It’s not meant to be a messenger, it’s not meant for privacy. Everything being public and transparent is part of the core design of the Fediverse. The idea of private groups/posts on the Fediverse seems counterintuitive to me.

Just want to counter this: Privacy is in fact a part of ActivityPub. Stuff is only meant to be public if it is sent to the Public collection, otherwise it should only be delivered to the intended recipients, much like email. This is part of the core protocol, not any extension.

If you are hosting a Lemmy instance, I suggest requiring new accounts to provide an email address and pass a captcha.

The captchas are ridiculously ineffective and anyone can get dummy emails. Registration applications is the only way to go.

Sometimes t’s difficult on an individual post level unless there are telltale signs. Typically have to look for patterns in different posts by the same account and account for writing styles.

The problem is that this is only going to get harder. First of all, AI is going to get better and be able to produce more natural sounding stuff.

But also, people will inevitably get affected by AI as well and people will drift towards sounding more like AI too. So both AI and humans will converge on each other and they’ll likely be impossible to tell apart in general in not too many years.

I’m not sure how we solve this tbh.

I wouldn’t consider it rude in the Danish communities we have in Feddit.dk, but that’s also cause basically all danes are fluent in English, so it shouldn’t be an issue.

Thanks anyway. Personally I haven’t been impressed either by the stability and performance of Lemmy. It is what it is I guess.

Since email is no less secure than snail mail

I would disagree with that. The attack surface on snail mail is much, much smaller (only whoever can get in physical contact with my mail) and any attack scales incredibly badly. It is also often hard to read snail mail without making it obvious that it has been tampered with (i.e. opening the envelope).

Meanwhile the attack surface of email is huge (basically the entire internet), any attack can scale wildly and it is impossible to tell if anyone else read an email.

By and large, physical stuff is much more secure than digital stuff, just less convenient.

It rather abruptly stops at a few thousand users and after that it becomes much harder and more expensive to scale further.

As a fellow Lemmy admin of a smaller instance, do you have any advice? Any resources that might be worth checking out?

I think every government should be providing email service the same way they provide physical mail service

The problem with that is that email is not really secure enough for sensitive stuff like your bank account statements or your health/medicine journals from your doctor.

That is why in Denmark we don’t have the government provide actual email, but there is rather a digital mailing system where you authenticate with your digital ID and can receive secured mail from banks, municipalities, health authorities, tax authorities and others.

Theoretically this shouldn’t be a problem with proper canonicalization but I don’t know if it is done well enough or if it is bad for the SEO ranking regardless.

Would be cool if they also participated on Lemmy instances sometimes, it is written in Rust after all :)

Hmm I guess some people might like this but I’d be a bit afraid of mixing different communities just because the same link is posted in them. Different communities might have different rules and different expectations for participation and such. This kind of mixes the different communities together.

Like imagine someone posts a link to an article to !nyheder@feddit.dk (Feddit.dk news community), which is already posted in !world@lemmy.world. If I understand correctly, I’d then see comments from both communities on the same page? But the comments on Feddit.dk will be in Danish and will probably largely be about how the news story affects Denmark, while the comments on lemmy.world will be in English and from a more international perspective. But muddling these things together takes away the “identity” of the community and suddenly you’ll be seeing stuff you maybe won’t want to see (i.e. danish comments for instance if you are not danish).

I think there at least should be a user preference to disable this, and an option for moderators to opt out of this, to avoid the above situation.