cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/51288619
Hi All,
Due to some ongoing issues with harassment campaigns, we’ve had to setup a rudimentary monitoring system for all new users.
- When a user’s signup is accepted, they will be automatically enrolled into the monitoring system. The admins team may also add accounts manually if they have been given a strike.
- The system will monitor all posts, comments and DMs sent by new users, and bring them to the attention of the admin team if it appears suspicious. In egregious cases, it will auto-remove posts and comments if required, but a human admin will always review and reverse any false positives as soon as required.
- Once we have validated that the user is not a spammer, they will be removed from the system.
We don’t want to go into too much detail on how it all works, but we can say that all the processing is being done locally on the instance server. For most of you, this wont have any impact, but some of you have been impacted by the systems false positives. It is also a good time to point out that DM messages are not private, and should not be used for anything that requires strong privacy.
There will likely be teething problems, but we are actively working on improving the bot to minimize impact and we are always open to feedback.
At first, I was against this. Then I thought some more about it, and now I’m fine with it.
Back in the good ole days when I was the most hated person on Lemmy (you didn’t bully me off, and I’m still gonna vote 3rd party, haha), there were a lot of brand-new accounts whose only posts were about me. A system like this would have stopped a lot of that.
Harassment is a real problem on Lemmy. Some people get sooooooo mad over a disagreement, that they think it’s reasonable to create 10 new accounts just to keep attacking someone. It’s weird.
People have aggressively harassed me for being trans and having AI communities. Most of them were brand new accounts from open signup instances like Programming.dev. Instances creating tooling to stop bad actors from easily creating burner accounts to harass others is a good thing.
If people don’t like that, registration applications and intent monitoring of your instance is and always has been an option.
Yeah, the AI hate on Lemmy is ridiculous. For a platform full of tech people who supposedly love innovation and open source, the knee-jerk hostility toward actual technological progress is pretty fucking weird.
Not to mention how many leftists don’t like corporate control or copyright until AI gets involved, then they suddenly want more of it.