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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I don’t think anyone is arguing against dual DNS servers. The distinction being made is that a second DNS server is not a fallback. Most newbies think “secondary” means it will only be used when the primary is unavailable. That’s not true. A client is just as likely to use a secondary DNS as a primary. If only one DNS uses pihole, then the secondary will serve ads because it’s just calling the upstream DNS resolver.

    Personally, I accomplished what OP is talking about with two rPis. First serves DCHP from 192.168.1.10 to .100, second serves .101 to .250. I send the two piholes as primary and secondary DNS. I also use Unbound as the upstream, but that is just personal preference.





  • I hope you are right about better mechanisms to detect and control Astroturfing. It is what killed Reddit for me, not the whole API mess.

    If you want a Reddit example, go look at the “Naked and Afraid” subreddit dedicated to the show. Almost all the activity is from accounts with the same semantic naming pattern and who have the same account pattern in terms of age and ratio of karma.

    When you look at what is being posted, it is obvious that Discovery/Max paid some shitty social-media marketing company to “increase engagement”. They will post for a thing, against a thing, opened ended questions, etc. then all the other fake accounts pile in and respond. Creating comment chains 8-12 deep with fake comments to try and keep you “engaged” with their content.

    The same thing will happen here. The Astroturfers don’t care about community standards, rules, “shame”, or accounts. They create and burn accounts by the hundreds of thousands. They also make money in this, so they will just continue to optimize for any criteria the fediverse uses to move content to “hot” visibility.

    I haven’t seen a platform yet that has a good way to combat this.


  • It’s already started. There was a technology post earlier that included an affiliate link to a big online retailer.

    It won’t be long before Disney astroturfs the entertainment communities and car companies astroturf the tech communities. There is no way to prevent it without requiring a level of privacy invasion that most people would not welcome.

    The fediverse is just as susceptible to this as every other platform. Now that Lemmy is counting users in the millions, the enshitifcation will begin. I just hope the communities figure out some novel way to mitigate it.


  • The official app is a horrible user experience, but the bigger issue is that most of the content is fake. Between commercial shills, political activists, social-media marketing groups hired to “increase engagement”, and various other bad actors, the site is no longer useful or differentiated. The only places that seem unaffected are smaller private subs.

    I don’t know how the fediverse will prevent the same thing happening. The bad actors are just going to follow the eyeballs. They don’t care which platform is used to host their actions. There was already an instance of a group of new kbin accounts being used to mass upvote topics to appear in the hot feed here.


  • One of my biggest concerns about Lemmy is the seeming inability to prevent astroturfing by various groups. I also wonder how it will survive when (not if) they receive GDPR fines, legal holds from law enforcement organizations, and a variety of other legal and regulatory topics that Lemmy (or at least the instance owner) is subject to even if the user base doesn’t believe that to be the case.

    Hopefully the donation model will allow enough funding to address the realities of running a popular service.


  • Good post. Any idea how Lemmy or the fediverse will prevent the systematic astroturfing that social media marketing, political activists, commercial shills, and others will engage in? They are just going to follow the users from Reddit to here and keep up their antics.

    When a lot of Reddit users stopped for the blackout, it became really eye opening how most of Reddit is just a wasteland of fake accounts posting, mass up/downvoting, and posting anything to keep you engaged on the site.

    I was hoping to see something in Lemmy that would prevent this, but I just don’t. So I expect the enshitification to happen here too unless something is done to prevent it.