RandomBit

For CSAM in the US, you have to have actual knowledge to be responsible for reporting. If you view the image or it is reported, you must act. Its pretty much the same for DMCA.

I think this could be very valuable for the community and the Lemmy devs. However, I believe to be successful, there needs to be a volunteer(s) who “sync” the community to the GitHub issues. We could automate this but that would make the situation worse. Here’s how I could imagine this working:

When a new feature or bug is posted, the mod determines if this is duplicated or not. If so, they will reply to the post with a link to the previous post and lock the current one. If it is truly new, the community can vote and comment. After a week or so, if the community supports the new feature or fixing the bug, the mod will open a new GitHub issue with a summary of the community discussion and link to the discussion.

This is a lot of work for the mods, but I believe it would really add value for both the Lemmy community and the devs.

"There are 5 games written in Rust and 50 game engines.” — Interview with Senior Rust Developer in 2023

I don’t think Lemmy instance admins are colluding in a secret underground lair like a group of supervillains. There is no point since the decision of one has no impact on the others.

Second, many of us aren’t here for the “features”, we’re here for the freedom.

My personal opinion is that I have no problem if my instance federates with Threads as long as the interactions are a net positive for us. If Threads users prove to be abusive then I have no problem defederating with them.

In C/C++, undefined should be the meme of the little girl smiling while the house burns down behind her.

I think that would only work when the number of instances is small. Two solutions to this might be:

• have instances act like relays where the home instance of a community notifies 10 instances and then each of those instances notifies 10 instances, etc.
• batch updates on a timer such that once a minute all posts, comments, boosts, etc within a minutes are buffered and sent together.

I’m shocked, SHOCKED that killing the API would lead to web scraping! That was a completely unpredictable outcome.

Yes, with a major caveat. An instance will search only communities that at least one user on the instance is subscribed to and only as far back as the time the first user on the instance subscribed to the community.

I’ve always been confused why Google keeps Waze and Maps completely separate. Google Maps interface with Waze crowd sourcing would be killer.

Have a look at Star Citizen (still in development).

In development for a decade with over $580 million in development costs and no release date in sight.

I used to love Etsy for true, handmade items. Now I have to wade through a sea of drop shipped AliExpress crap.

By default, federation is disabled and the admin must enable it. Private instance and federation are mutually exclusive.

That was an incredibly comprehensive, well articulated, and dare I say, exhaustive essay on some important issues you raised. On top of that, creating sample documents is next level.

Privacy

I don’t think the word “privacy” is a good word for the concept. I believe “user data control” or “right to be forgotten” is more appropriate for the “deletion issue”. However, there are few privacy issues such as instance admins having access to private messages and the potential for a hack to expose users e-mail addresses and usernames.

I believe you are 100% correct that we need to do a much better at communicating exactly who has access to their data and what (if any) control they have over that data once it is federated. I don’t believe we will ever have an guaranteed federated delete, and we need to make that crystal clear so users can proceed accordingly.

Legal

Running a self-hosted service is one thing, but running a public service raises a myriad of legal issues. In the US, children under 13 must not be allowed to have accounts (COPPA). CSAM (child pornography) is another problem that can expose admins to serious repercussions. In the US, it is not enough to delete it, it must be reported to the NCMEC. Federation will make this especially treacherous. Other issues such as criminal investigations, subpoenas, and possibly even national security letters are not a matter of “if” but “when” they will occur.

If Lemmy continues to grow, instance admins will need to be prepared for these issues. I would suggest that the public instance admins reach out to an organization like the EFF who has experience dealing with these issues. If not, I’m afraid a high profile incident may be all it takes to kill it.