So far Lemmy is vibing. Everyone here is excited and optimistic and willing to put up with a few rough spots to be part of something.

When the Eternal September comes, which it will, how does a Lemmy instance deal with bad actors?

  • merc248@lemmy.world
    5·
    1 year ago

    My understanding, based on what I’ve seen with Mastodon, is that, yes, all users will just cease to exist if an instance admin decides to pull the plug. There was some stupid drama with a particular Mastodon admin for a really popular instance a while ago (I forget which server exactly), and they decided to just kill the server. Poof, 100k+ users gone

    • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
      3·
      1 year ago

      The potential for accounts to vanish if the instance they started on is, to me, the single biggest hurdle that Lemmy will face with casual users. I think that the devs need to really consider figuring out a way to make user logins global.

      I said this the other day, but I think it may, unironically, be one of the first times I’ve ever seen a genuine use for a blockchain, but I have no idea how to implement it.

      The reason that the big social media companies came to exist is precisely because people didn’t like having to have a dozen accounts for all their different communities. Lemmy fixes that problem through federation, which is great, but introduces a new problem of “your account could just disappear, making all your contributions vanish.” I know that was technically a problem before big social media companies appeared and everyone was using forums, but it’s a big plus of the current social media giants- you don’t have to worry too much about the company failing so completely that the website gets shut down, which is the only way you’d lose your account, any time soon. People are used to that stability, and will not be happy if they join an instance in the fediverse only to have the rug yanked out from under them.

      If we want this to be a true alternative to big social media, it needs that stability.

      • GraceGH@beehaw.org
        4·
        1 year ago

        The other consideration is that impersonation might be pretty possible by making your own server called lemmy.mi or something and then stealing peoples username’s verbatim. IDK if that’ll ever become an issue but I do think its an avenue of attack for bad actors.

      • zkikiz@lemmy.ml
        2·
        1 year ago

        Your contributions won’t vanish, I can still see comments from people from dead servers on Mastodon because it’s cached on my server. The bigger issue is when you set up a new username on a new server, how can you show that you’re the old person. So ideally pick a server that has policies in place about offline notices, multiple admins, a funding plan, backups, policies about Nazis, etc.