/0

Hey peeps, the well-known spam problem in lemmy DMs is getting slightly worse, and the spammer in question is evolving their tactics to evade the very rudimentary options we have built-in to lemmy itself (or should I just call it,non-existent?). To get ahead of this, we deployed a DM-scanner directly in the DB, based off of this code but adjusted so that it's more difficult to pull off shenanigans.

At the moment we're only deleting messages based on the "fediverse chick" spam. However I want to point out that if for some reason you legitimately DM someone on dbzer0 with similar terms, you DM might get deleted, so do be aware about that. Them's the breaks.

Unfortunately I can't reveal the exact code I'm using atm, as this can lead to the spammer adjusting their tactics to evade it. However I plan to adjust threativore to also be able to manage your DB anti-DM-spam filters in the future, to make it much easier to handle this, even if you don't feel confident touching your DB. Stay tuned.

I do hope we get more robust anti-spam tech in lemmy and I did open two issues about this, but it seems this is not a prio atm.

If you realize that the anti-spam ate a DM. Do let us know. If you see spam getting through, also let us know.

In perusing the Lemmy community list, I've noticed several times the dormant [email protected] community mentioning a consolidation with [email protected]. As the latter instance has since gone offline, I inquired with the [email protected] moderator about switching the consolidation to one of the other two active Ukraine communities.

I was subsequently informed that the change had indeed already been made, but that the version of the community on lemmy.dbzer0.com didn't reflect it. As the updated version is visible on both the original lemmy.ca page, as well as the lemmy.world version of it, is there a reason our version of it is out of date?

Edit: Seems that subscribing to the community to federate it updated it successfully.

Is there any plan to try to fix federation with hexbear.net? Shortly after their domain expired it stopped working, but now that it's back it doesn't seem to have resumed. Does Lemmy even have something in place to fix federation issues when something like this happens?

ex: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/[email protected]

https://hexbear.net/c/badposting

In maintaining my Lemmy blocklist, I noticed that I was unable to block the [email protected] community, despite it seemingly existing if I look for it on lemmy.world directly.

As it doesn't load when accessed via this instance (lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/[email protected]), has it been defederated?

I want this to be a discussion. I'm sure everyone has seen this video by now, and I wanted to ask what people think about the prospect of labeling this sort of stuff as NSFW.

My opinion is that this is just AI-generated softcore porn. The "ethics" of making such a video notwithstanding (Stirner save me,) if such a video was posted in the news of say... Tulsi Gabbard kissing Melania Trump's feet, everyone would immediately recognize it as pornography. This instance, being explicitly SFW, should condemn the sharing of this video on the instance and any future videos or images like it. The liberal news media loves promoting shocking images that they can get away with, especially when it has a heavy serving of homophobia on the side, and clearly they are just getting away with spreading images of sofcore porn all over. Fuck them.

I also would like to hear people's opinions on if we should start demanding other instances mark videos and images of a similar nature as NSFW, because frankly, I don't wanna see this shit when I open Lemmy. I certainly don't wanna see it 10 FUCKING TIMES either.

Hey peeps, 2 weeks ago we opened applications to onboard new instance admins. We had a ton of great people applying and just as we were getting ready to decide, I got struck down by the influenza b and completely flattened to my bed. Welp.

Well, no matter, I'm back now and decided to announce the new peeps we're onboarding to the admin team. Initially I was planning to just add one new person, but we got so many strong applications that I felt bad choosing just one.

So without further ado, our new admins are:

• @[email protected]
• @[email protected]

Both seem to have a history which appears to align well with our values and will provide fresh perspectives and experiences to our admin team. Peeps, feel free to introduce yourselves with as many details, pronouns, and/or fanfare as you prefer.

That out of the way, this brings our admin team to 6 members, which starts getting to the point where's the sheer amount of admins and users makes it more likely that conflict arises, either between admins, or between admins and the userbase. In most other forums, this kind of thing typically causes a closing of the ranks and/or internal purges of dissent with the site owner taking the role of the BDFL. We've seen it already with lemmy instances and the regular drama which hits meta-comms.

