I hope those malicious actors are not keeping track of us!
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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They are with FISC court orders.
A bit more powerful than a Pub/Sub or RSS feed.
Trust built up over a long time through well moderated communities is my bet.
But with no karma system, and not even any popular extensions for keeping track of users, how do you keep track of "trust built up over a long time"? That's literally what karma was for, and the Lemmy devs removed that extremely valuable feature.
I meant more like trust in communities and admins. If you can trust that the admins and moderators will do their task well, you shouldn't have to worry about keeping track of these users yourself.
Karma in the style of reddit is not and has never been a great proxy for whether a user is "good" or "bad". It mostly just says something about how active a user is and for how long they have been active, and how much they agree with the hivemind. Agreeing with the hivemind is not necessarily the criteria you want, as that just leads to more echo chamber situations.
It’s best to look out for their tactics rather than individuals. Nothing stops someone from making a new account once they get known to be a KF or /pol/ troll.
The voyger mobile app allows you to tag users and see how many times you've upvoted abd downvoted them. If you have an idea you can suggest it as a feature on github. Outside of that you can only really block and report if their behaviour breaks the rules.
At the moment its up to the community at the moment to weed out those kinds of people.
was thinking of something similar to this except for web users too. for example if a user is reported as someone with a malicious history and/or has affiliations with malicious people/sites, the instance admins/mods review the evidence of the reporters and if the evidence is sufficient, that user gets flagged and the flag federates across instances. maybe a red "!" next to the name that has a note when you hover the cursor over it or tap it to warn users to be careful around that person. idk a thing about programming though so I don't know how hard/easy this'd be to implement lol
It would be cool if people could subscribe to an auto updating blocklist group. So if one or x amount of person blocks it applies to the entire group.
I think PieFed gives reputation warning icons for entities it thinks are statistically bad actors.
Not sure I like this though. That kinda stuff can just as easily be used to enforce echo chambers and censorship.
I think its good because some users really want that feature. But i think on by default for every user could encourages users to run multiple burner style accounts which is a huge problem for moderation and doesnt solve the problem users try to solve from tagging.
Example you might have me tagged as a Nazi because you dont want to interact or be subtly influenced by my less blatant comments. However if I knew everyone did this then I'd run one account for the blatant stuff and one account for blending in.
Its why I'm kind of against platform banning users instead of having individual blocks. Its better to bad actors known and operating in the open than to have them hiding and avoiding moderation.
As Shaun puts it:
i very much want to be in a bubble with likeminded people. i think that would be swell
Sorry, Shaun who? 😅
You don't know Shaun? How come?
(I don't know either)
Maybe Shaun, the leftist skull on YouTube? I don't recognize the quote but it seems like something he'd say and based on Lemmy's politics I'd bet he's popular here.
statistically bad actors.
Downvote bots gonna love this one lol
And Admiral Patrick on the instance dubvee.org, but it is regional for the state of West Virginia in the USA (tho he might be willing to share his blocked list?).
Not sure how much you'd want to trust his list. During the Luigi incident many users were instance banned simply for supporting Luigi, and the bans stand to this day. His ban list is not just malicious users but people he disagrees with.
And instantly we arrive at the problem with these kinds of requests: how to exclude certain kinds of people, but only the right certain kinds of people, and preferably with no effort on our part?
I for one have yet to find a way.
they will probably need some kind of filter to allow things like luigi, unless its constantly spammed.
I'm using voyager app and I just know about this! ~~Is that a feature I should turn on in the setting? Because right now, I couldn't seem to find the option "tag" anyone.~~
Edit: Found it in the settings. Nice!
[+1] :3
Kiwi farms?
Kiwi Farms, is a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and real-life harassment. Kiwi Farms has been tied to the suicides of three people who were victims of harassment by the website.
From urban dictionary:
A website full of cynics who yearn for the approval of those around them, and anonymously harrass people online for not conforming to their community's beliefs, which they themselves have religiously adopted.
"Boy ol' gosh golly, I sure do love going onto Kiwi Farms and laughing at autists and liberals!"
The fediverse is somewhat inherently a low-trust environment. Centralized social media (including traditional web forums) has only one database of users, so its administrators are able to keep track of similarities (in geolocation, email addresses, style even of deleted posts, etc.). Here every instance has its own database of users; if you register on another instance, it will be very difficult for anyone to figure out you're the same person.
The fediverse is also still obscure enough that mostly it's still a relatively high-quality place and this has mostly not been a real problem. You should join an instance, and communities, that moderate to give you an enjoyable experience. What that means varies according to person; I don't mind the things you list very much, but am very glad I have not gotten any messages from fediverse chick Nicole in a while by now.
Mod logs aren‘t necessarily a good tool to keep track of bad actors either because you don‘t know the mods. I think someone would have to have a lot of entries from several communities for me to even raise an eyebrow. It‘s tough.
I think maintaining mirrors and archives are important. It would be preferable to work with site admins but no one technically needs permission to web scrape so long as you do it respectfully and without causing service interruptions.
Prob a comm in the line of !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works , but expanded beyond just Tankies/Genocide deniers. Somewhere for people to post collected documentation, screenshots, modlog entries etc. and collaboration
I fear that would rapidly decline into a shitshow as not everyone here is rational or educated in the subjects being discussed. I can easily see this being used abusively