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.
This is good, this is what any server open with automatic sign-ups should do. They’ve had a serious problem of new accounts spamming hateful shit in DMs and attacking people. I’ve been harassed and doxxed by troll accounts from there and I’m glad they’re doing something about it.
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.
It’s not power tripping, as you said in a comment.
But it is bullshit, and they can fuck right off with the “too much detail, done locally” shit.
Look, I’m all for auto mod tools. I’ve been vocal about it being why I would never mod a large community on the fediverse. There’s just too much assholery online to not have a tool that filters out the assholes before anyone else is exposed to it.
But, with reddit, anyone could look at the documentation on what auto mod could do. You knew, if you wanted, what was an wasn’t possible. You could easily figure out why your comment or post ran afoul of it. Despite the complaints aboue its misuse, it was the thing that made modding a subreddit halfway bearable. And, when used appropriately, it made being part of a sub a much better experience.
But this? The lack of transparency about what’s going on, what the tool does, how it does it, just ain’t cool. It flies in the face of what the fediverse is supposed to be.
It’s llm/ai surveillance without even source available access so a given user can decide to opt the fuck out.
Like I said, a tool like that is a good thing, not a bad one. But not being open is abhorrent for this use.
Edit: for any stragglers, do read the responses made by people from the instance in question before raising any hell. They seem to be on board with providing good info to possible new users and informing current users that might object.
I personally think new user monitoring is bad.
Yanks.alt210948532 had entered entered the chat
Not strictly ptb, but just didn’t expect to see something like this anywhere on Lemmy.
We don’t have much of a choice.
Not because of real users, but bots. We’ve seen a huge influx of bots lately, to the point different instances have different solutions.
I know of one instance that is planning on removing all comments and posts of users that delete within a week of being created, as there is a group with an agenda doing this.
Well, auto-remove feature looks like a bit too much for me, especially with no clear write-up on rules it follows - getting unexpected automated false positive bans often sucks a lot emotionally; good thing you’ve announced it at least.
I have an opinion (just a personal vision on the big picture, I have no desire to instill it in others) that whenever we start needing automated tools like these in Fediverse, it’s a sign that decentralization concept starts failing locally and it’s time to federate more: make more servers with smaller governance.