So, since I'm the actual owner and I hate nothing more than being a BDFL, I want to attempt something novel in this space. You see, one core concept of anarchism is instant recalls. As in, the people that represent any group for a specific project, are not representatives in the same way as in parliamentary democracy. Instead, they are there to follow the exact mandate given to them, and if they are seen as going against it, the people below them have the right to immediately recall their mandate. None of this "minimum a couple of years" and popularity contest shit which allows corruption in.

I want to attempt something similar in our instance. I don't quite know how well it's going to work, but I'm willing to give it a try. The way it's going to work, the admin team is considered to have a mandate from the userbase to do admin shit. We don't want to be calling a vote for every ban and improvement after all. However as a counter-balance, any stakeholder gets the right to initiate recall vote against any admin, including myself. The vote will be run at a 75% threshold to remove, using the governance community.

However due to the impact of such votes, the hope is that perhaps we can sort things out before it gets to it, so the expectation is that people will first open a "sense check" thread in governance to talk about it before taking it to a vote. But if things have reached a head, then a recall vote is there to check our instance admin power.

The remaining admins of course are expected to replace any removed admins to ensure the good instance operation.

I did say that you can even recall myself if you so voted, however there's indeed some hard realities we can't get around. I still control the servers and the domain, and it's not possible to enforce their management based on such votes. So I will still ultimately be able to interfere, but I promise that even if I'm removed, I will only step in to ensure the instance recall functionality is respected. Ultimately this is an experiment that I want to attempt so I'm willing to roll with whichever way it goes.

Now there's one more thing of concern, which is about someone gaming the system. This is not all set up to be super rigorous. I'm hoping our relative obscurity and super-low stakes will prevent anyone attempting to game the system. Likewise, if foul play is suspected, I am still as a failsafe to recover.

You might be asking yourselves: Why do this? Why even mess with this sort of radicalism when the BDFL approach is tried and tested. The answer is because...well, power corrupts. Having power over people does something to one's brain, mates. So many times I've seen well meaning people turn to shit because they felt they were the only ones who knew best and could protect people from themselves. I don't want that. Every BDFL approach eventually creates internal cliques, mistrust, "good ole boy clubs" and such. I base my life in trying to shed as much hierarchical power from myself as possible and it hasn't led me astray, and if we want to change this shit world we're living in, we need to try things that don't repeat the same shitty structures. So while I can't do something perfect, I'm willing to do something flawed and see how far it takes us.

So yeah, welcome the new mods and tell us what you think.

PS: We also upgraded to Lemmy 0.19.9.

Just wanted to share for people who moderate communities that Tesseract lets you see who voted on a post or comment. This means that as moderators you finally have the ability to take action against users who downvote every post in your community or who vote with multiple accounts, or similar situations.

This might not be a new thing but it's something no one is talking about and I just wanted to let you all know its a thing.

It works on this instance: https://t.lemmy.dbzer0.com/

Or at the main Tesseract Frontent: https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

As communities are only federated with this instance when at least one of its users subscribes, new and small communities are at an inherent disadvantage in terms of discoverability. While not a problem unique to this instance, Lemmy Federate is used by several other instances to have a bot temporarily subscribe to communities from federated instances until at least one actual user from the instance subscribes.

Although the federation of additional communities means that users who curate their All feed via extensive community filter lists will have to filter more communities, I think the benefits to the discoverability of communities across Lemmy, promoting their growth in the process, would make it worthwhile.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37235684

Obviously reporting transphobic comments to a transphobic mod isn't going to result in any action, so I'm wondering if the admins are going to do anything about it?

(if someone needs an image description, please ask)

The gooners are coming!

(I kid, I kid, I assume you're not (all) gooners)

Context

Ahoy mateys!

We are closing the voting on this topic a couple of days early as the result is already conclusive., Our threshold for passing the motion was for 2/3 of voting members in favor. We have far exceeded that threshold (see below) and have a good number of overall responses, so the proposed policy change has now been approved and takes effect immediately.

Our new policy on Xitter links

1. No Xitter links are to be posted on this instance from the date of this announcement.
2. Workarounds such as link shorteners and alternative front-ends that resolve to Xitter posts are also banned.
3. Screenshots will still be permitted as per the overwhelming number of comments in support of this option.
4. Exception: In rare cases there may be a need to verify the veracity of a Xitter post. If this need arises, then you may post a https://xcancel.com/ or https://archive.is/ version of the link. Please note this option should only be used sparingly and exclusively for fact-checking purposes.

