I bet it can be a ‘temporary’ instance without a static ip or domain and spin it up every time.

This doesn’t work though. It has to be sitting, subscribed to get API calls when people do votes, otherwise it won’t be able to find out any of the voting information. You can cause Lemmy to dump the comments or posts (up to a point) from a selected actor, but you can’t do that for votes. You’re either subscribed when the votes happen and available to get a call, or else it’s gone for good.

Drop me a line sometime in case you wish to discuss docker and I can show you how I use it. My line of work is around Kubernetes and been working with containers for years.

I know a little bit about it. I actually made myself use podman for a deployment not that long ago and I just didn’t like it. I think mostly the issue is just that I have not been in a position where I really had to do anything with it, but if I do wind up in one I may take you up on it.

Can you elaborate? What type of control don’t you have when using docker?

Generally I like to muck around with the code for pretty much any service I am using / hosting. Just little tweaks to make things more amenable to how I like them. Telling docker/podman to do a source checkout and then recompile when I change something in the source in the container was beyond me and it didn’t really seem like it was set up with that kind of thing in mind, so I more or less abandoned it and went back to doing “from scratch” installations for any stuff I’m mucking around with.

Probably if I didn’t do that, I would prefer the simplicity / reproducibility and such that Docker gives, but that’s usually my priority over that.

Meaning I don’t expect my data to be private and the platform doesn’t push for stepping out of anonymity so for me it’s perfect.

Yeah, agreed. Like I say, I think it is fine as long as it’s clearly communicated to users that the expectation is that. I think without that clear communication, presenting a false sense of privacy, it’s wrong.

You can set it up as a “public” instance with closed registrations, and basically just use it as a self-host but have a lot more visibility and control. Or, you could probably play around with the nginx config and make it so that only the federation endpoints are accessible to the world and the actual web app is limited to just you. It will need to be “public” in some sense in order to be reachable to receive the content from other instances though.

I personally don’t use or like docker, partly just from inexperience with it and partly because I like to have more hands-on control over the deployment than I’m able to get with docker.

Yeah, no admin is going to give you access to their database. Even if it is supposedly read-only or something, you would be able to read private messages and other things you really shouldn’t be able to read. There is also a theory that things like who voted for what are “supposed to” be private even though they are not. I don’t subscribe to that theory but that’s the prevailing view among Lemmy people I think. You would have to set up your own full instance which requires a fair investment of time and knowledge at this stage however you are doing it.

You have to be running an instance of your own (either a self host or be an admin of a real host), sadly.

In my opinion the system design should not include this hard distinction between “the admins” who can read everyone’s private messages and decide what “their” users can and can’t read and say and see who voted how, and “the users” who can do none of those things and are allowed to even exist purely at the pleasure or displeasure of the admins. But that’s a deeper discussion for another time.

Done

I dislike the phrasing “data rape.”

Sounds good to me. And yes, the whole “I’m going to lie to your face and fuck with your network because at the end of the day what the fuck are you going to do about it? Nothing, that’s what” attitude, and its impact on the community, is the reason why I feel like this stuff is worth banning. It’s not that any single account ban is bulletproof or anything, but definitely just making it okay and mandating everyone pretend it isn’t happening, is 100% not the answer.

Just because I thought it was notably super-interesting. Here’s the most recent comment that got voter-fraud-ed by this person:

https://ponder.cat/comment/2910556

That one was upvoted from the redacted user’s alts on infosec.sub and slrpnk.net, and also one of the other accounts on infosec.pub that I think is an alt for them, and the original comment was posted by another account also hosted on infosec.pub.

And, I think I found a whole new alt account of theirs on infosec.pub, which gave an upvote sandwiched in between a couple of those alt account upvotes all within a few minutes of each other. With the fake upvotes, it’s voted at +7/-6. Without the fake upvotes, it would be voted at +3/-6.

Interesting-er and interesting-er. Like I say, there’s a certain type of subject matter that seems like it gets consistently fake-upvoted by this user, although they also fake-upvote just random innocuous comments of theirs for reasons I don’t really know.

Sounds good to me. They’ve got some other alts, I think, with different names. They claim that those are friends of their who just really like hopping on and upvoting their content right after they post it, but I’m skeptical. If you want, I can try to take some time to sort out a full list and send who I think might be those accounts.

To get rid of them all is obviously a Sisyphean task but thank you. Like I say, I think most of the reason it’s valuable to do is because of the cultural message, not because it will do much to prevent someone shifting to new accounts and doing it again. I do think the cultural thing is important. LMK if you want and I can look more into the actual accounts involved.

I think you have to. If you’re running an instance, it’s your responsibility that bullshit doesn’t fly off your instance and affect the rest of the network. That applies to spam, unrepentant disruption of communities, whatever it is.

I think it is impossible to really detect this kind of vote rigging if someone is trying to be stealthy about it, no matter how much database analysis you do. Here’s why I think it is a somewhat important thing anyway to get rid of it if someone’s being blatant about it: Part of making a good place to be involves aspects that aren’t technical. They are cultural. People don’t lie, people don’t deliberately try to cause damage or distortion. By banning someone who’s being overt about rigging votes or lying about it when they’re caught, you’re sending a message that really needs to be there if you’re going to be able to build a good foundation. By allowing it, you instantly engage people’s cynicism, and so why bother try to do anything.

I started work at a place that gave us single CRT monitors and expected us to do programming on them. I scoffed at the suggestion, ordered a Dell LCD monitor in the days when you had to mess around with screws and XF86Config to remount it vertically, and made for myself a 2-monitor setup with all the code on the vertical monitor on the side. I am not trying to brag when I say that I instantly became the alpha nerd of the office.

Woooomwmwmwmwmwmwmmmmm clear picture

*Triniton

I owned a computer for a while for which the standard startup procedure involved smacking it hard on the top to make sure everything was seated right.

Back then everything was made of metal, and it was an ugly white color, and we hit our computers if they weren’t doing what we wanted. We all knew what our ports and IRQs were. It was great days.

CRT, yes. I really hope that static electricity was the explanation honestly. I sort of always assumed that it was just tilting it forward jiggled something around back into place, something stupid like that, but they swore that was the only thing that worked. It would please me greatly to think that they were right and the dragging across carpet was actually a vital component that they had figured out.

In college, a friend of mine had a TV whose picture would mess up every so often, and the solution was to take it in the hallway and drag up and then back down the hall by the power cord. Then, when set up again, it would work again.

There was never an explanation, that I know of, for why. Presumably there was some simpler method that would have achieved the same result but no one was interested in that.

https://www.oglaf.com/slodging/

NSFW

Hippos will absolutely fuck you up, though.

https://en.m.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Main_Page looks like what you want.

There are lots of wikis for specific domains, what are you looking to write a guide for?

I want to ask about how strongly Russia’s economy is doing, and how they are rising and NATO is falling apart and the EU is going to all crumble and freeze in the dark with no fossil fuels while Russia stands strong, and how that all ties in with this whole theory, but I have lost interest.

I wish you luck with your geopolitical theories. Y’all are weird.