UI was similar to that of old Reddit, and I am very happy with my choice.
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Someone please let me know if I'm wrong, but I don't see how Lemmy could withstand any amount or coordinated cyber attack or operation.
If dedicated security teams from fortune 500 companies can't beat them, I don't see how someone's server in their garage is going to do it.
The best defence is having nothing of value
