“Let Chaos storm, let cloud shapes swarm; I wait for form”
Still worth while to do so, the trick is you need to defederate problematic instances. Not hide them, fully defederate. That stops problematic instances and communties from affecting your userbase. There’s many great Lemmy servers and communties out there. Just because a few of them aren’t great doesn’t mean you should dismiss all of them.
You’d probably need to monitor the computer’s network for a long time to get a detection, also something important is that if you’re on a System with AMT disabled/not present, you won’t ever get any, since those IntelME versions come without any network stack whatsoever.
In fact that’s one of the primary reasons why I haven’t tried it yet, almost none of the Intel computers I own even have the Intel AMT component enabled in the IntelME firmware, meaning they just won’t do it, like ever. The only one I have which supports AMT is an old Laptop with a slow AF intel Centrino, it’s so slow that it struggles with XFCE alone and no other apps running, I don’t know if I could use this computer long enough to get any readings from it because it’s just too slow to do anything really.
If you want to try it out I’d suggest building a copy of IntelMEtool and testing your Intel Machines to see if they have AMT enabled or present before trying yourself.
The same way you would do it with a black box while optionally taking as many shortcuts as one is comfortable with by virtue of assuming having a better understanding of it’s been built?
You can audit IntelME a similar way, it’s just more annoying and tedious, it’s also been done before by people. Honestly I don’t bother much with the IntelME conspiracy theory much anymore (and yes I will call it a conspiracy theory, more on why later), I did used to be extremely interested in it about 2 years ago, I researched the topic heavily. I met people and colleagues who were also interested in it. However I found when I suggested ways to study or prove the claims made about it, like where it’s communicating to or how it interacts with the system or even just disassembling the rom I would get weird answers about it knowing when it’s being probed and that I wouldn’t consider entirely rational when describing a tiny embedded system like this. Then I came across the 34C3 video and basically I realized then and there that this is a conspiracy theory, as there is a whole great study done by these guys and everyone is ignoring it.
Then there’s the fact that many of the theories out there seem to resist investigation, and people seem to come up with more elaborate ways of it resisting. Example: I presented the idea of sniffing the Ethernet connection of the computer by cutting the cable in half and probing it with a debugger and they claimed that the chip would listen with the microphone and abort, or that IntelME would skew the data collected when loaded up on another computer.
The end result is that I bought a high end PC from System76 with the capability to disable IntelME largely for nothing, which would be fine if the Laptop wasn’t so problematic, like the fact that it gets insanely hot and chews through battery insanely fast (seriously Battery consumption is worse on this laptop than my Steam Deck). Also it chews through power like this even on the iGPU, but it was way worse on the nvidia GPU, like way way worse. I wish I had gotten something AMD based, They’re killing it when it comes to performance and efficiency, more than I can say for Toasty old Intel.
I think that a lot of the IntelME stuff is what people would typically call a conspiracy theory, not like a theory of a conspiracy, but rather where the conspiracy is largely invented for the purpose of being scared or angry, or for attention from others who get scared or angry. Obviously not all of it is, and there are people who do research it, but the videos about it that you usually see on YouTube, most of them are like this.
The thing is that intelME isn’t like a government conspiracy where there isn’t much if any tangible evidence for it, IntelME is physically installed on millions upon millions of Intel PCs around the world, so it’s very easy to test the myths and claims by sacrificing some of these Intel computers. The fact though that most of the people making claims seem to not want to do that, suggests that they don’t think it’s as big a problem as they say it is. There are few people who have tested it though, a notable example from 34C3 where they found that it’s actually much more boring. Honestly the idea that people say it cracks Wifi passwords, or exchanges data home with a server, all this stuff people claim can be easily tested, even analyzing the network packets from a PC to see if it actually phones home when it’s off (can do that by probing an Ethernet cable and capturing the signals externally. The reason I claim the IntelME stiff is a conspiracy is because most of the people making the claims resist investigation, the same way that Flat earth theories and Lizard people theories resist investigation. My example of probing the network cable? Yeah I proposed that to someone already and they claimed IntelME would know the Ethernet is being probed, when I inquired how I was given many nonsensical claims, from microphone listening to talking to IntelME on another computer skewing the results, can’t make this shit up.
So to summarize, a lot of the claims are unsubstantiated claims, which could be easily proven or disproven due to easy access to IntelME based systems, but isn’t because the people making the claims can’t be bothered, and to top it all off many of them simply make arguments to resist investigation of IntelME in the first place, just like classical bad-faith conspiracy theories, and actual investigations like the one shown as 34C3 are swept under the rug. I don’t think IntelME doesn’t have issues or that it isn’t a security risk, it is like any firmware, but the sensationalized claims made about it regularly online don’t hold water, and the people making them should be called out for perpetrating conspiracy theories without merit. I’d leave some links to them but I don’t know if that’s allowed here, could be considered harassment.
