I want to be part of the solution of the problems I see on Lemmy, that is why I opened my alt account at my current server to open new communities while fixing their issues.
I had been informed by the server admin that I should not post more than 5 posts in any local community which is guaranteed to kill my communities on my current server.
I am explaining the backstory here for people to understand my logic for my question.
So, I really appreciate any help here. If anyone can give me good servers to open my communities in.
My current communities:
- News: to lower the load on Lemmy. World server and to improve the Fediverse health.
- Europe: due to less than optimal moderation actions as documented in "power trippin " community.
- Misinformation/ Disinformation: Because there is no community to post research and news about this topic.
Thank you all for your help. I really would appreciate any lead here.
Lets say you find an instance that meets your requirements, given the lack of email validation, what’s going to happen is that instance will be host to trolls and spammers, top to bottom, and then it will get defederated from the rest of lemmy.
It’s entirely possible to host an instance that doesn’t require emails to sign up. Blahaj lemmy and piefed don’t for example. We don’t have a spam problem though, because we require manual approvals of new accounts. Lack of email verification is only a problem when it’s combined with open signup
My instance does not require email validation and so far I have zero spammers or bots. There is one thing I am doing different than everyone else. Can you guess what it is?
Why wouldn’t you present your solution without the theatricals?
I did already. The solution is to charge a small payment from every user. I’ve been saying that for everyone that cares to hear since 2022.
I would venture that you spun it up yourself.
It’s still open for registrations. The instance is not just for me.
It sounds like you are looking for a server that is ripe for bot abuse. What time frame did the admin say not more than 5 posts. I would tend to think they mean 5 posts a day which sounds completely reasonable to be for an upper limit on posts per day into a single sub.
Yes, The time frame is per day.
Here is the reason I don’t support that limit:
From my experience in moderating the technology community at my main account, no one will post on my new community for very very long time.
How will news community for example survive on 5 news posts daily? As I said it will be granted to fail if it did not contain useful news posts that cover wide amount of topics.
Plenty of communities survive with 5 posts per user daily
More than 5 posts would raise the likelihood of people blocking that instance because of spam. Less is more.
As long as they’re not back to back I don’t mind. But what I HATE is people that spam out like 30 posts in one go. I don’t want an entire page to be posts from one person/community.
I especially hate it when it’s the exact same link, but different communities (shouldn’t be an issue for OP, but I hate that shit). Lemmy really needs to fix that. I don’t mind people cross posting 30 times, but I only want to see the same link once per page.
I make an exception to that rule for the /c/superbowl. I love seeing a bunch of owls suddenly appear in my feed :)
Omg, I agree. I hate seeing the same article posted to 10 different instances all lined up in a row.
https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few options
- https://piefed.social/ - flagship instance
- https://piefed.zip/ - lemmy.zip team
- https://piefed.ca/ - lemmy.ca team
- https://feddit.online/
!interstellar@kbin.earth for an app
https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few options
- https://piefed.social/ - flagship instance
- https://piefed.zip/ - lemmy.zip team
- https://piefed.ca/ - lemmy.ca team
- https://feddit.online/
You don’t need 5 posts a day for a community to survive here. There’s not that many people on Lemmy, things are a bit slower paced.
I mod !bicycles@lemmy.ca and we’d be lucky to have one post per day, yet I think it’s still a relatively healthy community, with a decent amount of engagement on most posts.
You don’t need 5 posts a day for a community to survive here
“Surving” != “Thriving”.
A couple of years ago, I noticed that the front page of HackerNews was consistently getting links from Mastodon posts. That was interesting because it showed that at least one significant part of the tech conversation had moved away from Twitter and into the Fediverse.
No such thing has happened for Lemmy. There is no particular community which is thriving. There is no example of subreddit community that had successfully boycotted Reddit and transplanted here. We have the usual handful of posters, each one trying to maintain their communities “alive”, but that is far from its true potential.
There is no example of subreddit community that had successfully boycotted Reddit and transplanted here.
!fediverse@lemmy.world is much more active than /r/fediverse
Oh, wow. Thank you for a very good example for self-selection bias!
Seriously, though: why is it that you feel this intense urge to dismiss any and everything I am saying? Don’t you think that is a little bit sad that all you can do is this mindless pontification?
I reply when I see absolutes such as “all communities on Lemmy are dead”, "all mods are bad ", “all communities are about politics”
It paints the platform in a bad light and it’s not accurate.