We will begin communicating this instance policy change to all our users today.

Please try to be helpful to anyone who accidentally posts a Xitter link who may not yet be aware of the policy change, and/or feel free to report in the usual way.

N.B.: For the loopholers - by "Xitter links" we mean any links to content hosted on X (formerly Twitter). Alternative Xitter front-ends are also banned under this policy, unless exception #4 applies. Edit: The ban also applies to other Xitter-owned domains such as their photo blobstore (pbs) domain at pbd.twimg.com

Thanks to everyone involved for participating in the vote!

**The final tally is as follows: **

• For: (2), (7), (5), (3), (2), (1)
• Against:
• Local Community: +2.6
• Outsider sentiment: Very Positive
• Total: +22.6
• Percentage: 100.00%

To break this down a little differently:

• Home instance users voted 93% in favor of the proposal (284/307)
• External instance users voted 97% in favor of the proposal (70/72 note: these are not counted, but good to know)
• Donating and vouched for users voted 100% in favor of the proposal (20/20 votes).

Hi mateys,

Please go to the following link to cast your vote on this topic. Votes will only be counted on the original post link below:

• Direct link: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36114134
• Lemmyverse universal link: https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36114134

Thanks in advance for helping us to test the new dbzer0 governance voting system.

:)

Hello once again peeps. As part of my work in categorizing and flairing users based on their registration application, I thought, "why not use the same code to have a constantly running script that checks for new applications and automatically flairs them. Then after I built that, I thought to myself "why not PM new users with their starting flair"? And, well, long story short, our instance now has a script that will automatically PM new users with a full welcome message.

The message will include the users starting flair, based on their stated favorite Anarchist, Pirate or FOSS Advocate and then will suggest some starting comms to join, based on those tags. You can see an example in the attached image.

I feel like this is a neat idea to simulate something like the bluesky starting packs. Of course since we don't quite have something like an onboarding screen, I can't finetune the suggestions too much, but at least we have something.

Let me know if you can think of any improvements to this process.

E: solved I guess? This seems to be an issue across users and instances, so it must be an issue on catbox's end.I hope they sort it out.

Scrolling through the new 196 there are quite a few posts that won't expand when clicking as I would expect them to on my feed, some simply lead to a new tab (annoying, but they still load), but images from catbox, from different users, don't seem to be loading at all, not expanding in-instance, and not loading in a new tab either, the best I can do is open the thumbnail image in a new tab and zoom in at like 500% to try and read it.

I'm on desktop and have tried on a couple different browsers, and cleared cache and cookies and that, but that doesn't help.

Trying to figure out if this is an instance issue, a catbox issue, or a me issue, and is there a way to resolve it?

Thanks.

Really thought the old one was much cooler, does anyone else agree?

I mean it is what it is ultimately but I always thought the older one looked much cooler. While the new one looks very flat and plain.

What do you guys think though?

Old:

New:

Yo, new subscribers. Just because we don't have a very demanding application, doesn't mean you can just ignore it.

My work on threativore and flairs was the stepping stone for something I wanted to achieve ever since reddit. A way for a community (instance in our case) to be able to vote on decisions, without having to rely on comment-votes and manual counting, but also without allowing every rando on the service to vote on your internal matters.

To this end, I have now deployed the governance community on our instance and it's live, let's say in testing mode. Please check the manual I just linked for more in-depth explanation of how it works.

As discussed in the previous thread, the initial plan is that only stakeholders can vote and open threads. Everyone who is supporting us with donation is a de-facto stakeholder, however ~~threadiverse enjoyers cannot open new threads.~~ Also after the discussion I decided to allow vouching for others, which any supporter at the higher tiers can do twice. Vouching gives voting access, so this means you can specify other people who you personally know are valid members of the instance, and that will allow them to take part in the decision making, even if they're otherwise only lurking. Effectively vouching puts someone at the same level as a threadiverse enjoyer.

EDIT: I had a change of heart about this. I plan to initially allow both threadiverse enjoyers and vouched to also open threads. If this causes problems, we can re-evaluate.

