tal

https://old.reddit.com/r/place/comments/64zlnw/an_easy_guide_for_r_place_alternatives/

People have made a bunch of alternatives.

https://pixelcanvas.io/ looks like the most-practical to me, but some people may want the canvas constrained.

IRC has had a history of people trying to take down servers from time to time.

I’d guess a random person who got banned from a lemmy.world community or the like.

I’d have no problem with this if it meant their trolls stay the fuck off our Internet and leave us alone

One imagines that it might have some negative effects on people in Russia, not all of whom are trolls.

It may also have secondary effects on people outside Russia if the leadership wants to do something that people outside Russia don’t much like, but where public opinion in Russia is a constraint on them. If Russia builds a system that is aimed at constraining the public’s view of the world, then presumably the views of the public will shift towards whatever the people who are presently running the government in Russia prefer.

Votes are visible to the world, unlike with Reddit, so that’ll be vulnerable to data analysis on behavior.

I’m not really enthusiastic about email filters either, from a privacy standpoint. Plenty of companies that go harvest email addresses to link identities to activity.

If the CAPTCHA can’t handle it, then it ain’t doing its job.

I suspect that there’s going to need to be some analysis software that can run on the kbin and lemmy server logs looking for suspicious stuff.

Say, for instance, a ton of accounts come from one IP. That’s not a guarantee that they’re malicious – like, could be some institution that NATs connections or something. But it’s probably worth at least looking at, and if someone signed up 50 accounts from a single IP, that’s probably at least worth red-flagging to see if they’re actually acting like a normal account. Especially if the email provider is identical (i.e. they’re all from one domain).

Might also want to have some kind of clearinghouse for sharing information among instance admins about abuse cases.

One other point:

I would recommend pre-emptively banning as many bot accounts as possible,

A bot is not intrinsically a bad thing. For example, I was suggesting yesterday that it would be neat if there was a bot running that posted equivalent nitter.net links in response to comments providing twitter.com links, for people who want to use those. There were a number of legitimately-helpful bots that ran on Reddit – I personally got a kick out of the haiku bot, that mentioned to a user when their comment was a haiku – and legitimately-helpful bots that run on IRC.

Though perhaps it would be a good idea to either adopt a convention ("bots must end in “Bot”) or have some other way for bots to disclose that they are bots and provide contact information for a human, in case they malfunction and start causing problems.

But if someone is signing up hordes of them, then, yeah, that’s probably not a good actor. Shouldn’t need a ton of accounts for any legit reason.

If they’re advertising a guaranteed rate, sure – and there are contracts that exist where one does buy guaranteed rates (usually over some period of time, though). Some businesses may buy that. But if you look at a typical consumer ISP, they usually aren’t selling that. They’ll have something saying that the speed isn’t guaranteed, or “Internet speeds up to” or something along those lines.

Lemme grab Comcast, for an example.

googles

https://www.xfinity.com/learn/deals/internet#Pricing&otherinfo

Internet: Actual speeds vary and are not guaranteed.

The ISP I use (small, most people won’t be using it) says “Up to X speed” next to each price on their pricing page.

Like, consumer ISPs are not going to generally sell guaranteed-rate service, and most customers aren’t going to want to pay for what that would run. That’s not just a function of some users using a lot more than others, but because they’re also overselling the infrastructure. They maintain infrastructure sufficient to handle load if customers are only using a portion of that maximum – that is, if every one of their customers decided to simultaneously saturate their line, even if those customers aren’t particularly heavy users normally, they’d simply overwhelm what infrastructure is there.

Now, that being said, I do think that it might be legitimate to ask ISPs to disclose overselling ratio (or maybe there’s some kind of better metric, like how percent often their internal infrastructure to an average customer is above N% utilization). Or to explicitly disclose soft caps or something. Those might be useful numbers in helping a customer compare ISPs. But they aren’t presently selling and won’t be providing guaranteed sustained rates – that’s just the reality of what kind of Internet service that can be provided at what consumer prices are.

The infrastructure over which that data travels isn’t free. If you have a resource and it has any kind of scarcity, you want to tie consumption to the cost of producing more of it.

You can reduce the transaction cost – reduce hassle for users using Internet service – by not having a cap for them to worry about, but then you decouple the costs of consumption.

Soft caps, like throttling, are one way to help reduce transaction costs while still having some connection between consumption and price.

But point is, if one user is using a lot more of the infrastructure than any other is, you probably want to have that reflected in some way, else you’re dumping Heavy User’s costs on Light User.