“Announcment”

It used to be quite common on mailing lists to categorise/tag threads by using subject prefixes such as “ANN”, “HELP”, “BUG” and “RESOLVED”.

It’s just an old habit but I feel my messages/posts lack some clarity if I don’t do it 😅

That sounds a great starting point!

🗣Thinking out loud here…

Say, if a crate implements the AutomatedContentFlagger interface it would show up on the admin page as an “Automated Filter” and the admin could dis/enable it on demand. That way we can have more filters than CSAM using the same interface.

Update 1

Thanks all for your feedback 🙏 I think everybody made a valid point that the OOTB configuration of 33 requests/min was quite useless and we can do better than that.

I reconfigured timeouts and probes and tuned it down to 4 HTTP GET requests/minute out of the box - see the configuration for details.

🌐 A pre-release version is available at lemmy-meter.info.

For the moment, it only probes the test instances

• enterprise.lemmy.ml
• ds9.lemmy.ml
• voyager.lemmy.ml

I’d very much appreciate your further thoughts and feedback.

Agreed. It was a mix of too ambitious standards for up-to-date data and poor configuration on my side.

sane defaults and a timeout period

I agree. This makes more sense.

Your name will be associated with abuse forevermore.

I was going to ignore your reply as a 🧌 given it’s an opt-in service for HTTP monitoring. But then you had a good point on the next line!

Let’s use such important labels where they actually make sense 🙂

beyond acceptable use

Since literally every aspect of lemmy-meter is configurable per instance, I’m not worried about that 😎 The admins can tell me what’s the frequency/number they’re comfortable w/ and I can reconfigure the solution.

You can hit the endpoint /api/v3/site for information about an instance including the admins list.

Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks very much 🙏

Thanks for the link. Had no idea about that.

Love the attitude 💪 Let me know if you need help in your quest.

I see.

So what do you think would help w/ this particular challenge? What kinds of tools/facilities would help counter that?

Off the top of my head, do you think

• The sign up process should be more rigorous?
• The first couple of posts/comments by new users should be verified by the mods?
• Mods should be notified of posts/comments w/ poor score?

cc @PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@lemmy.ml

Interesting topic - I’ve seen it surface up a few times recently.

I’ve never been a mod anywhere so I can’t accurately think what workflows/tools a mod needs to be satisfied w/ their, well, mod’ing.

For the sake of my education at least, can you elaborate what do you consider decent moderation tools/workflows? What gaps do you see between that and Lemmy?

PS: I genuinely want to understand this topic better but your post doesn’t provide any details. 😅

Thanks all for the input 🙏

I did a quick experiment w/ the APIs and I think I have identified the ones I’d need. Obviously, all is open source (GPLv3) available on github: lemmy-clerk

As the next step, I’m going to expose that data to Prometheus for scraping.

I still haven’t made up my mind as to what is a good interval. But I think I’ll take a per-endpoint approach, hitting more expensive ones less frequently.

So far I can only think of 4-5 endpoints/URLs that I should hit in every iteration as outlined in the post above.

web/mobile home feed
web/mobile create post/comment
web/mobile search

I think those will cover most of the usecases.

OK, I think I see your point more clearly now. I suppose that’s what many others do (apparently I don’t represent the norm ever 😂.)

So tags can be useful for not only listening but also discovery.

I guess my concern RE tag & community competing. But I’ve got no prior experience designing a social/community based application to be confident to take my case to the RFC.

Hopefully time will prove me wrong.

Thanks. Yes, lemmy-status.org was where I got the initial idea 💯

automatic list

For the website I’m thinking about, I’d rather keep it exclusively opt-in. I don’t wish to add any extra load since most of the instances are running off of enthusiasts’ pockets.

That’s a fair use-case.

You see memes in your feed (despite not subscribing to meme’y communities). Three things come to my mind, thinking out loud here:

(1) Could it be b/c the community is not granular enough? Remember we’re in the early stages of Lemmy w/ big “holistic” communities. I’d suppose as we grow, a overarching community will specialise and be split into several more specific ones?

(2) Creating “filters” based on tag/content is a fair usecase and I would second the idea as long as the main dimension of organisation remains “community.” I’m a bit over-attached to “community” b/c I feel that’s a defining element of Lemmy experience & am afraid that touching that balance may change the essence.

(3) Tags can be used to achieve (2) indeed but is the added complexity (❓) to the codebase and UI/UX worth it?

I’m not sure I understand the value of tags for Lemmy (or Reddit in a similar vein.)

Lemmy’s main (& sole?) dimension of organisation is the concept of “community.” You subscribe to communities to automatically receive their updates on your feed.

Now, tags are going to add another dimension for organisation which allows one to curate their feed w/o subscribing.

The good thing about tags is that they simplify “listening.” No need to keep searching for communities or keep scrolling through your feed to find the content you’re interested in.

The downside of tags, IMO, is that it fundamentally competes w/ the concept of “communities” in the sense that, why would I bother w/ finding communities and “explore”, and consequently, potentially contribute to the content of a community where I can simply listen to tags I’m interested in and forget about the rest.
IMO, the reason that tags (moderated or not) are working so beautifully on Mastodon is the lack of communities: listening is the only option.

I stand to be corrected, but it (tags and communities) very much feels like an either/or situation.

PS: Despite its quality and friendliness, Lemmy’s user base and the content they creates is still small. That means, for the time being, communities may work just fine. As we grow and so does our volume of content, we’d probably need new strategies to augment communities. Though I wouldn’t call that a concern of now or near future.

My 2 cents.

The first few paragraphs were a good read where the author makes a good point.

Sadly, it somehow turns into a BluSky promotion afterwards.

Good read, nonetheless.

junk

I’d say “irrelevant to my interests” 🤷‍♂️

Not a direct answer to your question but here’s what I’ve learned and am learning:

It all boils down to “finding the right balance between the costs of implementation, the value the implementation offers given the circumstances and constraint.” Essentially, the foundational guideline of engineering across all engineering principles.

Usually every decision brings about about a series of advantages/improvement but it’s important to remember that “one must lose in order to gain.”[1] That is, every improvement (value) comes at a price (cost). Unlike other principles of engineering (which are closer to bare maths), software engineering more closely resembles something intuition-based like art. That is what makes it difficult to see the values and costs and measure them. It takes lots of practice and introspective and extrospective (!) effort; doing things and potentially making mistakes and learning from them is as important as observing others do things and make mistakes.

In other words, it boils down to honing your intuition to “do the right thing, at the right time, the right way.”

PS: Please note that I used the word “right” and not “correct.”

[1] Dialectically speaking, every material good contains w/i itself its own seeds of destruction 😆

Effective method…so long as your kid doesn’t hate you 😂 in which case, IMHO, it should be a favourite aunt/uncle/teacher/… who introduces them to the topic while the parents try to stay quite on the topic as much as possible.