this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023

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Steering Discourse and the Futility of Local Blocking (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I wanted to provide a brief analysis of the top comments on blahaj lemmy and compared to lemmy world (who defederated from hexbear preemptively). The red comments favored federation and the blue ones favored defederation.

Initially I was browsing Blahaj Lemmy and couldn't believe how many top comments favored federation.

When I started browsing from Lemmy World (who preemptively defederated) the top comments were way more favorable to defederation. On the top comment, it looks like 50 upvotes (more than half) came from hexbear users.

Whether intentional or not, this is brigading. I'm happy that they're defederated. I really don't think that individual/local blocking is good enough since this has the ability to steer the direction of a lot of discourse, and I'd just not see it, but it would affect our instance the same. The effects of brigading still happen. I'd still see the same number of upvotes that would imply sentiment different to the actual users of the instance.

Also, is there any proper way to see where upvotes come from? I feel like this would be a good tool to vet botting, trolling and brigading. Also instance only communities (though I'm on lemmy.ca rn lmao) would be good.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Something I saw Ada mention, that I personally appreciate, is that we were cutting hexbear more slack than they probably deserved because they're another trans friendly instance. If a few bad actors can get you to defederate, that's a very quick way to isolate trans people from the rest of the fediverse. I agree that hexbear should be defederated, but I really think Ada's plan of giving things time to cool down before putting it up to a community vote was the best way of handling it.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

Ada was handling everything really well. But yeah, Hexbear used to be Chapo, they had to make the migration to Lemmy because they were really bad about accidentally brigading shit and got banned from Reddit for it. Ada (and also me) gave them a bigger pass than they deserve instance wide.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There's something I'm curious about here: Blahaj has downvotes disabled while .world does not. While I don't exactly have the best idea how federation works in this case, downvotes from .world users would likely be counted in your comparison (and .world being the largest instance I assume a fair few people would've stumbled across that thread and went voting), I assume that must have some sort of an effect.

I wonder if the view from another instance has both preemptively defederated from Hexbear and has downvotes disabled (Beehaw, maybe?) would look any different.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah I did look from my beehaw account and it's still like the lemmy.world view. From lemm.ee (not defed) it looks like the blahaj view.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Alsoo afaict the down votes are only disabled visually, the api still works so you can downvote if browsing e.g. from a third party client

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Even then, they're not taken in to account with the ranking algorithms

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sometimes I’ve accidentally not swiped far enough while using Voyager, and it downvotes instead of going back. I’ve always got an error about the downvote not registering and assumed it was because it’s disabled on the instance.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Same on Memmy. I’m assuming both just haven’t coded for the button itself to be hidden based on your signed in instance.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The real solution is local-only communities, although they are also free to join this instance as there are no rules about political beliefs.

I’d kind of prefer if we could stop talking about them at some point soon. It seems to be unfortunately the most excitement that’s ever happened here and that seems bad.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Local-only communities would be a great addition to lemmy

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think this is the proper way to do this analysis. I believe the lemmy.world vote counts should be the same as blahaj.zone. It will still include the votes from hexbear. The only difference would be that lemmy.world's view will include the down votes from lemmy.world itself. Those won't federate over to blahaj.zone since down voting is disabled on the instance.

It should be possible to do your analysis though. It will take getting a copy of the vote history for the comments on the post. Every admin of an instance that federates with blahaj.zone has a copy of that. Then you will have to run some queries on the database to filter votes by the instance they originate from.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's definitely not "proper" lol. I'm pretty sure it doesn't count the votes though. I could be wrong in which case why was the difference so large. It's still true when viewing from Beehaw, which has downvotes disabled.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Now that I've looked at lemmy.world, beehaw and lemm.ee myself, you might be closer to right than I initially thought. The amount of comments in the first thread on the blocking instances, lemmy.world and beehaw, is much less than the federated instances, blahaj.zone and lemme.ee. The vote amounts on the blocking instances agree with each other and the amounts on the federated instances agree with each other.

I think that's sufficient evidence to conclude something is up. I'm going to suspect lemmy.world and beehaw filtered out hexbear comments and votes when they federated the post. This would suggest brigading from hexbear users. But I would need to view the vote database to be sure.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

A server that defederates does not receive any updates from the other one, including upvotes and comments.

I think for it to be brigading would require a planned response, people organically reading and responding to comments is not brigading, even if the people from the same instance happen to think the same way (not surprisingly, in this case).

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think for it to be brigading would require a planned response

It wasn't coordinated as such, but they did link to our post in their dunking/call out community, and that post hit their front page. That was the source of a huge amount of traffic from Hexbear

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

That original post definitely ended up bridgaded, I just don’t think their votes in your defederation post was the same thing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

From my understanding of how federation and communities work is that the instance hosting a given community receives the postal, comments and votes for that community from other instances and then sends the combined data out to other instances that requests that data. Users from instances that aren't federated could still interact if they both used a community on a third party instance they were both federated with. But I could be wrong about all that.

And your right. Brigading is probably too strong of a word outside of evidence of coordinating action.