I’m a 15-year user of Reddit. Lemmy right now is very similar to very early Reddit. Reddit’s users were more technical back then, too. I’m betting the early adopters of places like this are usually the technical types.

Another nice thing about Lemmy is that a lot of the low-effort, casual users on Reddit haven’t gotten here yet. Interaction here is definitely a lot more pleasant.

Now this has some potential! I have something for my nighttime reading list! Great post!

Most people pick an instance by collecting a list of instances that are physically close to them, and then reviewing the /instances page to see how big the block list is. Lemmyverse.net can tell you how many users are on those blocked instances.

Heck yeah! I can’t believe how popular that game was. Every time I bring up this era, everyone talks about it.

I was a big Tradewars 2002 fan, myself. You can still play it, which is what made me start to think about connecting it to Lemmy somehow. That, and Nethack.

As a site admin, I really wish it was easier to modify the content on the front page. We’ve had some interesting ideas over here, like linking to some simple online games and posting high scores for the site, or maybe just adding some analytics boxes to the site. But for us that’s difficult.

A lot of our ideas come from a shared experience in BBSes from the 90s, where they had game doors, ascii art, and other fun site-specific elements. Technology has changed, but there are modern equivalents to all of those things that we wish we could implement.

Excellent! This is good to know! I bet other users who aren’t admins/mods can’t see the post at all when it’s removed. I’ll avoid purging from now on.

However, I’m surprised to still see my posts there. I would have thought you deleting them on your instance would propagate out to my instance.

Well, I purged them from the database. Maybe if I had removed the post instead of purging, that would have propagated. Right now the posts don’t exist in our database at all.

But I bet the more likely scenario is that once a post gets propagated, it persists forever on the instance it gets propagated to unless someone purges it there.

Assuming I am correct, this could end up being a bit of a problem. That means, users on my instance could go about spamming the fediverse, and I would never see reports of their activity unless they are spamming communities on my instance. The only way I have to know that they’re being bad users is if I notice we get defederated, if an admin of another instance specifically reaches out to me, if another user on my instance reports them, or if I manually monitor my users.

This is actually consistent with something that happened to us in the early days of lemmy.ninja. We had a few thousand bot accounts get created on our site. Some other sites defederated from us, but it took us weeks to notice that this happened. One of them happened to be a Mastodon instance, and that person indicated a ban reason that indicated that a user was an edgelord. Well, this was back in the beginning of our site, so we knew all of our users personally. If we had not been really on top of things and really plugged in to what was happening across a lot of the Lemmy instances, we would never have known that the bot users interacted with anyone. We still don’t know how many posts or comments they made before we deleted them all.

I think you are right on all counts. I have just resolved both reports that we had on our side. That clears the report list, so I don’t expect you to see any changes on your side, but I thought I’d mention it just in case.

It’s definitely there. I guess this proves that some propagation is slow. This is what we see on our reports list right now:

Resolving the report on your side seems to have had no effect on our side. In Lemmy UI, there is a very subtle color difference in the checkmark before and after it is clicked, so I took a screenshot of the report.

Before:

After:

I guess there’s a chance that it may take time for the change in state to propagate to me, so I’ll watch it over the next 20 minutes or so to see if it changes.

I am now reporting the second test post.

The report just arrived in our moderation queue. Please click the resolved checkmark on your side.

Next, please post a second post in the Tea Room and this time I will report it, get confirmation from you, and then I will resolve it.

Do you have some time to test it? You can post something to Ninja Tea Room and then report it. Let me know and I’ll confirm that the report exists on our site. Then you can resolve the report and I can confirm one way or the other whether the status changes locally here, and whether the reason propagates. We will take care not to ban you. :-)

So is the right process to report the post? (I’m assuming reports go to the home instance’s community moderator.)

And if that’s the case, does that mean we need to avoid clicking the checkmark to “resolve” the report on our instance until the remote moderator has done something about the problem?

Today some spam bots posted about 20 or so posts, and they originated from thegarden.land, feddit.nu, lemmy.film, lemmus.org, feddit.nl, pricefield.org, lemmy.world, and geddit.social. I’m not sure I’m ready to defederate lemmy.world over a single account. There must be a better way.

Only thing to mention of note was that I disabled triggers while doing the cleanup.

Could you explain what that does and how you did it? I can add that to the post as a note.

I was just thinking about this.

I’m also old, having gotten into the internet back in the BBS days in the late 80s and early 90s. Lemmy is the first platform I’ve been on that resurrected those feelings of friendly competition, community, and variety. In those days, each BBS had its own character. There was plenty of duplication of content, but it didn’t matter because each server you connected to was like looking at that content through a different lens. Users didn’t get notoriety from collecting upvotes; they got it by being willing to travel to different servers and make a name for themselves by participating in many communities.

It’s good to have that feeling again!

I’m thinking the same thing. Lemmy.ninja had a bot issue for a day or two until we figured out how to cleanly wipe the bot accounts. Do you happen to have a link to the bot instance tracker?

That’s odd. My instance shows up as blocked by several other instances. Yet when I check those instances, they show my instance as one of the linked instances.