cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/35270153

Context for the unfamiliar, OpenAI agents were using a defunct german website to trade notes on how to succeed at benchmark trials.

Coverage here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg725z5kgzo

This thread from two months ago shows an agentic account stashing notes for itself in the same way described in the DseWiki incident: https://lemmy.world/post/49599814

digipres.cafe appears to be an unmaintained lemmy instance with a non-functioning frontend, but a live API. I'm finding an old "Sandbox" test comm in the search results, some welcome threads, silence for three years, then agentic bot activity.

I flagged it because this bot is currently spamming a bunch of comms, probably not directly OpenAI related in this later case, but taking advantage of the same opening for similar reasons: https://lemmy.world/u/pathwren@digipres.cafe

I built Zyke: Discussion Forum, a discussion forum & social news aggregator like Reddit. Loads fast, moderation is transparent, has user mentions (@), hashtags (#), a democratic voting system and a modern rich text editor.

But how do I monetize without running ads? That’s why I’m skeptical about adding Zyke to the fediverse. The community dislikes products with ads, so it feels like a bad idea to me. I don’t even intend to put pop up ads, just clean banner adverts

I can see if accounts do it occasionally and organically but are accounts that exist solely to repost popular and recent posts from twitter/reddit/Facebook healthy for the Fediverse?

I'm planning to introduce Peertube to a fairly large group of people who are new to the fediverse. Which instance is the best in terms of how easy it is to get an account and watch federated content as well as having something to discover locally?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/70749935

An interesting blog post about how the AT protocol has it's own cool little ecosystem next to the fediverse.

It's really interesting how the way ATproto is both more and less as every service must follow a strict format to interact with others using the same format.

Like, ATproto has more variety than the fediverse, but the way they interact is a bit more strict, which means that a post from a lemmy analogue wouldn't show up on bluesky, but it also means that each platform often seems more polished.

Quadruple moderation is killing Lemmy. It’s a gift to Reddit

There’s a rule about online communities I want people here to understand: the 90-9-1 rule.

Roughly 90% lurk, 9% comment, and 1% create.

Additionally - lemmy monthly active users is stangant at about 35k monthly active and not improving:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

When I first got to Lemmy, I had trouble finding enough content I was interested in even commenting on. So I figured: why complain about the lack of content when one can start posting it myself?

That's why I post so much.

If people don't post, most Lemmy communities simply don't have enough creators to sustain themselves. You need posts before lurkers can lurk, commenters can comment, and some of those people eventually become creators themselves.

I'm not posting just to flood Lemmy. I'm trying to help solve one of Lemmy's biggest problems: not enough content creators.

And frankly, doing that has been a nightmare.

Lemmy has a quadruple-moderation problem

Every active content creator has to survive four layers:

1. Community moderators can remove your posts or ban you from the community.
2. Your home-instance admins can ban your entire account.
3. Receiving-instance admins can block/ban you for everyone on their instance, even though you don't belong to it.
4. Public moderation history means those decisions follow you. One moderator's decision can influence another and snowball into more moderation.

For prolific content creators, that's brutal.

I've had multiple accounts banned over one or two posts that somebody didn't like. Months of posting, comments, engagement and contributions can effectively disappear from a community because of a couple of moderation decisions.

And the more you contribute, the worse the odds become. If you make hundreds or thousands of posts, eventually you're going to post something that one moderator somewhere doesn't like.

You don't need one moderation team to tolerate you. You need multiple independent moderators and admins, across multiple servers, to remain aligned indefinitely.

There's almost no cost to deleting a creator

This is another major difference from Reddit.

There is generally no financial investment in a Lemmy community's content. A volunteer moderator can ban someone who contributed months of posts and comments and lose all of that person's past and future contributions without losing revenue, salary or investment. Did you know all creator posts are wiped out from lemmy after account banned?

The creator paid the cost in time.

The community loses the content.

The users lose something to read and discuss.

And the moderator who pushed the button may personally lose essentially nothing.

So who benefits from making prolific content creation this difficult?

Because it certainly isn't Lemmy.

And this creates an enormous attack surface

I genuinely have trouble believing that everyone complaining about prolific posters simply doesn't understand this dynamic. At some point I have to question whether some of it is deliberate.

If I were Reddit and wanted to undermine a federated competitor, this is exactly where I'd attack it: its content creators.

You don't need to hack Lemmy. You don't need to DDoS instances. You don't need to take anything offline.

Lemmy already provides the mechanism.

Report prolific contributors. Call their posting "spam." accuse them of being bots. Point moderators toward their public moderation histories. Get one account banned somewhere, then let that decision influence moderators elsewhere.

Eventually the creator gets tired of fighting and leaves.

I'm not claiming I have proof Reddit is doing this. I'm saying Lemmy's architecture makes this kind of subversion ridiculously easy, and Reddit would be an obvious beneficiary.

