Is there really any scenario where a normal user should NOT be rate limited on posts or comments to some degree? Say, no more than 3 posts per minute? No more than 10 replies?
But when anyone can run an instance, you can’t control it. Someone has an instance which allows them to make as many posts as they want, and then all that content is federated to connect servers
Really though? You can implement the same limits for federated posts, and just drop the ones exceeding the rate limit. Who knows, might be frustrating for normal users that genuinely exceed the rate limits, because their stuff won't be seen by everyone without any notice, but if they are sane it should be minimal.
The notice might still be able to be implemented though. idk how federation works exactly, but when a federated post is sent/retrieved, you can also exchange that it has been rejected. The local server of the user can then inform the user that their content has been rejected by other servers.
There are solutions for a lot of things, it just takes the time to think about & implement them, which is incredibly limited.
It’s an interesting problem to be sure. It feels like it should be possible for servers to automagically detect spam on incoming federated feeds and decline to accept spam posts.
Perhaps a case to be made for a federated minimum-config. If servers don't adhere to a minimum viable contract, say meeting requirements for rate-limiting, or not requiring 2fa, or other config-level things... They become defederated.
A way of enforcing adherence to an agreed upon minimum standard of behaviour, of sorts
This is why Lemmy needs to keep tweaking it's feed algorithm. I understand why many people rightly have a distaste of social media algorithm fuckery, but Lemmy doesn't have some of the same bad incentives that an ad driven site like Reddit or twitter might have. A better algorithm will help Lemmy grow and surface interesting posts organically.
The recent feed change to boost smaller communities in 0.19 is a good start, and not showing too many posts in a row from the same community will be another welcome change.
I can think of a couple. For events like the NFL or some expo where you want a bunch of different topic discussion threads all at the same time. But even then, it would very limited.
This is where I believe that other site did a decent job with their front page: they created filters that divided it into most popular, what's trending, and what's new. I like seeing posts from the variety of different communities, but I do not necessarily want to see every single post. Especially the ones from the same community, in succession. Having a way to only see the ones that are considered "popular" would be nice.
The problem here isn't that Lemmy doesn't have good enough ways to sort content; the problem is that it's still small and doesn't yet have enough content to sort.
The word algorithm has a bad reputation here, and there is a lot of abuse in over tuning it, but Reddit does do a better job showing me things I want while showing me bits from other communities. Even though there are 8 sorting algorithms here none of them quite satisfy my want. Scaled is a little closer but gives too many posts from the same community.
when you subscribe to community with different sizes, the bigger ones will dominate your front page. That's why I use "all" to get updates from populare communities, and "subscribe" for smaller communities, that only rarely reach all .