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!world@quokk.au, world news without a bot

!world@quokk.au

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.

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  • 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.

        • 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.

          Can you link to some examples of people abusing you? You don't have to spend a ton of time on it if you don't want to. I'm just curious.

          Moderation is never completely fair. It can't be. I'm just saying that by some coincidence, the moderators that interacted with you are some of the only ones who I tend to agree with a lot of the time.

          And I 100% will admit that I’ve called for the removal of Israel. I don’t view that as the negative FlyingSquid does.

          It's not just FlyingSquid. I think calling for "removing" Moscow, or Washington, or Israel, or Gaza, or Ukraine, for whatever reasons of geopolitical argument, would lead to your removal from most communities outside of the instances that tend to get defederated.

          You can hold whatever views you want, but surely breaking the community rules on purpose by speaking about them, and then getting banned, isn't a confusing outcome.

          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.

          Maybe so. It could work fine. Definitely having you be a member of the community instead of someone coming from above, and open about what you're doing and why, is a step in the right direction. I'm just saying that moderation is hard and thankless work that is going to bring you into contact with a lot of obnoxious people, and refraining from becoming obnoxious or unfair yourself, as you deal with that day in and day out, is a lot more difficult than it seems like it would be.

    • 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.

        • Maybe it could be addressed with cryptographically-signed votes

          That is how it works, I believe. Each vote has to be signed by the actor of the user that voted.

          There have been people who did transparent vote-stuffing by creating fake accounts en masse and get detected, because they were using random strings of letters for the usernames. Probably it's happened more subtly than that and not been detected sometimes, too, but it's not quite as simple as just reporting a high number.

          • I believe that the basic metric of trust is instance-level. That is, it's the TLS certificates and whether-or-not an instance is federated that is the basis of trust. I don't think that users have individual keys -- I mean, it'd be meaningless to generate one rather than just trusting a home instance without client-side storage, and that definitely doesn't exist.

            Having client-side keys would potentially, with other work, buy some neat things, like account portability across instances.

            But the problem is that, as you point out, any solution on vote trust can't just be user-level keys, unless every admin is gonna police who they federate with and maintain only a network of instances that they consider legit. Once I federate with an instance, I grant it the right to create as many accounts as it wants and vote how it wants. And keep in mind that ownership of an instance could change. Like, an admin retires, a new one shows up, stuff like that.

            • Your actor (https://lemmy.today/u/tal)'s public key is:

               -----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----                                      
 MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEA1VR4k0/gurS2iULVe7D6
 xwlQNTeEsn0EOVuGC2e9ZBPHv4b02Z8mvuJmWIcLxWmaL+cgHu2cJCWx2lxNYyfQ
 ivorluJHQcwPtkx9B0gFBR5SHmQzMuk6cllDMhfqUBCONiy5cpYRIs4LBpChV4vg
 frSquHPl+5LvEs1jgCZnAcTtJZVKBRISNhSp560ftntlFATMh/hIFG2Sfdi3V3+/
 0nf0QDPm77vqykj2aUk8RnnkMG2KfPwSdJMUhHQ6HQZS+AZuZ7Q+t5bs8bISFeLR
 6uqJHcrXtvOIXuFe7d/g/MKjqURaSh/Pqet8dVIwvLFFr5oNkcKhWG1QXL1k62Tr
 owIDAQAB                                                        
 -----END PUBLIC KEY-----

              All ActivityPub users have their own private keys. I'm not completely sure, and I just took a quick look through the code and protocols and couldn't find the place where vote activity signatures are validated. But I swear I thought that all ActivityPub activities including votes were signed with the key of the actor that did them.

              Regardless, I know that when votes federate, they do get identified according to the person who did the vote.

              In practice, you are completely correct that the trust is per-instance, since the instance DB keeps all the actor private keys anyway, so it's six of one vs. half dozen of the other whether you have 100 fake votes from bad.instance signed with that instance's TLS key, or 100 fake votes signed with individual private keys that bad.instance made up. I'm just nitpicking about how it works at a protocol level.

              • Ah, thank you for that, then; that makes sense. And yeah, if there is a per-user key, then I'd expect it to be signing votes.

        • Good points. I also think the fediverse and Lemmy, in particular, could be attractive to certain bad actors in terms of misinformation and astroturfing, and vote manipulation would certainly help with that. I think some people think we’re safer here from that because of smaller size, etc. - but I think Lemmy users are more likely to be willing to engage (as we wouldn’t be here without willing to take leave of places like Reddit), and influencing the conversations on Lemmy could be a significant boost to someone looking to share misinformation or make a difference in very tight elections.

          On the whole, I think that’s one of the reasons Lemmy needs better built-in moderation tools than what might otherwise be thought appropriate based on its size. And an overall maturity of the platform to protect against that kind of manipulation.

    • 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).

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