this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Some thoughts β
The original "Eternal September" (on Usenet) wasn't an influx of abusers. It was an influx of new users who didn't know how to do things properly yet.
Most of the new users were from the America Online (AOL) private service, and known as "AOLers". (As it happens, I joined Usenet around the same time, but from a local dial-up Unix BBS in the Washington DC area.)
The AOLers didn't know which aspects of the service as they saw it were due to the AOL custom client software, which were due to the AOL local server, which were due to the newsgroup (forum) they were looking at, and which were due to the global Usenet consensus. So when they had a problem, they didn't know where to address that problem. They complained on public newsgroups about UI issues with their local client, because they didn't know what was what.
And the existing users didn't have the time or capacity to help them. The AOLers were added to Usenet en-masse without preparation. Nobody had signed up to help them. The AOLers were accustomed to AOL chat rooms that had staff helpers and moderators; most of Usenet did not have any β just regularly-posted FAQ documents, which the AOLers did not know to look for, and grouchy users who angrily told them to read the goddamn FAQ before posting.
Another consequence of the influx of new folks was that Usenet suddenly just had a lot more people. This made it a tasty target for commercial spammers and other abusers; which led to the eventual spampocalypse and a lot of people abandoning Usenet for web forums or other services.
It wasn't long into Eternal September that the hardcore abusers showed up, though. That, I think, is the harder problem to deal with.
"Good" Usenet servers did not reliably disconnect themselves from the servers that were accepting and forwarding spam. It was not generally acknowledged that a good server needs to block bad servers: the free-speech ideal was assumed to mean "accept anything from anyone; let the client decide what to filter out" β which meant that new users who had not written any filters necessarily saw all the spam.
And because nothing was secured by strong encryption, forgery was rampant; with a little cleverness, anyone could pretend to be anyone from any server.
There were many, many efforts to fix the spam problem. Unfortunately, as things turned out, it wasn't enough. Eventually folks noticed that the NNTP facility offered by their ISPs was a great means for sharing pirated porn ....
this is worthy of a BestOf, do we have a BestOf?
The fediverse is your oyster!
We do now. https://lemmy.world/c/bestof
Agreed on all points! It turns out Lemmy has a mechanism for federating block lists. What will be interesting is when instances disagree about bans. If you get banned from an instance because - hypothetically - you disagree with the actions of one government or another, it's not obvious to me that other instances should repeat the ban.
Will we end up with islands of trust?
It's a damn necessity if you want to avoid a situation like Mastodon had with Gab joining the fediverse.
Imagine the absolute shitshow if a white-supremacist Reddit clone like Poal suddenly integrated their site with Lemmy...
I'm somewhere between libertarian and progressive, I vote for mainstream Democrats, and I'm not super thrilled with the tankie situation 'round these parts. When I get around to running one of these things, you better bet I'm not peering with the Klan.
I'm pretty far from Marxist myself, but I gotta say, I can't see a system like Lemmy coming up at this point in the lifecycle of the internet except through that kind of ideology. I'll gladly verbally bitch-slap a tankie for their pro-Putler bs, but the fact that an alt-right instance can (and probably does) exist is proof that true freedom of speech can exist only on a free and open platform like Lemmy. Fuck whatever Elon thought it was.
So much for the tolerant leβ
Hopefully you've got the Paradox of Tolerance on hand, because you'll end up quoting it a lot with every 'free speech!' person who shows up angry that you banned someone for throwing slurs around.
Yes, as we always do, digital systems should represent the real world, not be a distortion of it. Protocols are meant to standardize communication but the rights to re-distribution have never been guaranteed . Now many understand why this may not even be feasible in a real way.
There will never be just "one zone" and there shouldn't be, however control over your interaction with these zones should be up to you not brokered by a proxy. To a degree we do this out of necessity though IMO the larger goal would be to give the user the ultimate option even if deployed infra is helping make it happen.
It's OK for online systems to represent a projection of the real world. Not every feature of the real world needs to be represented in every online system.
