this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
37 points (78.5% liked)

Selfhosted

49979 readers
238 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hey everyone, just wanted to give a quick update.

After opening things up more on Plebbit/Seedit, we got hit pretty hard with spam and some NSFW content. It got out of hand fast and honestly, its worse than we expected.

To stop that from messing everything up, we’re thinking about adding optional email or SMS verification when people sign up.

This isn’t something we wanted to do at first, but it seems necessary to protect the space and avoid getting buried in garbage.

we’re still fully open source, and still want this to feel like a community. If you’ve got other ideas or feedback, feel free to share.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

bootstrap

Sure, so bake in a set of default "mods" whose influence goes away as people interact with the moderator system. Start with a CSAM bot, for example (fairly common on Reddit, so there's plenty of prior art here), and allow users to manually opt-in to make those moderators permanent.

pure web of trust

I don't think anyone wants a pure web of trust, since that relies on absolute trust of peers, and in a system like a message board, you won't have that trust.

Instead, build it with transitive trust, weighting peers based on how much you align with them, and trust those they trust as bit less, and so on.

easily gameable

Maybe? That really depends on how you design it. If you require a lot of samples before trusting someone (e.g. samples where you align on votes), the bots would need to be pretty long-lived to build clout. And at some point, someone is bound to notice bot-like behaviour and report it, which would impact how much it impacts visible content.

DDOS

That can happen with any P2P system, yet it's not that common of a problebut

it probably would have a UX that’s very different from reddit

I don't see why it would. All you need is:

  • agree/disagree - by default, would have little impact on moderation
  • relevance up/down (this is your agree/disagree metric)
  • report for rules violation (users could tune how much they care about different report categories)
  • star/favorite - dramatically increases your trust of that user

Reddit/lemmy has everything but a distinction between agree/disagree and relevant/irrelevant. People tend to use votes as agree/disagree regardless, so having a distinction could lead to better moderation.

You'd need to tweak the weights, but the core algorithm doesn't need to be super complex, just keep track of the N most aligned users and some number of "runners up" so you have a pool to swap the top group with when you start aligning more with someone else. Keep all of that local and drop posts/comments that don't meet some threshold.

It's way more complex than centralized moderation and will need lots of iteration to tune properly, but I think it can work reasonably well at scale since everything is local.