!world@quokk.au, world news without a bot
!world@quokk.au, world news without a bot
Not going to lie, I got banned so I made my own World News Community. This community differs because there's no silly bot, I'll happily listen to the communities voice, and we're a bit more lax on rules policing.
Feel free to come on by and comment. I would love to foster a News community that's active in discussion.
looks
So, I don't know what the beef between the !world@lemmy.world mods and you was, but...
That's a lot of activity for a new community. On Lemmy.today, I see 82 upvotes for the first article, which was apparently a week ago...and I assume that this is the first announcement.
https://lemmy.today/post/17163696?scrollToComments=true
lemmy.world shows the same thing for it.
Normally, Lemmy doesn't show users who have upvoted a post. Only admins can see that.
But Kbin and Mbin do, including on federated servers.
So, I can look at the upvotes for that post; mbin shows them on the "favorites" tab.
Fedia.io is an mbin instance.
When I go to the most recent !world@quokk.au post on Fedia.io, however, all of those votes that your community is reporting disappear. It shows virtually no upvote activity.
https://fedia.io/m/world@quokk.au
In fact, no post in that community has more than four upvotes. Most of them, you've upvoted. But I don't see a lot of other users there. One or two.
Now, that might just be some kind of mbin bug. But the posts on !world@lemmy.world look pretty much the same on lemmy.today and fedia.io. It shows real users generating those upvotes.
Now, okay. Maybe it's just me being cynical and skeptical. But this is your home instance, yeah? You wouldn't have anything to do with that instance possibly reporting incorrect vote totals on posts on your new community, right?
And keep in mind, I'm not saying that more competition for communities is a bad thing. More options, let users choose what they want. But I'd also think that having an instance report accurate numbers to help them make that choice is important. And if they aren't accurate, that ain't a great start for the community, in my book.
EDIT: Looking further, it looks like it's just a very high upvote count for a new community relative to age and comments, but I was able to look at the users doing the voting on another instance, and the users doing so don't appear to be bots; that's coupled with some oddity of vote propagation; I detailed this in a follow-up comment. Sorry, Deceptichum! I don't believe that there's any funny business going on.
"This magazine is not receiving updates" is why it's out of sync. It's no different than a Lemmy instance which isn't syncing updates from a community. You'll be able to see the community, and sometimes see some content on it, but it'll be missing most of the votes. Also, when you first subscribe to a community, you'll get a handful of recent posts, but none of the votes, so you'll see content with the voting all wrong.
Mbin might also be flaky about syncing with Lemmy instances, but that's not the reason in this case that the votes are out of sync.
I looked over the votes for a couple of the posts in !world@quokk.au. I've seen voting in that past that seemed faked, but nothing in this community jumped out at me.
As much as I'm in favor of a !world community that isn't on lemmy.world, because there's clearly some kind of rot going on there, I'm not sure how good an idea it is to have someone who's habitually gotten their own stuff banned in the past be the boss of a new community. He didn't get banned for tangling with the mods, he got banned for advocating violence, abusing the report feature, and things like that.
Of course, diversity is good, obviously. Let's see what he does with it.
I never abused the report system. That was the mod of News abusing the rule, I only ever reported stuff hurled at me which never ever got removed even when it was very obvious personal attacks or other people doing exactly what I had a comment removed for.
And I 100% will admit that I’ve called for the removal of Israel. I don’t view that as the negative FlyingSquid does.
Every mod has their own personal biases. Mine are just further to the left of American liberals, so we clash.
I moderate differently than I comment. Moderation for me is only about removing spam etc or obvious bad actors, people voting are what determines what’s visible not what I’ve decided should be allowed.
Yeah, the ratio of upvotes to comments looks a little unusual IMO
I suppose that there's also a broader technical issue here. Like, Deceptichum's a real user, a regular on various communities I use. He comments, contributes. I don't much agree with him on, say, Palestine, but on the other hand, we both happily post images to !imageai@sh.itjust.works. I figure that he probably got in a spat with the !world@lemmy.world mods, was pissed, wanted to help get a little more suction to draw users. That's relatively harmless as the Threadiverse goes. This is some community drama.