It's OK for the furries to have their server where everyone pretends to be tigers and dragons.
its also ok for them to go to private residences and dress the part, im usually speaking of data, trust and execution realms. These need to represent the real world since things like giving up your ownership of your data and systems should not be a requirement to use a novel app. This is not how the internet was intended to operate and in the days of 6ghz silicon and ultrafast dram the cryptographic overhead of doing things in a way where you own your digital domain in the same way you might own a house is very real.
Where you want the technology to not represent the real world is in its abilities to scale, and that's what's really crazy where were are with technology today individuals can be companies and small teams are international orgs. This is not just a concept for entrepreneurs but a concept for anyone who wants to take more control over thier presence.
It's still okay for people who don't dress the part to pretend to be tigers and dragons online.
thats not what i mean either, just like in the real world you can wear masks and costumes or not. you can even wear masks that arent obvious simply pretending to be entirely different people. what else are you looking for, hit me with it.
The same Elder Internet that spawned Usenet also spawned furries, which seem to have become a standard test case for "so just how tolerant is your community?"
i mean as far as they go, strange to me and mostly harmless. I'm running a SFW instance, no fukkin clue what the line there would be (halp is welcome lol), was not a huge thing in the forums I ran back in the 00's. Overall im not queazy but im sure there will be drama, these days I expect drama over everything.
this is also a reason I run topical subs rather than just having OT, general or shitpost subs. Ill have an OT channel usually but if its drama becomes too much a distraction its well enough to just shut it down.
for the more personal and off-topic style subs where people are more "hair-down"....fireworks im sure.
Oh hey, you've actually got your own instance? Cool! I should do that too.
its not hard, ansible playbook and overall not hard on the machine.
Agreed on all points! It turns out Lemmy has a mechanism for federating block lists. What will be interesting is when instances disagree about bans. If you get banned from an instance because - hypothetically - you disagree with the actions of one government or another, it's not obvious to me that other instances should repeat the ban.
Will we end up with islands of trust?
Islands of trust, in an archipelago of less-trust, in a sea of no-trust, is probably pretty okay.
Real islands have coast guards and customs offices.
If Usenet newsgroups had come with default killfiles β which users could choose to override β the whole thing might have turned out differently.
So if you get banned by lemmy.ml for "Orientalism", you get a fediverse-wide ban? That doesn't sound like a better system than reddit, that sounds like a worse system! At least reddit mods could only kick you out of their own subreddit, not the whole site.
Well that's what I mean by "islands of trust". If an instance has a habit of banning people for dubious reasons, other instances would have to just ignore their bans, and that makes it dicey to federate with them at all. It'll be interesting to see how it shakes out over the next few weeks.
Have you checked the link? We aren't talking about racism here...
I've been on reddit long enough that I remember the mantra...
Do not talk about Reddit on other sites
Do not link to Reddit from other sites
They understood the concept of "Eternal September" and wanted to hold it off for as long as possible.
I'm not sure that represents a good lesson from the original Eternal September.
One might hope for an echo of Lovecraft:
Do not call up newbies that you cannot calm down.
And also:
Do not permit automated posting that exceeds your capacity for automated filtration.
in their house at R'ddit, dead C'hatb'ots wait dreaming
It kinda worked for a very long time. Like a good 8-10 years. Sure, there was a slow decline but reddit was still pretty good up until new reddit was introduced.
I remember being embarrassed to discuss reddit irl in a way that I wasn't embarrassed to discuss Facebook, for example. Reddit was the dirty little secret.
If anyone is curious about the history like I was, the Wikipedia article is quite well done:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September#:~:text=Eternal%20September%20or%20the%20September,access%20to%20many%20new%20users.
I've just gotta know was that local dial up in DC Digex?
I worked with Tale@UUNET during the Eternal September, providing NNTP support to our customers. God that was hell.
CapAccess.
That's a name I haven't seen in a long time...
(I'm also from the days of bang paths)
Posted to [/c/bestof]!(https://lemmy.world/post/89698)
Posted to /c/bestof!