this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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No such thing. Ask away!

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Is there such a thing for lemmy? I've noticed some... Overzealous moderation on lemmy, which annoys me to no end. I want to read the comments naturally, and not just what the power mods (yes, they are here too) deem acceptable.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 8 months ago (2 children)

You can check the public modlog. Unless the user was banned + removal of all comments, it should be visible there.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's all gone if post is removed.

Is there a way to look through it by community instead of just by instance?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago

Yes, in the community sidebar there’s an community specific modlog.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Won’t the activitypub have been synced to federated instances too?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

When another server (say kbin) is set to federate with another doesn’t it get the activity pub including the comments, changes, etc?

If something was pulled before it was deleted they’d have it and, subsequently, the deletion record too. So wouldn’t the activitypub record include the content or am I misunderstanding how that works?

Edit: like this

https://seb.jambor.dev/posts/understanding-activitypub-part-2-lemmy/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sorry, I don’t completely get what you mean with this sentence

If something was pulled before it was deleted they’d have it and, subsequently, the deletion record too

As far as I understand, removal by mods is federated and will thus be visible on all instances in the modlog. But not an expert by any means.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Let’s say I post something at 1 am. And a federated server pulls it at 2 am.

Then the other server has the content.

Then it’s deleted at 3 am and that federated server pulls it again at 3:15

Now the federated server no longer has it. Since it synced to match the first server.

I was wondering if that’s how the ActivityPub worked.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (1 children)

No such thing needed, you can check the modlog for the comment removed. Just go to modlog and filter it by user and you can see the comment along with the reason it got removed. It's transparent.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The modlog only shows removed posts which is probably all OP wants. It doesn't show deleted posts, or edit history which I'd want to see.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yes but that would kinda be bad for privacy. Fediverse is already pretty bad at it and i don't want it to be worst.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I mean it's social media, on the internet. Does anyone really have any expectation of privacy?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Yes. Tell that to EU's GDPR if you disagree. If someone want to delete something they pretty much should have the right to erase that from the database. Making it available again will defeat the purpose.

We shit on reddit when they refused to delete our comment, seems like everyone already forget about it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Under the GDPR, they have the right to delete their name and other personal data from the database, not their content.

Some exceptions apply such as if they wrote their name or other personal details into their comment. Those parts would be covered by the GDRP but that's indeed exceptional, not the norm.

The comments we write here are "only" protected by copyright.
How exactly that manifests? Who knows. It's the same as IRC logs or mailing lists archives. A quick not at all exchaustive search revealed no relevant legal cases.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

This isn't really true. GDPR is mostly about private and personally identifiable information. If you broadcast something publicly (which is basically what happens whenever you post or comment on Lemmy) you have very little protections. Even if you do have enough protection to get people do delete it you would have to go to each "archive" one-by-one.

Basically if you post it on Lemmy you should treat it as public forever. Just like just about any other public space on the internet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

There's a good reason Discord stopped letting moderators hang on to people's deleted pictures actually LOL

Not that you should ever under any circumstances "hand it to" Discord

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

Should be rather simple actually. You'd need a slightly modified version of Lemmy which simply ignores federated deletions.

Beyond that, you'd have to Index the fediverse somehow. This could probably be achieved by subscribing to all relevant communities. There's ready made bots for that I believe for the purposes of populating small instances with content.

The legal side of that is questionable at best though, just like removedit. Slightly less I'd say since re-hosting content here is generally allowed which was certainly not the case with Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I also see deleted comments, I guess by the user. Which is odd, bc like if they wanted to remove it that's their choice I suppose, but Lemmy still shows me reply notifications, but then when I go to read it, it's gone!?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Yeah, that's a really annoying design choice.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Are you on the same instance as the deleting user? This sounds like a quirk of federation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This does seem the most likely explanation. But... my instance seems to be aware of the deletion at least, and yet still chooses to show it. It could show the old message, it could remove it entirely and show no notification, it could get fancy and show nothing by default but then upon requesting addition information show it anyway... but out of all the various possibilities, it chooses the single most annoying one? 😜

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I think the real reason has nothing to do with federation. It's probably just one of the many UI bugs. You get notifications on reply but cancelling of notifications isn't implemented. That would mean once you open that notification, the post is refreshed (because there could be new comments, someone could have edited or deleted something) and the UI learns it got deleted at this point and the reply vanishes.