Reddit doesn't have this same federated quadruple-jeopardy problem. You're primarily dealing with the moderation of the subreddit you're contributing to.

Lemmy desperately needs more people creating content, yet its moderation structure makes life progressively harder for the people who create the most of it.

At some point we should be asking:

Who actually benefits from that?

A plea to admins: protect your creators ban reddit agents instead

Before banning someone, look at who is contributing and who is reporting.

If an account with zero posts in years reports someone who has contributed hundreds of posts, don't treat those two users as equally valuable to the health of the community.

That doesn't put creators above the rules. Remove bad posts. Warn people. Moderate proportionally.

But stop throwing away months of content and future contributions over one or two posts someone disliked.

Creating content takes time. Reporting takes seconds.

Protect the people actually building your communities.

edit: I am reposting from reddit - there is no rules against that. its actually great thing for majority of lemmy users!

This reposting tool is open source - i've never been hiding the fact im reposting from reddit.
people get only high quality pre-dozed, pre-moderated content.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-deep-lighthouse/

I think more people should be using similar tools and populate lemmy with content. - htis is the only way to move that 35k mau number and creat conditions for more OC on lemmy

edit 2 " but we dont want content" argument.

The fuck you dont. who the fuck is we?

And this is why I don't buy the argument that the people still here represent what users want.

Look at the numbers.

• Fediverse: ~14 million registered, ~1.17 million MAU.
• Lemmy: ~756,000 registered, ~35,000 MAU.

Lemmy has had three quarters of a million accounts created and only about 4.6% of that number is active monthly.

Obviously that doesn't mean 95% were all regular users who quit. But it does tell us something important: the people currently active are a tiny, self-selected fraction of everyone who has tried this platform.

So when 30 existing users say "WE don't want more content," you're hearing from the people the current system successfully retained. You're not hearing from the enormous number of people who tried Lemmy and aren't here anymore.

Maybe instead of assuming the remaining users have figured out what Lemmy should be, we should be asking why so many people tried it and didn't stick around.

This is the announcement of the Threadiverse Vibrancy Challenge!

The Challenge - From September 1 to 30, 2026, complete each one of the categories below with a unique post or comment:

1. (Freebie) Make a shitpost.
2. Make a post about something other than technology or politics or a shitpost.
3. Make a post showcasing a thing or topic you find interesting.
4. Make a post to a community with fewer than 100 subscribers.
5. Make a post to a community in a small instance.
6. Make a post featuring a human-made piece of art.
7. Make an on-topic comment to a post in a small community.
8. Make a comment or post sharing news about a location relevant to you.
9. Make a high-quality long form text post or comment.
10. Post or comment a link from another part of the Fediverse.

I came up with this to encourage a greater variety of posts and comments to niche communities, with the support from people who usually just comment occasionally and lurk.

Participants will evaluate their own progress. If you get a score of 10/10, you will win a virtual Lemmy Gold Star, and hopefully everybody will win a noticeably more active Threadiverse in the smaller communities!

Remember to be respectful and follow rules of the instances and communities you post to.

Feel free to share this with your own instance. I will try to post a mid-challenge follow-up in 3 weeks and a concluding ceremony in October in !fediverse@lemmy.world. Good luck!

PyLova (Python+Pavlova) is a soft fork of PieFed, aimed at improving the user experience through UI overhauls, empowering users and admins with agency, improved administration and moderation functions, and general bug fixing.

New in V0.3.2

New & Improved

• Muffle Users : Instead of outright blocking a user, you can now 'Muffle' them. This will place their content behind a spoiler. This functionality has also been extended to the filter system.
• Live Posts : Mods can designate a post as a Live Post. A Live Post will continuously update with new comments coming through while sorting by new. This is great for keeping track on currently happening events such as global news or sports.
• Reel View : This is a new way to browse the site, putting it into 'Reel' view shows one post per scroll. Cuts out the noise, allowing you to appreciate one post at a time.
• User Flags : Want to show off who you are? Add a flag next to your pronouns. These small flags can be set by instance admins, great show showing Pride Flags, Sports Teams, Nationalities, Political Ideologies, etc.
• Bookmark Organisation : Users can now sort their bookmarked posts and comments by folders.
• Admin Notes : Admins and Instance Moderators can share notes about users on their profile page, this can be handy in building a history of bad behaviour or sharing concerns.
• Account Oversight : Admins and Instance Moderators have greater ability to search through a users upvoted and downvoted content.
• New Theme : Nocturne Core @luminous5481@anarchist.nexus has wonderfully created a Sci-Fi inspired theme you can apply.

