Maybe they detected the compromise on the secure network, and only after some forensics did they work out that it came from a compromised laptop in a neighboring building.

Mastodon is your coworker who’s honestly well-meaning and kind, but seems to have fits of upset for seemingly no reason at all and random beefs and drama with people that arise from nothing at all. She’s not very good at her job, but she can get it done, and she seems like a sincerely good person, which is enough that people like her.

Misskey is the employee who’s incredibly efficient, but has her own system that no one else can make sense of or follow. You have to just let her do things the way she wants to do them, but it all works. She does not hang around with anyone, just comes in and does her thing.

Bluesky is the guy who is always talking buddy-buddy while either wasting time or asking people for things, blows coke in the bathroom, is constantly hyping himself up. He seems to be very qualified, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is an act, and he’s also clearly a huge piece of shit. For some reason he is wildly popular with everyone.

You didn’t ask, but Bonfire is the IT guy who seems to live in his windowless office, wears T-shirts to work, speaks to no one, and is personally responsible for about 40% of the company’s products and services. Most people have no idea who he is.

Yes. The question I’m asking is, why?

This is absolutely true. The level of entitlement and lack of appreciation that the average toxic user has for the whole effort and kindness that goes into providing a volunteer Lemmy network for them to come and be a part of, and how little regard they have for it, is breathtaking.

I’m saying that the two sides of that coin, users who behave in not ideal ways and mods that behave in not ideal ways, are of a piece and feed into one another. By inviting the first and making an unspoken promise that nothing in particular is required of anybody to come in and use the network in any way that they feel like, whether it adds to the community or is destructive to it, we’re welcoming a type of behavior that is not reasonable to ask a volunteer moderator to deal with indefinitely, which is part of what over time leads to the second. I think fixing the first problem is absolutely necessary in order for the network, in the long run, to be a nice community.

“They” meaning developers, administrators, and moderators. There’s quite a lot more hierarchy in the social structure than there used to be.

One example is that some site admins want some moderation features, and they lobby the developers, but the nature of the technology is that it’s difficult for them to just lay out their own features, and the developers’ time is limited, so the developers say no. So people don’t get their moderation features. On the long-ago internet, there were many, many different software options that supported the same protocols, and they were also a lot more configurable generally speaking, so that you weren’t stuck lobbying a single group of developers to implement your thing or get stuck with things not being the way you want.

Probably a bigger example is that there are constant little impedance mismatches between how people want certain communities to be moderated, and how they are moderated. People do want for the experience to be curated. It’s unwieldy, with the current volume of assholes, to say that it’s each user’s responsibility to encounter a handful of assholes in every comments section and block them individually, so that the overall experience splinters, consistent assholes are free to continue harassing new users until the new users learn to block them, and any given asshole is everyone’s problem. That’s the problem with just blocking the MBFC bot if someone doesn’t like it. It’s fine as an individual solution, sort of, but the fact that it’s even an issue in the first place speaks to a code-enforced hierarchy of control that doesn’t match the hierarchy of respect and consent. That’s why people keep bringing it up instead of just blocking the bot, I think.

I think that this is one thing Bluesky does right, where you can opt for certain people to “moderate” your experience, but there’s not a single grouping which has a monopoly on being able to do that. It’s under your control. That would be an example of what I’m saying, where on Lemmy there is a “they” that is uniquely empowered to ban you from a community, or decide not to ban someone else that you think is objectively being a nuisance, but the “us” that is in the community can’t make that decision. On Bluesky, it’s all one grouping of users, and they can decide how to control that aspect of their own experience, and that’s a good thing.

Hopefully that makes sense. I’m not trying to air any sour grapes, or say that the developers should immediately prioritize any wishlist thing that comes their way. I’m also not trying to say that the moderators need to obey how I want MBFC bot to be handled, or let me post if I want to change the title of an article for clarity, or anything like that. I’m saying that, in terms of system design, the very existence of a unique grouping that I need to be lobbying to do these things is a development that should be worked away from, over time.

Lemmy thunderdome community! All posts get fed in from RSS, but if they don’t get upvoted by the time the time limit has passed, they get deleted!

I am joking, I think. It’s an interesting idea though. I don’t think relying on the algorithm to stem the tide of bot-posted content is a completely complete solution, since I have definitely seen bot-provided communities which annoyed me with the volume of 1-upvote posts which the bot was putting up. I am planning to try to limit the feeds available to those that have a respectable amount of human interaction.

I added !cbc@rss.ponder.cat and !globalnews@rss.ponder.cat for you.

I know there’s already !xkcd@lemmy.world and I wouldn’t want to duplicate that community. @koraro@lemmy.world do you want me to set up an RSS bot to post new comics to the existing lemmy.world community? If one doesn’t already exist? It’s easy to configure the RSS bot to post comics to a designated community for them, and I think that’s better than setting up a duplicate community.

Yes. I want to avoid having it become spam, so I decided to be careful which RSS feeds I add to keep the human-to-bot ratio up.

It’d be easy to do. What did you want to have combined? I’m not sure it would be much better than people subscribing to multiple communities to combine different feeds together, but what were you thinking?

I think they can both be useful. Some people will prefer to have an RSS reader pulling the feeds from Lemmy communities, and some people will prefer to have Lemmy as their home base, so to speak, and like to be able to add updates from some RSS feeds to that.

!requests@rss.ponder.cat

and

!phys@rss.ponder.cat

Phys.org does what some of the others do, offer a massive menu of options for the RSS feeds. I picked out their top stories feed only, to cut down on spam. I don’t want to have a huge list of bot-posted communities with no activity. Are there any of the specific ones that you want to have, besides the top headlines?

😁

I said that I would mirror any community, but I thought about it more, and now I am worried about creating spam. I agree with the other posters that the community ambassador feature would be a better way to do this.

I think @rglullis@communick.news has a suggestion that is better than using Reddit’s RSS through my tool. Importing Reddit communities via RSS may become spam and stunt the growth of a real local community based around the same topic.

This is an absolutely excellent idea. I don’t think I will allow this for Reddit feeds, since there are two better ways of getting them on Lemmy already.

!hackaday@rss.ponder.cat

Maybe an IPv6 issue? Can one of the admins see what the error is on their end when the communication with rss.ponder.cat is attempted?

It’s a hacked-together python script. Should I try to clean it up and open source it? It’s not well-organized right now, though.

Whatever you want, yes. I separated it from the main server exactly so that all kinds of stuff could get mirrored without creating a problem.

Let’s have it 😄