But you gotta figure that if it's possible to have an instance reporting bogus vote totals, that it's possible for someone to have bogus vote totals at greater scale. So you start adding instances to the mix. Maybe generating users. Like, there are probably a lot of ways to manipulate the view of the thing.
And that's an attack that will probably come, if the Threadiverse continues to grow. Like, think of all the stuff that happens on Reddit. People selling and buying accounts to buy reputability, whole websites dedicated to that, stuff like that. There's money in eyeball time. There are a lot more routes to attack on the Threadiverse.
I don't know if that's a fundamental vulnerability in ActivityPub. Maybe it could be addressed with cryptographically-signed votes and some kind of web of trust or...I don't know. Reddit dealt with it by (a) not being a federated system and (b) mechanisms to try to detect bot accounts. But those aren't options for the Threadiverse. It's gotta be distributed, and it's gonna be hard to detect bots. So, I figure this is just the start. Maybe there has to be some sort of "reputability" metric associated with users that is an input to how their voting is reported to other users, though that's got its own set of issues.
Hey, thanks for the reply. I don't know how upvotes syncing works, but when I look at the community on here or .world, I see roughly the same number of upvotes?
Edit: When I look on any Lemmy site that's synced with it, I see similar. Is this a kBin issue?
It's my home instance and I am friends with the admin. From what I know they ran an "easy" script to setup the site, I don't think they're knowledgeable enough to do stuff like fake votes from the instance (no offence @Marsupial@quokk.au).
Hello,
Any reason to not participate to !globalnews@lemmy.zip rather than creating another community? They already have close to 3k monthly active users
!globalnews@lemmy.zip and !politics@sh.itjust.works are the best news communities I'm aware of.
Especially with "scaled" sorting, there's no real downside to subscribing to any number of them, but if I had to pick one for each category, those would be the ones. Mostly, my metric is that interesting stories reliably come across the feed without a lot of dreck.
Honestly hadn't seen it before now, but it doesn't look very active.
2.74k monthly active users, so around 700 more than !world@quokk.au (2.02k)
It would also become even more active if you guys join forces over there
Interestingly enough, now that I'm having a look, if you filter the top posts of the community, quite a few posters were created 9 or 8 days ago:
- https://quokk.au/post/588248 9 days ago: https://ani.social/u/LaLaLa
- https://quokk.au/post/582207 9 days ago: https://lemmings.world/u/MamboNo5
- https://quokk.au/post/586169 9 days ago: https://quokk.au/u/EuroPapa@feddit.nl
- https://quokk.au/post/593922 9 days ago: https://quokk.au/u/GreeNRG@slrpnk.net
- https://quokk.au/post/603026 9 days ago: https://quokk.au/u/Lemmynated@lemmy.zip
- https://quokk.au/post/578437 9 days ago: https://quokk.au/u/Grainne@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- https://quokk.au/post/580245 9 days ago https://quokk.au/u/Domino@lemmings.world
I also couldn't find any announcements anywhere which would draw 2k members in such a short timeframe
I also noticed two new accounts voting on this post:
- https://moist.catsweat.com/m/world@quokk.au/t/520324/Over-50-people-detained-as-police-raid-two-Moscow-gay/favourites
- https://moist.catsweat.com/u/@BoomBoomBoomBoom@lemmings.world
- https://moist.catsweat.com/u/@34dfg4g13@lemmings.world
Edit: another 9 days old account voting:
@Deceptichum@quokk.au , any comment on this?
Yeah I asked my discord group to join Lemmy on different instances and post something on the community, so I recognise a few of those names. Not all of them though, like nfi who Basmati is.
And the community doesn’t have 2K members, it’s 2K people who clicked on a trending topic. Which considering the top 5 posts have 600+ votes is like 1/3rd of all those 2k already.