Bug-Fixes & Misc

• Lemmy/Mbin support for Multi-Image Posts : Multi-Image Posts will now add the extra images into the post body for users on Lemmy and Mbin so they don't have to miss out on your amazing content.
• Censorship Transparency : On the instance about page, there is now a one-stop location for viewing what sort of things are being censored by your instance.
• Options Menu : The menu has been updated with a more navigable UI in 3 Panel Mode.
• Reactions Only Mode : A small setting for instance admins to 'turn off' up and downvotes, letting posts only have emoji reactions. Note, emoji reacts do technically count as an upvote and this is more of a visual change in regards to user view.
• Trusted Instances Only Federation : Communities can already be set to local only, this feature allows communities to only be visible on those in your instances trusted list.
• Banned Users can now unsubscribe from a community, allowing them to remove it from their feed.
• Blocked/Unfederated Instances now show more information, such as allowing for reasons why it was removed.
• Poll Post Type teasers had a slight visual inconsistency, their icon should now align properly with every other post type.
• Flair, Tags, & Live Status all follow the same visual format. Also now visible on post teasers.
• General Performance Improvements.
• Code Refactoring to follow a more pythonic style guide and reduce McCabe complexity.

The Lemmy interface tells you if there are new unread comments on posts you viewed before. Does that mean Lemmy tracks all the posts you've ever viewed and when? Is that information public?

I still believe that getting access to sports news and commentary would be one of the sure-fire ways to get more people in the Fediverse. But even after all these years, Reddit, Twitter and Instagram obviously completely dominate the space.

In the US, the NFL is starting in a couple of weeks and the NBA will come back in October. There is also the European Football (Soccer) leagues which started this month, so the thought came to mind again: what could we have that could make the conversation around professional sports more interesting...

• Specific apps or sites that act as a multi-platform client, to let you follow short clips from Loops, or posts from specific communities or athletes?

• Real time scores and match threader bots?

• A (local, user-controlled) recommendation algorithm to manage different news sources?

• Integration with fantasy leagues?

Maybe I am barking at the wrong tree and/or the majority of people here do not care about it enough, but I would like to hear some ideas to see if there is anything we could do.

Here's an idea for my fellow Lemmings, Piefedians and others, about a fun little challenge we could run in the month of September, to encourage a greater variety of posts across our communities with help from people who usually lurk or only occasionally comment. Each person would score themselves on an attempt to make 10 contributions across some defined categories in a month. What do you think?

As far as I can tell from my venture into Mastodon's feeds, the demographics of that part of Fediverse isn't that different from what Lemmy has: the same political takes, FOSS stuff, "big corpos bad", etc.

I wonder, is there anything that Mastodon excels at that Lemmy just doesn't provide? For example, I noticed that there are game developers and artists posting their stuff on Mastodon. Not many game developers (or any creatives, really) on Lemmy though.

Believe it or not, the Fediverse has a pretty active and happening music scene. NHAM and RadioFreeFedi are collaborating to put together a music and culture live stream, for the Fediverse, by the Fediverse, and it’s all powered by PeerTube and Owncast.

The event is from August 26th @ 1900 UTC to August 28th @ 0100 UTC

#Tapatalk was a dominant app in the pre-social media days when discussions took place on all different forums and message board sites across the internet, not centralized platforms like today. Tapatalk provided a centralized way to subscribe to all those discussions on different servers, post and comment freely, without logging into each forum site directly.

Since then #Reddit became the centralized and dominant place to engage around niche topics, killing that diverse ecosystem of forums. I'd like to see the #Fediverse become and equivalent "central" location for finding and engaging with niche topics while remaining decentralized by its nature.

We still have lots of forums running on open source #Discourse software, but we don't have an easy way to connect and engage all those communities back into #Lemmy, #ActivityPub, and the #Fediverse to make them findable with the same ease Reddit provides.

What's the best way to unify the #Fediverse with the existing forum communities that exist outside the platform web?

I thought it would be good if making a post with a URL alerted me if the same URL has already been posted to another community/ server. Then it could offer to make the body of my post a comment under that post instead.

What do you think, and do any technical people familiar with Lemmy / Piefed / ActivityPub know if suc h a feature is possible without huge overheads?

I'm posting this here because Taylor didn't reply to my comment on youtube about this. While I appreciate her work at least covering the fediverse, I think its worth noting she isn't actually engaging with the fediverse with this post.

Posting this here in some hope it can gain traction and get her attention. maybe repost to Mastadon if thats something you do?

I'd like to invite Taylor to come to either Mastadon or Lemmy and do an AMA to discuss her video and the topics it contains further.

https://fedihood.social/about

FediHood is a social network built around the place where you live. You choose a city and the topics you care about, then read what neighbours are saying and join in.

It stays a normal fediverse app. Your posts can reach Mastodon, PixelFed, Misskey and the rest, and posts from those servers reach you too.

Source code: https://git.holos.social/tom79/FediHood

There's only one instance so far: https://fedihood.social/

If new instances are created, they should show up here: https://fedihood.fediverse.observer/list