Looking at Fedidb.org the Fediverse Network Statistics, I’m seeing about 98,000 Active users as of the 27th. That’s at least 50k new users this month. Welcome to Lemmy, fellow migrants!

  • AmberPrince@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Well I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea of federation but initially I imagine an instance could just not federate with an instance that doesn’t use captcha/email verification during signup but my confusion is wondering if like there is a transitive trust in the fediverse. Like Lemmy.1 trusts Lemmy.2 and Lemmy.1 does not trust lemmy.3 but Lemmy.2 DOES trust lemmy.3… can bots from Lemmy.3 post on Lemmy.2 which will then be federated to Lemmy.1? Sorry, that seems super confusing as I type it out but it’s the best way I can describe it.

    • Nepenthe@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      If your question in this scenario is can a defederated Lemmy.3’s posts reach Lemmy.1 if they’re posted to a neutral intermediary (Lemmy.2), then no, instances that are defederated from each other don’t trade information. Doesn’t matter how far the post/comment spreads if your instance is ignoring it based on point of origin.

      If both users subbed to a mutually federating instance’s community, they would both be able to interact with Lemmy.2 users, but they wouldn’t even be able to see each other.

      As for bots…I fear there logically is no good way to tackle this because of the nature of the fediverse itself, short of blacklisting every baby instance and manually approving users. At the very minimum, asking for verified email and never auto-suggesting usernames, which is far from airtight but could slow them down.

      Ideally, one could write their own bot to evaluate users for brigading behavior, copied posts and comments, etc., but that seems a little sci-fi when some instances barely have a working search bar right now

      • AmberPrince@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        If your question in this scenario is can a defederated Lemmy.3’s posts reach Lemmy.1 if they’re posted to a neutral intermediary (Lemmy.2)

        You worded it so much better than I did. That’s what I was wondering, thanks for clearing it up for me.