On a voting thread, the bot will maintain a control thread and refresh the tallies every 15 mins, (so don't expect instant updates.)

Currently most of y'all won't have voting rights, because ko-fi tiers will only be applied at the next donation or the monthly charging time. Liberapay is handled more often, but it requires a manual step on your end which you can do on your own already.

If you have any suggestions for MVPs for our instance, please do suggest them.

Unfortunately no feedback from any UI developers until now so as to add threativore flairs to the UI itself. I guess I have to learn javascript as well one of these days...

Anyway, this is only the beggining. I want to add more voting options, more automatic ways to nominate others for MVP. And I still need to distribute the affiliation tags (they will be visible when you comment in a governance thread). Eventually I want to even allow threativore to be usable my comm mods than just instance admins.

There's already a test thread in governance, so go ahead and downvote/upvote it. I plan to open a proper one soon, with a small decision I want to make. I wouldn't suggest trying to open a thread yourselves yet until voting-enabling tags are distributed, as the bot will just lock it)

EDIT: I decided to extend the voting a bit further. Now votes of local instance members who otherwise have no voting rights will also be accounted at a rate of 1/100 from a random sample of up to 1000 of their votes. This means that a vote can go up to max +/- 10 from local community votes and it's a fractional count (i.e. +1.1, or -0.7) which should make the local community sentiment an excellent tiebreaker, without overwhelming the people who are directly supporting the instance. Furthermore, I decided to display the "outsider sentiment" which is votes from non-valid-voting users from other instances. The outsider sentiment is only flavour ("Positive", "Negative" etc) and is disregarded from the total. This is just shown for reference of the outsider sentiment which I think might be useful.

Hey peeps, I got a few things to talk about.

First of all I am happy to announce that the Divisions by zero will be joining the newly minted Haidra non-profit org. The plan is to use Haidra as the fiscal host for your donations to the instance and have things a bit more organized in the backend. Haidra is our own non-profit, so it should carry our values and avoid conflict with people who don't understand our ethos.

With the non-profit in place, I wanted to put into action a plan I had for a long time. To implement some sort of radical instance democracy. I don't believe in Benevolent Dictators for Life and thus I always look for ways to receive a mandate for my actions all stakeholders, rather then deciding top-down. Unfortunately the nature of hosting a service like this does not allow anarchist democracy to be practised, as at the end of the day, there's a sysadmin with the passwords holding all the power, but given that for this specific instance, that sysadmin is myself, I want to try and experiment with this.

As part of Haidra, the project itself (i.e. the divisions by zero) maintains full autonomy, so its own decision-making remains in its own community. However as a member project, it also effectively gets a vote in the internal running of Haidra. For me use your mandate, I need to figure out a way to receive it. To this end, I want to try and implement some sort of system to allow such democratic decision making.

Unfortunately we cannot reasonably allow every registered member to vote on instance policies, as it's trivial for any bigot to join and make sockpuppets and throwaway accounts to affect our policies.

So I want the voting process to be somehow run by the instance stakeholders, so I came up with the concept that the only people who should be able to take decisions on the instance, are those who have monetary contributed to the hosting and personnel costs, or who are putting significant effort into nurturing communities here and potentially in the larger fediverse. The idea is that if you've put into action your support of this instance, you should deserve some say on how it's run. That said, while I'm still doing most of the work behind the scenes, I still need to feel good running this instance, so I will need to come up with ways to reject people from the voting process if they don't match our ethos. I won't in good faith allow bigots to vote, just because they have money.

Now the trick is how to do this in a way that is manageable. While I have access to the accounts subscribed on Ko-Fi and Liberapay, connecting them to accounts in here is a massive PITA. Likewise it's not easy to easily remember who is contributing in direct action to this instance.

So once more the mad science lab that is my brain, has come up with some new ideas. First I have updated the threativore bot so that it now also provides a REST API on top of its bot functionalities. The REST API can now be used to retrieve extra user info that is maintained by the instance admins about users on our instance, that is not always relevant to the software (and as such is unlikely to be added to the API by the devs).

