My guess is that a good portion of that comes down to the quality and breadth (or lack thereof) of the Lemmy built-in moderation tools. Combined with volunteer moderation and a presidential election year in the US, and I’m sure the moderation load is close to overwhelming and they don’t really have the tools they need to be more sophisticated or efficient about it.

I completely agree. I have a whole mini-essay that I've been meaning to write about this, about problems of incentives and social contracts on Lemmy-style servers in the fediverse that I think lead to a lot of these issues that keep cropping up.

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.

That's not quite true. If a community was resolved but no one's currently subscribed to it, for example because someone searched for it or subscribed and then unsubscribed, you'll see exactly the situation that you're looking at. You'll see partial content and almost no votes.

It's very obvious that someone is doing deliberate astroturfing on Lemmy. How much is an open question, but some amount of it is definitely happening.

The open question, to me, is why the .world moderation team seems so totally uninterested in dealing with the topic. For example, they're happy for UniversalMonk to spam for Jill Stein in a way that openly violates the rules, that almost every single member of the community is against, and that objectively makes the community worse. Why that is happening is a baffling and interesting question to me.

https://ponder.cat/comment/589276

I propose to give this article the zero amount of attention it deserves, and instead, to spend the comments talking about how to help get people out to vote.

I signed up yesterday with votefwd.org, and I'm planning on spending some time on it, as soon as they verify my signup. I've already turned in my ballot, but there's still time to motivate some other people, and influence the outcome that way.

Edit: I don't think this is the way. Does anyone know how to volunteer for text banking? I think I did, a while back, but I never did it. I looked at https://web.kamalaharris.com/forms/take-action-for-kamala-harris but the prospect of having to go outside and meet people is terrifying.

I already sent it. It's here:

https://ponder.cat/wp/wp-sources.zip

Edit: You don't need to do the import initially, since there's already a sources file with some small modifications. The import is the only complicated part. Use categorize.py to categorize a source, or lookup.py to run a quick command-line test.

On a different topic: It sounds like jordanlund is saying that if he tried to remove the MBFC bot from the politics sub, he might be removed as a moderator, and replaced with someone else, and the bot would come back.

https://lemmy.world/comment/12825768

Is that true? Is the admin team mandating the use of this bot, and if so, why?

Here you go:

https://ponder.cat/wp/wp-sources.zip

It's in python, suitable for sticking directly into the bot if the bot is in python. There are docs. It's a first cut. How did you envision this working? I can make a real API, if for some reason that makes things easier, but it's not immediately obvious how it would get integrated into things.

Running it on the last 50 articles posted to /c/politics, we see:

• https://lemmy.world/post/20739836: Source is unreliable since ownership change
• https://lemmy.world/post/20736298: Source is unreliable for political topics since 2011
• https://lemmy.world/post/20724155: Reliability consensus is mixed
• https://lemmy.world/post/20723675: Source is unreliable
• https://lemmy.world/post/20722912: Source is unreliable
• https://lemmy.world/post/20722910: Reliability consensus is mixed
• https://lemmy.world/post/20716118: Reliability consensus is mixed
• https://slrpnk.net/post/14127964: Reliability consensus is mixed

It's more complex to use this than MBFC, because there's a lot more depth to the rankings, and sometimes human judgement is needed to assign scores. There's a category "needinfo," meaning it's necessary to know what topic is being discussed or when an article was written, because of an ownership change or similar factor. I've applied that judgement above. That, to me, is a good thing. It means the bot is grounded in something, and not just blithely spitting out arbitrary scores without bothering to ground them in any reality.

In practice, I think it would be realistic to assign a single reliability ranking to most of the "needinfo" sources. You can manually edit the .json data to do so. Almost all of the posts are going to fit into one of Wikipedia's categorizations or another. Newsweek is unreliable, The Guardian is reliable, and so on.

I think most of the mixed-consensus sources can be used without a second thought. Mostly, the questions about them boil down to open partisanship of the source, which for a political community is perfectly fine as long as they're trustable factually.

If you want me to boil this down further, so that it gives a single "yes" or "no" score to each source, I can do that and probably keep almost all of the accuracy of the rankings, now that I've looked at it for a little while.

When you talk about "adding" this to the bot, are you proposing to still have MBFC be the main source, with this as a footnote? A lot of the criticism of the bot is on the grounds that MBFC is a very bad source for judging reliability, so I would question the idea of keeping it on as the primary source.

!rcv@ponder.cat

Any third party that's telling you to vote for them under FPTP, but isn't heavily promoting RCV to fix the system, isn't trying to win. They're trying to spoil the FPTP election.

RCV is already law in a surprisingly large number of places. It may change the majority in the house in this upcoming election, because the difference in vote-counting within the two states that use it for US congressional elections might be enough to change the razor-thin outcome.

RCV is on the ballot, in one form or another, in 7 states and DC this year. Go vote. You might be able to fix the system, and move toward the future that all the people in this thread who are being vocal about Jill Stein say that they want. Remember back when marijuana was illegal? That changed. This can change too, and it would be glorious, for a lot of important goals that a lot of people claiming to support Jill Stein claim they're supportive of. It would be practical and realistic. It would work.

Anyone in this thread who is saying Jill Stein is extremely important, but haven't been saying anything about ranked choice voting or changing the voting system to make third parties realistic: Why? What's your goal, why did you make that decision about your priorities?

The answer is obvious, of course. But it's fun to ask.

@anticolonialist@lemmy.world, why?

I'll add more @s as more people pipe up. They always do.

Register and vote, for RCV as well as for Harris. We have 25 more days.

https://www.vote.org/

The network said this week it would encourage the candidates to fact-check each other, but it never ruled out the notion that moderators would fact-check the candidates.

It’s a pleasure to see the only party that everyone respects worldwide, the master negotiators who fixed the Iran nuclear deal, in action.