I notice a large number of ragebait-y political communities being spun up by new users with thousands of posts & ai profile header photos. I notice comment sections are more acrimonious, and foreign disinfo talking points are circulating a lot more prolifically than before the US election started ramping up.
Anyone else notice this? Any idea on how to combat it on this platform? Are there any communities built around creating block lists of obvious troll/ai/disinfo accounts & communities?
Every Lemmy instance can see which other fediverse instances they’re connected to, I’d be satisfied if it scoped to those instance domains. It’s going to be very rare to have a link to a Lemmy/kbin/whatever instance that is not already being followed by one local user, and when it does happen, the first time any local user follows it, it’s fixed again. That covers the 99% of cases better than having to educate every user every time in every thread they innocently post a normal url instead of knowing how to even copy this special url from.
True, that will at least let you figure out what is a fediverse link and what isn’t. Most implementations I know either use the same URL for both the AP representation of a post and it’s HTML one (differentiated by the Accept header), or have a redirect from the HTML view to the AP representation when an AP type is requested (or, very rarely, the via Link header/<link> html tag), which means you can reuse code used for the “search URL to load community” feature in order to make this possible.
Given the list of fedi instances your instance is aware of is already present in the API, clients already have the tools to do this, I believe.