This is @[email protected] and @[email protected] but PieFed told me not to use my admin account for general browsing so here I am following instructions.

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  • 15 Comments
Joined 15 days ago
Cake day: September 2nd, 2026
  • Hal@piefed.nztoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why isn't it easy to transfer your lemmy account to a new instance?English
    3·
    2 days ago

    For 1, there’s no central authentication. Accounts prove themselves to other instances with a private/public key pair. I guess you could have some system where the old and new instance connect then transfer that private key so the new instance could prove it’s really you nkt someone impersonating you.

    For 2, we don’t even backfill communities when they sync to an instance for the first time because of the volume. For a while, Lemmy instances would freeze (for everyone) when a user with a lot of content deleted their account, but if you wanted to achieve this I’m sure you could do some slow, async, progressive loading of the content that might happen over days, so volume alone wouldn’t make this impossible. It would also have the potential for large storage requirements or a mismatch between what is allowed on different instances, e.g. you could create an instance, load it up with spam posts, then import it to a major instance to get thousands of views before they could ban you. So here you’d need some protection. Admin review from the new instance? Only allow import from trusted instances? What if someone faked dates or other metadata in their posts before the transfer?

    1. On Lemmy, a community owns the content. So an upvote or comment will get sent to the community’s instance then that instance will federate it to other instances. If one instance transfers a user, there needs to be a way for the owners of the user’s content to federate that update. For something like Mastodon people directly follow a user so their instance is the owner, but for Lemmy with communities you need the user to tell the community about the change then that community would need to trigger the update to it’s own content. You’d have hundreds of communities each triggering updates to hundreds of instances. I see a big risk here of a user being in two states, e.g. one community federated updates ok but another didn’t, and now some instance has two records of the same user. I’m sure smarter people could work out some redundancy here.

    I honestly do think this sounds achievable but like others have said, it’s a lot of work with a lot of edge cases to cater for. So it’s likely not a high priority.

  • Hal@piefed.nztoFediverse@lemmy.world•Making Social Media SocialEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    Unfortunately Lemmy has one major problem when it comes to banning spam bots. Only the instance that a user belongs to can ban the user in a way that federates to other instances. This means if that particular instance doesn’t quickly ban the user, then hundreds of other instances need to do it manually. Currently, a pretty significant percentage of spammers get banned individually by many instances.

    If we had 100x as many users and 100x as many instances, we would have 100x as many bot accounts for every instance to ban.

    The solution is probably something like shared ban lists or ban mirroring (setting an instance up to ban every user that some trusted instance bans). But right now it’s just people clicking, and it’s not scalable.

  • Hal@piefed.nztoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Which Lemmy/Piefed instances have taken a stand against AI training on users’ posts?English
    4·
    7 days ago

    Bots scraping the website cause high levels of server load because compiling a page is an intensive activity, and so instance admins are taking active steps to stop this in order to stop all the scrapers bringing down the server.

    But if they actually wanted Lemmy content (as opposed to the bots scraping everything on the internet they can find, and happening across Lemmy) then they can just start an instance and have other instances send them the content via normal federation. It would be almost impossible to tell this from a normal instance, and would be more efficient for everyone involved.

  • Hal@piefed.nztoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Just found a bunch of old family photo's on a CDR. Is there anyway I can put them to something that will not get messed up? More info insideEnglish
    1·
    8 days ago

    I decided to cancel OneDrive and run my own cloud storage, and I have almost 1TB of family photos and videos going back generations. I was utterly terrified that I’d do something and lose them.

    What I did was just go overboard on backups. I back up to a backup drive on the server (which is in my house). I use borg backup for incremental backups so I can go back to previous versions if needed. I have daily backups for 2 weeks then monthly which go back years so I can go back to any of these times if needed.

    Next I sync that borg repository to Backblaze using rclone. So now if my house burns down I don’t lose everything. Thats 3 copies (original + backup + cloud) on two mediums (hdd + object storage), with one offsite (cloud), so that’s the 3 2 1 backup strategy.

    Ok but what happens if I accidentally delete it all. It’s within my capability. So I wanted to have an air gapped disk. But if someone finds it decades later, any ssd, hdd, or cd is gonna be degraded. So I burnt everything to M-Disc, which should last 100+ years.

    What if the house burns down and I’m inside it, who is going to know how to decrypt a borg repository, or even how to download it from Backblaze? So I burned two copies of everything to M-Disc, all unencrypted, and store one copy at my mother’s house.

    And for good measure, I also printed 100 photos from each year and put them in a big black storage container, so if none of that works there’s still a chance.

    Every year I print another 100 photos and burn another M-Disc with changes (using rsync to identify the changes).

    I’m very paranoid about losing these photos, because I have done it before.