There is a bugreport open for it: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3816

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Little by little, progress is being made - in the meantime the software isn't quite "finished" yet, but somehow still the UX ends up being significantly better than Reddit:-).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah. I've asked quite some questions in the AMA the developers had a few weeks ago. Seems they have quite something on their plate. I've reported more serious UI bugs last summer/autumn and they're still open along with several other bugs. But I'm not involved in how things get prioritized. However I've heard them say multiple times that all of this is more work than they can do with the manpower available.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah note how the version number is 0.19.3 - that's not 19.3, or 1.93, it's still far from 1.0 yet.

When Reddit imploded Lemmy got hit with this deluge of new subscribers, but it wasn't quite ready for it. On the other hand, third party apps were made almost instantly, so definitely the pace accelerated:-).

And they've been hit with multiple spam attacks, from 4chan and Discord, so those I am sure were considered the priority.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I know. I've been watching Lemmy since 2021 so I've been around for quite a while before the Reddit exodus happened. Before that Lemmy was mainly a wasteland. There were a few communities that would connect you with people but the majority of it felt just like talking to yourself. I think all the people coming from Reddit was necessary to lift it beyond a small Linux forum with 100 infrequent visitors. But it definitely was problematic. The state of the project wasn't prepared for that kind of growth. I'm sure a few devs and admins spent their nights handling that instead of getting some sleep... And we only get by as of today. I'm still waiting for bugfixing and new features, but that won't happen before the foundation is in good shape and it seems we have to be patient with that.

I'm a bit split on the version number thing. Sure, you can poke around with your hobby project for 10 years and slowly build something in peace that isn't actively used by anyone... But this approach doesn't deliver the goods. If you want to create something useful and get to a point where it actually provides something for someone, you have to have users, grow with your community at an adequate pace.

And from the user's perspective: We want a platform to communicate. I like this style of discussion and there isn't some other, superior federated alternative around. And I want to do it now, not in 5 years time. So the expectations might clash a bit, here.

I think fighting spam is the job of the instance admins. The developers are indirectly responsible, their job is to provide the tools to fight spam and moderate. I just started to get Spam recently, but I don't watch the All feed, just my subscriptions so I could have missed it. However I saw all the DDoS attacks happening and I was affected by those. Nowadays I have several accounts on different instances, so I'm prepared.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I'm a relative newcomer myself, just from the time of the protests, and yeah I am also making multiple accounts. My Kbin one I even gave up on almost entirely, but you never know when it may come in handy:-).

I wonder how much of the development issues are related to the choice of languages, if it unnecessarily restricts the number of people who can help, or the political stance of the originator turning people away who are unwilling because of that. But Kbin, Mbin, and other spin-offs are happening, and even Threads and whatnot, so it does seem to be happening, just slowly.

And the interface is somewhat good even now, okay so not quite so "stable" but as you said, that was mostly from DDoS so understandable that it could take some greater difficulty to turn those away.

I expect great things in its future:-).

But either way I'm not likely to leave. (And even if I did, I still would never return to Reddit!:-P)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

So on Liftoff, I find that if I interact with a deleted comment (up or down vote) the deleted content appears. Weird eh?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

That’s because only a Boolean flag changes when deleted by user. Comment content stays.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

That does not work in a webpage browser, so seems like a Liftoff ~~bug~~ (/feature?:-P) on top of the underlying issue in Lemmy itself.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I was wrong