Theres no LLM involved. This version of the post doesnt have the tldr to clarify some things so ill just repost my comment here

• Were not sending data to an LLM but the method is hidden so bad actors cant bypass it (you can disagree on that but the main issue is bots that are able to check blacklisted content and then just edit messages slightly to bypass it)
• The things that are checked are public (posts, comments, and dms that are also sent to other servers we dont control) and can be moderated on regardless of this. There isnt anything that breaches privacy
• Worst thing it can automatically do is temporarily remove a post/comment until an admin can approve or deny it just so its not there for people to run into (for example if someone spams slurs at someone else the someone else doesnt see that instead of it being there until an admin is able to come online)

People interact with the site that dont have accounts on the site

Making it local only would lock them out of news and discussion about something they interact with

That would massively hinder growth since actual users would get affected and then leave since they can't actually use the platform

Probably better to set up some link blacklists and then add things to it based on what spammers are linking to

edit: what you linked to is also not a community, did you mean !technology@lemmy.world or !tech@programming.dev?

As more people use https://lemmy-federate.com more niche communities will show up in most large instances by default

Imo its the ideal solution since it populates the posts in the all feed for people who don't know about the site to still see

Its from the microblog side but leaking into lemmy a bit since they mass tag everything they find (which includes lemmy communities)

There typically will always be some form of controversy, tends to be just how the admins handle that

I try to keep this instance federated with instances as much as reasonable (the only lemmy instances we really defederate with are burggit and rqd2 since their instance rules break our instance rules, lolicon+DMCA ignoring for the first and very questionable communities in the second (zoophilia, MAP)) and were dealing with the situation in this post internally currently to solve the situation here with blahaj. Should make a post in meta probably tomorrow

I can give some recommendations of some instances with admins ive had positive experiences with (im one of the programming.dev leads though if that affects my stances on this)

• startrek.website - I dont talk with these admins much but the instance tends to be pretty positively viewed across lemmy
• slrpnk.net - one of the other niche instances. Admins seem relatively chill and I dont have anything negative regarding them. Active in helping stop spam accounts (defeds with hexbear + lemmygrad)
• lemmings.world - has been pretty active in making tooling to help out a bunch of admins + the fediverse in general. Made uptime badges that some instances use, a linking system so you can link to something that sends people to the copy of it on their own instance, and a gui for fediseer which a bunch of admins use to keep track of defederations + endorsements (defeds with hexbear + rqd2)

Update: Ada is back and banned them, im refederating

they start out easy and get harder as time goes on. Theyre intended for all levels due to that and theres two different difficulties per day (the harder one being unlocked when you do the easy one). Basically anyone can do day 1

Heres stats for how many people completed each day last year https://adventofcode.com/2022/stats

Ive been working on a soft fork of lemmy called Pangora to prioritize development on different areas that the main lemmy codebase has been neglecting (such as mod tools). Gives a different option than the main lemmy codebase for supporting development and as redundancy for if anything goes wrong (although not production ready atm as its still getting mostly set up) !pangora@programming.dev

Update: we now have !ios_dev@programming.dev, temporarily managed by me until we get some mods for it

The issue with using upvotes as a voting mechanism is they can be easily faked due to federation. Someone can just whip up an instance with 200 accounts and mass upvote one of the options

Note if you put the image link in the url bar of the post rather than the body it lets people see it while scrolling (url + title can be edited so you can edit it to do that still if you want)