One big aspect of this update is that I can maintain user tags inside threativore. These tags are free-form and will allow us to mark users as contributors through ko-fi or other means. In fact, I even setup a complete backend DB connection to threativore and a webhook for ko-fi, so that as soon as you donate to the instance, you will be marked on threativore as a contributor, so long as you used the same email address on both (if you didn't, and you want to be recognized, please send me the email you used on ko-fi in a PM and we can override)

However, because I can't just do things only a little bit, I decided to extend the tags functionality to also have a key for "flair". Each tag assigned to a user has an optional flair key, which can be an emoji, or a link to an image. Currently those flairs don't serve any purpose, but I have already pinged some of the popular third party UIs (which we're currently hosting and I wholeheartedly suggest you use), to assist us in making those flairs visible.

In fact, those flairs are not even restricted only to our own instance, we can potentially flair any user from any instance and I have a lot of plans to make expand this functionality. The only limitation is finding UI developers to handle that end.

In fact, I have already created and onboarded some starting flairs for our instance. Some of them will be automatically assigned by the ko-fi webhook, and some others will be automatically assigned by the way you answered your registration application. Here they are:

Ko-Fi

These 4 are coming from Ko-Fi subscribers. The idea is to use them to flair people so I can quickly see whose votes would count in the democratic process. Initial plan is that every subscriber should be allowed to vote, but only subscribers who fund a lot can open new votes for mandates.

• : Drinking Mate is the tag for people who have donated in Ko-Fi, once off. The tag will expire after 2 months.
• : Threadiverse Enjoyer: The people at the lowest end of the ko-fi support.
• : Deck Hand: The people who support significantly through the year (as it stands, each of them effectively covers half a month of hosting per year)
• : Salty Dog: The people who massively support each month (each of them effectively covers ~1/5th the monthly cost)

Liberapay

• : Threadiverse Enjoyer: Same as Ko-FI
• Powder Monkey: The people who support significantly through the year
• : Buccaneer: The people who massively support each month

Affiliations

The below flairs are going to be assigned depending on how you answered the registration application. If you mentioned more than affiliation, you will be assigned all of them matching.

• : The bread book: Will be assigned if you mentioned an anarchist.
• : Jolly Roger: Will be assigned if you mentioned a pirate
• : Wildebeest: Will be assigned if you mentioned a FOSS advocate/software.
• : Early Bird. Will be assigned if you registered before our instance had an registration application process, so only around 5K users ever got this one.
• : ADHD Assigned if you specified you have ADHD
• : ASD Assigned if you specified you have ASD
• : Snowflake is assigned if you mentioned someone who is neither an Anarchist, Pirate, nor FOSS (advocate)
• : First is assigned if you were the first to mention that particular Anarchist, Pirate, nor FOSS (advocate)

Other

• Vouched: This signifies a user for whom a trusted user of this instance has vouched for. This is another way to be able to take part in the decision-making of this instance. Vouching will be restricted to tiers higher than threadiverse enjoyer and MVPs.
• MVP: Is a flair which I plan to assign to signicant contributors to the instance in some way. Perhaps lifetime funding and/or fediverse presence? Perhaps we should vote on it :D

All of this is only the beginning of what I want to do here, but this beginning will be short-lived if we can't get UI developers on board. So if you're maintaining one of the 3rd party UIs in the sidebar, please contact me. Likewise, if you're excited by any of this and you can help hack the exising lemmy UIs (including the default one) for our instance purposes, please speak up and that would be a good ground for an MVP flair! :)

In the meantime I will use threativore to start doing some scripting to allow only-staholder voting, and we'll try it out soon.

If you have ideas and improvements about all this please post. If you have ideas for more flairs and way reasons to get them, let me know. If you have thoughts about how this democratic experiment should be structured, now is a good time to write them!

Hello again you scallywags, welcome to to 2025! After last month's post we had a pretty amazing showing and we finished the funding for the year with quite a bit to spare! Not only that, but thanks to our 26 subscribers, we are completely self-reliant as we have enough stable subscriptions coming in to cover all our costs. Extra thanks to the two Salty Dogs who carry ~40% of the hosting costs on their own!

I have now opened the goal for the next half-year and I'm fairly confident we'll be able to cover it easily. Cause y'all are excellent.