Don’t you think that is a little bit sad that all you can do is this mindless pontification?
Another example of absolute.
I help this platform grow by regularly posting and engaging with regular users.
Stop using absolute statements and I’ll stop replying.
I reply when I see absolutes such as “all communities on Lemmy are dead”, "all mods are bad ", “all communities are about politics”
- I didn’t make any of these statements
- There is a big difference between “sweeping generalizations” and “categorically correct statements”. The former are the statements you give as examples, but the latter can apply to the absolute majority of cases, even if someone has a data point (“the exception that proves the rule”) in the contrary.
It paints the platform in a bad light
Why would you think that?
The original argument was “Communities don’t need a lot of posting to survive here”, and my response is basically saying “we should strive for more than surviving”.
It seems like that instead of focusing on the part where I am calling for more action, you decided to focus on what you perceive as criticism and you try to attack that as soon as possible.
Stop using absolute statements and I’ll stop replying
It feels like your problem is not with the “absolute statements”, but that you are doing your best to reject reality.
It doesn’t matter if the number is 100% or 99% or 92.376%, what matters is that it has been two years since the Reddit boycott and we still do not have a good example of a thriving community here. We had many attempts (the /r/selfhosted people, the /r/blind), but they are by and large still on Reddit. Can you at least agree to that?
I don’t dislike the Adam’s Family nor the Munsters, but I have blocked both communities because they each had a ton of submissions on the same day, and they were dominating my feed.
There’s nothing wrong with slowly submitting content. Submitting too much, too quickly makes it hard to distinguish from spam.
Just my opinion. I understand that you are looking to build something, and therefore you disagree on submission frequency.
I don’t dislike the Adam’s Family nor the Munsters, but I have blocked both communities because they each had a ton of submissions on the same day, and they were dominating my feed.
I love eevee and its eeveeloutions, but the eevee community is spammy AF. I unsubscribed after a couple days. I am getting close to blocking it altogether.
I mod the women’s hockey community on OP’s instance, and post the results of all games (this past season there were only 6 teams so not a lot), but if there are two games in a day I try and put at least 6 hours between the posts so not to spam.
I suppose it depends on the purpose of the community. Narrowly defined communities like eeveelutions or The Addams Family don’t really justify a glut of content in an hour.
OP seems to run a news community though, which is probably where they ran into a brick wall with the 5 post limit. There’s a lot of news. And I guess you’re not a very useful news community if you miss a lot of it.
First time I hear about Eevee community. Is it !Eevee@pawb.social ?
Yes. And looking at the feed, there are 11 posts all at the same hour mark, then it will go a day or so with nothing then another dozen posts at once.
Email is optional on lemmy.sdf.org.
Set up your own server and apply your own rules.
Agreed, this is my go to response to everyone, (seriously there’s like a post a week about this same thing) asking it. Sounds like the perfect place to spread whatever garbage you want is the server you set up and pay for yourself, accepting all personal liability for. Go all cowboy with it!
Guessing you want a free speech instance where you can spam and spout nonsense. You may want to look to hilariouschaos, or one of the other freeze peach patriot instances.
I’ve noticed you tend to always assume the worst before even trying to give the benefit of the doubt.
There are very legitimate reasons to not want to give your email to any random website that asks. They can be hacked, the instance might be a front for some data aggregator, etc. And if your response is “just use a masking service” or “just use a disposable email address”, then what is the point of validating the email address in the first place?
Admins add email verification because this is one extra layer of protection against automated bots, but this is far from a guarantee they are protected. It might help them to give some paper trail in case someone does something nasty on their servers, but the best they can do is take an (easy to create) email address and report to the authorities along with the IP address.
Compare with an instance that only accepts paying members:
- no bot or spammer will be interested in paying a few dollars per month to send messages
- if some spammer is stupid enough to sign up to the service and sends clear spam, then we point the ToS to them, kick them out and they will be left without any money
- we have a much stronger paper trail (credit card payments, bank transfers) in case some user does something nasty.
I think your approach is a good one to ensure real users, reduce spam, and for the admins to be compensated for the service they provide. However, is giving your credit card or bank transfer information to a website less risky or more privacy-focused (one of OP’s goals) than giving an email address?
