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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • For what? For being too edgy for your tastes in an online forum? Because they moderate an instance differently than you want? In an ecosystem where people can block and defederate instances with software THEY built?

    This is clownish. They’re weird tankies who also write software they give away for free. They don’t build blocklists to secretly shape the Lemmy Fediverse or even force you to hear their opinions. They have nearly zero political impact on the world at large but quite a lot of impact on federated software, but apparently annoying you through inaction is your red line.



  • My experience of trolls getting bored was from Reddit. It’s so easy to ban them and filter out fresh accounts that practically no equation of troll vs. moderator effort would ever be anything but a waste for the troll. There was one guy who set calendar reminders to flame us in modmail every 90 days or whatever when the longest mute expired and it was just amusing. He set up all this infrastructure and typed out a big flame message and we just hit a single button.

    Only truly automated trolling would be meaningful, and that requires a home instance that doesn’t put in restrictions or hurdles in account creation. Which will quickly become obvious as an attack vector and then defederated. And federation of new instances can be restricted so they don’t get to just unleash hell. I’d be more worried about actual DDOSes than a troll storm.

    I’m sure there are fake accounts flying under the radar here now, and they’re a big problem on Reddit, but trolling is easy to manage.


  • In my experience most trolls just do low effort trolling, so simple interventions can quash a lot. While some people do get so into social media they make multiple alts for ban evasion, it’s much easier for mods to ban an account than for the troll to make it so after a few cycles they’ll just get tired of it.

    And if there’s an instance so open that people can automate account creation so that trolling is just as easy it’ll probably get defederated.