On a more personal note, I want to say I regularly run into people mentioning our little corner of the fediverse, and the reactions I see seem always positive from the wider lemmy populace. Almost nobody has much of anything bad to say about the Divisions by zero and it just gives me a warm feeling inside to see a notoriously contentious bunch as y'all, manages to have us in high regards throughout. I live for such comments!

Alright, that's all. Carry on.

I created this account two days ago, but one of my posts ended up in the (metaphorical) hands of an AI powered search engine that has scraping capabilities. What do you guys think about this? How do you feel about your posts/content getting scraped off of the web and potentially being used by AI models and/or AI powered tools? Curious to hear your experiences and thoughts on this.

#Prompt Update

The prompt was something like, What do you know about the user [email protected] on Lemmy? What can you tell me about his interests?" Initially, it generated a lot of fabricated information, but it would still include one or two accurate details. When I ran the test again, the response was much more accurate compared to the first attempt. It seems that as my account became more established, it became easier for the crawlers to find relevant information.

It even talked about this very post on item 3 and on the second bullet point of the "Notable Posts" section.

For more information, check this comment.

Edit¹: This is Perplexity. Perplexity AI employs data scraping techniques to gather information from various online sources, which it then utilizes to feed its large language models (LLMs) for generating responses to user queries. The scraping process involves automated crawlers that index and extract content from websites, including articles, summaries, and other relevant data. It is an advanced conversational search engine that enhances the research experience by providing concise, sourced answers to user queries. It operates by leveraging AI language models, such as GPT-4, to analyze information from various sources on the web. (12/28/2024)

Edit²: One could argue that data scraping by services like Perplexity may raise privacy concerns because it collects and processes vast amounts of online information without explicit user consent, potentially including personal data, comments, or content that individuals may have posted without expecting it to be aggregated and/or analyzed by AI systems. One could also argue that this indiscriminate collection raise questions about data ownership, proper attribution, and the right to control how one's digital footprint is used in training AI models. (12/28/2024)

Edit³: I added the second image to the post and its description. (12/29/2024).

It's been getting a lot of quality of life upgrades recently and it's sad it's not more known by lemmy users. It handles a lot of things better than the lemmy devs envisioned in the lemmyUI and it improves integration of things like loops etc.

It's become my favorite web frontend as of late, so I wanted to spread the knowledge around. All kudos to @[email protected]

We host our own instance in https://t.lemmy.dbzer0.com/ if you're from lemmy.dbzer0.com and if you're from another instance, you can try it from https://tesseract.dubvee.org/

One year ago I developed the first (and from what I know, still only) real-time CSAM detection tool for the fediverse. This has been in use by this instance and recently the real-time version was put in use by lemmy.world. Unfortunately the false-positive rate was a tad too high as this was still using my original implementation in horde-safety. But through our demands in the AI Horde, we've had to constantly tweak and improve it over the past year and thereofre we've had an improved checker for a while, but not used in fedi-safety.

Unfortunately I haven't had the time/motivation to update into it recently so lemmy.world pinged me about its false positive rate being a tad too high, I felt it was a good time to do so.

So now horde-safety has been updated and it should already be more accurate. The admins of lemmy.world already put it into production and they have the most demand, so they'll report back with their findings in a week. If this is not sufficient for lemmy's purpose, I have some other ideas for tweaking it.

And yes, memes and pressure on the admins is what caused me to look into it, but remember we're all just volunteers here. I would have looked into it if y'all had asked nicely as well ;)

Speaking of volunteers, if you want to support my work in providing tooling for lemmy and the Fediverse, feel free to send some support my way which covers all of my FOSS project work.

Recently noticed a resurfacing of the image bug that happened back when 0.19.6 was released where random posts with image links wouldn't be detected as the images they are.

I've noticed it happening for several posts on the instance, here's a few:

• ~~https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/33634525~~ (Works now)
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/33642831
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/33626225

I'm making this post here though and not in the Github issue since it seems to be affecting only this current instance. I checked and it doesn't seem like lemmy.ml is affected at all. So in all likelihood it's probably limited to dbzer0. If anyone else notices this elsewhere pleas feel free to chime in and provide post links (dbzer0 copy, the origins don't help us since this is a dbzer0 issue).