However, is giving your credit card or bank transfer information to a website
You are not giving your payment information to the website. You’d be giving to a payment processor, which has to go through all the regulatory oversight. So, yes, I trust Stripe to handle my payment information more than I’d ever trust any random instance admin with my email.
!fediverse_vs_disinfo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
exists and is decently active.
Huh, maybe db0?
We require a valid email for registration as an anti-spam measure, but you can garble the email afterwards.
What does garble mean in this context? What would be accomplished by removing your email after registration?
If we get pwned, or otherwise compromised, one cannot tie your username to an email. The same reason the OP doesn’t want to provide an email I guess.
Oh right, the email!
db0 require email for registration.
slrpnk.net doesn’t require an email, makes it optional in case you want it for password recovery. And as far as I know it doesn’t have the restrictions you mention.
Which is great until I lost my password 😂 @FundMECFS@slrpnk.net will be dead I guess.
Actually @poVoq@slrpnk.net was wondering if possible to recover my account since it’s pretty obviously my alt. If not possible, no worries, totally understand.
Please PM me about it.
Just use a disposable one-time mail?
For the first problem, just use a throwaway email service (I like temp-mail.org) to make your account.
What’s stopping spammers/scammers/bots to do the same thing?
Usually sites will blacklist all temp providers, lemmy doesn’t seem to care. The only reason we don’t look overrun with bots now is that they’ve gotten a lot better and appearing human in the last year
But yeah, mods and admins only give lip service to dealing with bots, as per usual
mods and admins only give lip service to dealing with bots
“You get what you pay for.”, evidence #103.
Nothing at all. That’s why we have captchas.
What makes you think that captchas are effective against spammers signing up to the service?
They raise the barrier of entry for creating spam accounts from “make a bunch of API calls” to “set up some kind of AI captcha solver/pay someone in India to do it for you.” It doesn’t stop spammers, but it makes it harder for them.
https://communick.news/ fits all you requirements regarding users - only paying members can join, so the instance is pretty much guaranteed to be protected from spammers and bots.
Regarding your communities: I really rather keep a strict separation between “instances for communities” and “instances for groups”. The topic-specific instances I am running are meant for specific niches, but perhaps I can find one domain that can be used for more “generic” subjects. Would you be interested in that?
I don’t see how required an email means they don’t care about privacy.
I agree. If you’re worried about it, set up a free gmail account to use for validation, problem solved.
You mean those free email accounts that actively scrape your emails for data?
Is everybody here just on crazy pills today?
They’re saying “free” email services. What they mean are disposable e-mail services. You go to a website, they provide you with a random e-mail address. You enter that address into the form, check for the verification code on the disposable e-mail site and you’re done with the disposable e-mail. You never visit the disposable site again. Do a search for “disposable email”.
Son I’ve been using mailinator since before you learned to type
They still track your data, they still sell your usage, in fact THAT IS THE ENTIRE BUSINESS MODEL FOR DISPOSABLE EMAILS
It really staggers me how ignorant everyone in this thread seems to be about basic security practices
What security issue do you imagine arises from creating a Gmail account that receives a single Lemmy verification before the account is deleted?
But if you only use that email account for authentication to the system and it’s not tied to you, they have no way of tying it back to you. It’s just an anonymous email address.
that now has your IP address and your host string, as well as matching your ID to any sales trackers you happen to have, basically all you need to uniquely identify a user across sessions
All pretty easy to circumvent if you understand privacy. Guess you don’t…
So because I posted cybersecurity standard practices, I don’t understand privacy.
Please explain your logic
Your username is incredibly apropos.
If you’re truly worried about that, turn the Internet off and never come back. What you are asking is impossible.
Incorrect.
Nobody has my IP, self-hosted vpn
My host string changes automatically every 3 minutes, and none of them report my actual system status
Every cookie and cache is purged on close except for a few whitelisted sites, and I regularly run diff scans for evercookies
So yes, it is possible, and is relatively easy to do
And are you also clearing the logs at your ISP? If not, you’re still being tracked. Even vpns are not as secure as people think they are. It’s all trackable at some level.
Then you don’t understand privacy
Sh.itjust.works didn’t require email when I made my account, but I couldn’t say for sure if that’s still the case
… and you’re blocked.
Amazing that this person thinks spamming is going to improve anything.
Noice. One less negative person.
Funny, that’s what I was thinking as I blocked your spammy ass!
Noice, Two less negative people.