I think it’s just very messed up, ultimately it doesn’t work against the real nasty people Reddit claims to be going up against because those people have bot armies that monitor their astroturf accounts so they know when the shadowbans happen and dump the account to move on to the next ones. No this system disproportionately affects the people who aren’t expecting it and probably don’t even deserve it.
Also for braindead spammers it’s actually a terrible strategy because spammers’ purpose is both to annoy users and chew through your resources, even if they are shadowbanned and uploading multiple gigabytes of white noise they aren’t annoying people but they are chewing through bandwidth and CDN storage. IMO that’s not feasible long term, and wouldn’t even be initially feasible for most Fediverse services, hence why most basically just don’t do it.
Don’t forget about shadowbans that attempt to make it seem like you aren’t banned when your entire account is hidden without your knowledge.
Stopping viewing on a per-account basis doesn’t make sense to me, since people don’t need accounts to view any content in Lemmy, therefore it’s trivial to bypass by logging out or fetching the discussion information without logging in from a custom frontend. What would be better is simply stopping them from interracting, just like what happens with bans, they can still view but all interractions are simply dropped or disallowed.
You should report them as trolls in any case, most instances on Lemmy have rules against trolling in general, further violations beyond that just add to the initial violation of trolling.
Being able to support threading would be nice, a lot of clients don’t have that feature, spaces too would also be nice. Also the E2E encryption is a must since a lot of Matrix communication have it enabled by default.
It’s not nearly the same as following communities or groups, it’s just a collection of posts grouped by tags, as opposed to a space where people discuss or post about a more broad topic. Also Communities and groups typically invite more interaction than simply tagging posts by virtue of being a place people post as opposed to simply being a post tag category.
I should note that there are groups on Mastodon (Not really in Mastodon itself but federated Group actors from other services show up there) though they are less intuitive and thus are usually overlooked by most Mastodon users.
@[email protected] Hey do you think this would be a good idea, a bot to waste scammers’ time (possibly with AI)?
I very much agree. Instead of complaining and isolating themselves and their users, they could be helping improve the moderation tools which benefits all of us, but instead they choose to self isolate, which hurts their users while the biggest servers that they defederated forget they even existed.
Late Reply: This is going to sound harsh but it’s true. I wouldn’t miss it. If Beehaw disappeared tomorrow I probably wouldn’t even notice, and I’m sure that would be the case for many other people here. The problem is that because Beehaw has defederated so aggressively from the largest instances and shut its doors to new users, and people just moved on, or didn’t notice or care. I spent most of my first days on Lemmy.world and consequently didn’t see a majority of the content from Beehaw, but I did see many upset users who had to Migrate from Beehaw due to the defederations since most of the content and communities they wanted access to wasn’t available to them on Beehaw.
Since Beehaw didn’t (and still doesn’t) have community creation enabled it never really had niche communities like other instances did, it is rather forgettable because of that, what most people will remember it for though is the defederations and having to migrate accounts to not be cut off from the rest of the fediverse.
FYI There’s more than just one not allowing downvotes
These are all instances excl Beehaw that don’t allow downvotes (there might be some I might’ve missed):
Ubuntu, because snaps break shit and don’t work right a lot of the time, also they left people hanging with 32 bit support which isn’t great (for being a Legacy OS for weak computers it’s not a great look for them, or all the Linux distros that followed them).
There were a lot of problems with Fedora and CentOS, none of them as bad as Ubuntu though. Most were either instability or software availability due to lacking RPM versions of the software I needed.
Arch itself hasn’t given me many problems but it is ideologically problematic for a lot of reasons (mainly the elitism) and it is also a rolling release which isn’t great if you don’t like being a guinea pig and getting software before all the bugs have been ironed out.
It’s not actually unstable, more accurately it’s tested and verified as much as Debian stable, meaning it’s fine for desktop use but I wouldn’t use it for a server or critical system I plan on running 24/7 without interruption, both since it may have bugs that develop after long term use and gets more frequent updates which will be missed and render it out of date quickly if it’s running constantly.
Anyone seeing this might want to consider combat training and counter custody training while it’s easy, just in case this is the future we’re headed for. (Also Remember they’re not real people, they’re bureaucrats they’re the same as robots, don’t hold back.)
The first one might suck but can be solved by either working under the table or with underhanded tactics, not super easy but doable.
For the second one, it’s much easier, [email protected] can help you.
There’s quite a few instances like that that aren’t self-isolated prestigious hellholes. Here’s a list:
From what I can see the biggest things these instances have in common with Beehaw is that they support LGBTQ and they have downvotes disabled. So they’re not really that similar, closest one is blahaj.
I haven’t made any arguments in this thread, you are putting words in my mouth, and not really helping your credibility. All I said is that the person should defederate Lemmy instances and communities which go against the mission of their instance. Something that almost all instance operators would likely agree on.
Just for the record though, I don’t believe people should be kicked out of a project based on their nationality, that seems incredibly xenophobic. I don’t know where you got that idea that I said any of those things from.