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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2024

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  • I’m personally trying to stay out of (especially US) politics discussions as much as I can, as I don’t think there’s much to gain there for me anyway while potentially costing a lot of time and energy. I’m not from US, so most of that stuff isn’t anything that is relevant/influenceable for me anyway.

    I haven’t actively looked whether that person has been posting content that is violating our instance rules, that is simply not a reasonable task to do without leads pointing out specific cases. Without supporting their statements, unless they’re violating instance rules we’re generally trying to allow people to communicate their thoughts here without applying political bias to rule enforcement, at least on instance admin level. I can’t speak for community moderators, but I’m sure that there are communities with bias in rule enforcement or even rules themselves in both directions. If LW users or users in LW communities are violating LW instance rules, we recommend reporting them with references directly to admins, which will bypass community moderators, so our admin team can review it.

    I’m also not directly involved in how the bot is used/discussed, but I did have a look at votes targeting the account in the past and there were several accounts heavily involved in automated or at least not legitimate votes, which on its own is generally also a violation of our ToS and would usually lead to a ban. Votes are therefore not really something that can reasonably considered at face value as peoples opinion either, as they’re skewed by those who abuse the system.

    The leading case for this is an account with zero posts or comments, that downvoted more than 8k comments by the bot, 98.5% of all its comments. This is not legitimate voting behavior. This user does have other voting activity that is at least not immediately obviously abusive, but their downvotes on the bot comments are about 65% of their total comment votes since the MBFC bot account was created.

    Following that, I see another user that downvoted the bot about 6.5k times, almost 80% of the bot’s comments, which makes up around 40% of their comment votes since the MBFC bot account was created.

    Interestingly there are also a few cases where people have massively upvoted the comments, which is the case for 3 out of the 13 accounts that have more than 1k total comment votes for the MBFC bot each.

    Out of the currently 101k total votes for the bot, 23% were upvotes, 77% downvotes.
    Out of the currently 101k total votes for the bot, 41% were created by those 13 users with more than 1k votes each.
    Out of the currently 101k total votes for the bot, 51% were created by 28 users with more than 500 votes each.

    I can’t say what a reasonable cutoff might be for gauging vocal minority vs representative user base.

    If I exclude the top 13 voters with more than 1k votes each, this leaves 59.5k votes, which is 28% upvotes and 72% downvotes.
    If I exclude the top 28 voters with more than 500 votes each, this leaves 49.3k votes which is 31% upvotes and 69% downvotes.

    I’ve excluded the bots own automatic votes that Lemmy adds when creating a comment from these calculations.

    I don’t know how people typically vote on bots they like, for me I wouldn’t usually vote on automoderator-style bot posts, it’s not like anyone really gains or loses anything from that anyway.

    Anyway, this is really just some additional data to think about.

    fyi @Blaze@feddit.org @Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com

    edit: typos/missing letters









  • It’s not automatic, admins have the option to ban with or without content removal.

    Different instances deal with this differently and admins are also humans that sometimes make mistakes. Especially during holiday season there are frequently trolls running around with racist, transphobic or other offensive content. Sometimes they’re more obvious, sometimes they try to fly under the radar a bit by being less direct. In the end you’re at the mercy of the instance admins of the instance you signed up with and many instances will provide contact information to appeal bans.

    Since this account was not a Lemmy.World account it’s not up to us to decide whether or not the user should be banned and whether their content should be removed.


  • If you’re referring to the post Ex Redditors of Lemmy what made you come on over? What happened at Reddit that you made the switch?, their account was banned for trolling and all content associated with the account was removed.

    Some examples of their post titles, that likely contributed to their ban
    • African Americans (I hope that PC) have you ever gotten the N word tossed at you and how did you react or feel?
    • How come in most games including the community of gaming I can’t mention the word Nazi for have a civil conversation?

    They also had a number of other posts that seemed to be doing just fine, so it might be falling in the “stupid kid” category.

    The post has since been restored by a community moderator, although the user’s account on lemmy.ml is still banned: https://lemmy.world/post/17593614


  • @PugJesus@lemmy.world, you might have been posting only for LW users for a while :-/

    this is unfortunately correct for the time being.

    while we still have aggressive rate limits in place to limit federation impact from kbin bugs, which started with the measures that @sunaurus@lemm.ee mentioned, this wouldn’t impact activities coming from lemmy.world towards kbin.social.

    while kbin.social used to break down every now and then based on what i saw people comment, service was typically restored within a short period of time. more recently however, any time i’ve looked at kbin.social in the past couple weeks, it’s only been showing an error page. i suspect it may have been unavailable the entire time, not just at the times i looked at it. looking at our federation stats, the last successfully sent activity from lemmy.world to kbin.social was dated 2024-06-18 00:12:25 UTC, although the actual send date may have been later. successful is also not necessarily guaranteed, as some error codes might be misinterpreted as success due to how servers can be set up and how response status codes are interpreted on the sending side.

    if activities sent from lemmy.world don’t reach kbin.social then the posts and comments won’t be relayed to other instances. this is generally an issue in activitypub when instances are down, as such “orphaned” (at the time) communities effectively become local-only communities, isolated islands on all instances that already know about them.

    at this point, the last time we’ve received an activity submission (federation traffic) from kbin.social as on 18th of June, so it seems like it was working for some time on that day and has been broken since.

    at the start of this month, @ernest@kbin.social (kbin.social owner, main kbin dev) said that he was going to hand over management of kbin.social to someone else, as he’s currently unable to take care of it. presumably this hasn’t happened yet.




  • except it doesn’t work well for the rest of lemmy/the fediverse.

    many other instances seem to be getting hit by this, but they don’t have as many activities generated locally for this to become much of a problem. additionally, this is mostly affecting instances with high latency to the instance that is being flooded by kbin, as lemmy currently has an issue where activity throughput between instances with high latency can’t keep up with too many activities being sent. the impact of this is can be a bit less on smaller instances with smaller communities often not having as many subscribers on remote instances, although we’ve seen problems reported by some other admins as well. this includes e.g. kbin.earth, which i suspect to have been hit by responses from a lemmy instance, while the lemmy instance was actually only answering the requests sent from that kbin instance.

    during the last peak, when we decided to pull the plug for now, kbin.social was sending us more than 20 activities per second for 7 hours straight. lemmy.world can easily handle this amount of activities, but the problem arises when this impacts our federation towards other (lemmy) instances, as e.g. votes will get relayed by the community (magazine) instance, which means, depending on the type of activity being sent, we might have to be sending out the same 20 requests per second to up to 4,000+ other fediverse instances that are subscribed/following the community this is happening in. trying to send 20 requests per second, which lemmy does not do in parallel, requires us to use at most 50ms per activity total sending time to avoid creating lag. when the instance is in australia, with 200ms+ latency, this is simply not possible.

    looking at the activity generation rates of some popular lemmy instances, anything that is significantly above lemmy.world is likely not just sending legitimate activities.

    ps: if you’re wondering how i’m seeing this post, you can search for a post url and comment urls on lemmy to make lemmy fetch them, even if they haven’t been directly submitted through normal federation processes. this requires a logged in user on lemmy’s end.