Have you ever been a developer of a project that has a lot of public comment on it?

On the other hand: Many comments from people unfamiliar with the code base and the project organizers’ plans are unlikely to be useful to the people actually doing the work. Discussions that are low-signal/high-noise are likely to be simply ignored by the people actually working on the code.

Sure, for Lemmy instances who are Cloudflare customers. But I don’t think it can be integrated with the Lemmy code by default.

On the other hand, if the people who want those images can satisfy their urges using AI fakes, that could mean less spreading of images of actual abuse. It might even mean less abuse happening.

However, because they’re terrible people, I have to suspect that’s not the case.

Even without the issue of new AI-generated images, those hash-based scanning tools aren’t available to hobbyist projects like the typical Lemmy instance. If they were given to hobbyist projects, it would be really easy for an abuser to just tweak their image collection until it didn’t set off the filter.

An account is just a small database entry. It probably costs the server less than a post that appears on the front page.

My understanding is that ActivityPub is designed with the expectation that servers can look one another’s names up in DNS and initiate TCP connections to one another.

So even if all of your end-users are on your LAN, your instance still needs to have a public address that’s discoverable in DNS, etc.

You might be able to rig this up via tunneling, but you’d still need a public address on the other end of the tunnel.

The Walgreens drugstore got robbed. Was their competitor, CVS, behind it?

Search engines do indeed index Lemmy instances, just as with any other public web site.

For example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aprogramming.dev+humor

Neither the backend nor the UI appear to treat #this specially; it’s just a piece of text.

A line beginning with # (with a space) is treated as a headline:

Celery predator stalks stalks

Somehow the server has to be able to look up the user’s subscriptions so it knows what posts to show them.

That may not be possible with web technology.

Browsers send URLs to web servers. The web server has to have the URL the user wants in order to serve a response; and it has to know who the user is in order to check permissions (e.g. don’t accept a moderation action from a user who is not a moderator).

This inherently creates an opportunity for the web server to record any details about that exchange.

Technically? Sure, they can retain and read their web server logs; or even put additional logging into the server code they’re running.

If a user submits a comment and doesn’t see an immediate response from the server, they might submit the comment again. Right now there’s no automatic check for this sort of duplication.

If you’re not sure if your comment has been received, check your profile; if your home instance has accepted it, it should be there.

Here’s what this sounds like to me:

george@aol.com and george@hotmail.com do not reach the same person. This is a problem. When a user sends email to george, they expect to reach the one true George, not some kind of fake George.

It is not helpful to declare that a system is defective just because it doesn’t work in way that a new user initially guessed that it does. Their first guess was incorrect! That’s okay! It’s okay for new users to make mistakes and learn!

There’s no getting around that new users have to learn how to use the service. That takes time and experimentation. It also takes patience, both on the part of the new user and on the part of more experienced users.

Sure, there can be additional signposts and help. But it’s really unhelpful to just declare that the system is wrong and the new user’s first guess must be right.

To be fair, if you don’t conform with the laws in a liberal-democracy, you might eventually get killed too. Ideas like “property lines” and “don’t drive on the wrong side of the road” are ultimately backed up by force.

If you go around driving on the left side of the highway in a country where the law says to drive on the right, eventually someone’s gonna come stop you and you’re lucky if that is somehow peaceful.

But that’s a far cry from organizing a movement around “that ethnic group there, that sexual minority over there, and those miscegenators over there, must be exterminated for the purity of our nation”.

Specifically, any fascist group is a conspiracy to commit murder. As such, there is no “free speech” reason to tolerate fascist organizing.

Edited to add: Discussion of fascist views is a different matter. I specifically mean people using your stuff to organize fascist groups or activities. If they’re trying to rally people into a group that wants to murder Jews or LGBT+ or socialists or liberals, then they’re not just discussing views — they’re conspiring crimes, and you don’t have any good reason to support them under “free speech” principles. Even the libertarians object to “force and fraud”.

When using email, be aware that george@aol.com is the real George. All other Georges on all other email servers are fake.