ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝

A geologist and archaeologist by training, a nerd by inclination - books, films, fossils, comics, rocks, games, folklore, and, generally, the rum and uncanny… Let’s have it!

Elsewhere:

  • Yrtree.me - it’s still early days for me in the Fediverse, so bear with me
  • 348 Posts
  • 1.2K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Default instances would go a long way, I know there’s a lot of hate for lemmy.world but defaulting to the biggest instance or a random one in the top 10 would help ease some of the early friction.

    I’d rather join-lemmy (and join-fediverse) were smarter.

    Have a series of questions (for join-fediverse add “what service do you want?”):

    • Where are you?

    • What languages do you speak?

    • Select your hobbies from the list below:

    And it then spits out 2 or 3 instances.

    It’s what I’d do if someone asked me directly for a recommendation and should be relatively easy to do.

    As we say with someone posting a link to db0 on r/piracy, if you just say to people “this is the instance for you” and it seems relevant then they make the jump. I’m tempted to go to the main subs for Canada, Australia, the UK, etc and just post a link to the relevant instance.








  • Lots of thought clearly already gone into it

    And that’s the key to the legislation. Small sites need only read the summary documents then run through the online tools, what it is designed to do, at least for us, is to make us think about our systems and processes, then tighten things up (we needed more contact email addresses) and more explicitly state what you are doing.

    The bulk of the legislation is aimed at the large social media firms to make sure they look after their users - TikTok is currently being sued by British parents because the algorithm seems to have promoted a dangerous challenge that killed their kids (the OSA gets a mention in some news articles about it).




  • I suppose a lot of it comes down to how nsfw is handled. If there are no means to access it on the home instance, then what you’re doing is probably A-OK.

    It was the decision of the original Admin but it has made life easier (as in the CSAM spam attacks - we don’t need to figure out if it’s real or not, if it’s porn, it’s gone) and will make complying with the OSA simpler. I suspect there’s a way to navigate those waters but I am focused on our own needs to get this boxed off and then I’ll have a ponder on that topic. We’ve been discussing this with DGR for a while now and that is the main hurdle we’ve struggled with.

    The only problem I can see would be other federated instances that may feed poorly filtered or flat out unfiltered/untagged nsfw into yours.

    It’s like porn spam - it gets flagged up quickly and dealt with. One bonus of federation is that if it is removed from the home instance it is gone for us too, so it often gets sorted before we even realise there’s a problem.

    I imagine that’s going to be a decent chunk of the risk assessment, given that federation with others is the main point of lemmy as a whole.

    The OSA document we’ll post is 50% risk assessment, 50% mitigation - the law accepts that, in spite of your best efforts, shit happens, the more important thing is what processes and systems are in place to deal with it quickly and efficiently when it does.




  • Do you yet what compliance is going to look like for feddit?

    Behind what we are currently doing (NSFW filter on, Lemmy’s own systems, ways to contact Admins directly and AutoMod), so far I think we need:

    • More contact email addresses
    • A contact form
    • A policy document on abuse
    • A policy documents outlining the risk assessment and mitigations

    The law isn’t designed to be onerous for small website owners (and that is pretty much anyone whose membership isn’t in the upper 100s of thousands) and all of the above should exceed the requirements. If not, then it demonstrates we’ve done our homework and improved our processes and documentation (which it seems is the laws intent - it forces you to think about the issues and what you can do about it, when you may have been muddling on through until now), so we are opening a dialogue with The Powers That Be and if there is room for improvement they will let us know, rather than having to get threatening.

    If you see a significant enough level of migration, would you bite the bullet and just shut up shop for the UK anyway? What’s the point in investing in compliance methods if the core userbase decides to move away?

    I really don’t see it coming to that. It should make no difference to the users of the site. It’s a bit of a time sink for Admins at the moment but, once it is done, it should, hopefully, only require the odd tweak at most.