Aren’t fruits subsets of vegetables? Without looking it up I thought that vegetables were the edible part of the plant and fruits are edible reproductive parts of the plant. I could be totally off on that though.

It actually seems like an interesting problem to solve. Instance runners have the sql database with all the voting record, finding manipulative instances seems a bit like a machine learning problem to me

As it happens, one already exists, so I’m glad that I messaged folks. You can check out https://lemmit.online/ for exactly this use case, I believe

Let me send some messages to lemmy instance owners and see what they think. I know there’s a bit of strain in the federation, but if they like the idea, I don’t mind pulling one of my machines into the mix.

That’s a good point. I do have hope that people will come to understand the distributed nature of it not long from now. Mastodon (while confusing at first) seems to have stabilized and most people seem happy with it. That said, if the education isn’t there, then it’ll never be user-centric, and if that doesn’t happen, you’re right that’ll be a big problem.

I’m thinking about doing that. There’s no reason one couldn’t make a web scraper and just scrape some list of subs and run it through a particular mirror instance of lemmy which other instances would be able to federate with. It just seemed like there wouldn’t be interest in such an idea

If you did that it would get quite dicey quite quickly. How would two instances decide to federate together if they already had a whole ton of common communities (ie “programming” or “memes”), and part of the idea is that you can run an instance without needing to be beholden to the activities of other instances, while still being able to federate with them. Having that strong of a dependency on the other instances would likely make things quite unmanageable.

Just out of curiosity, do you have any examples of bugs? Perhaps someone would be able to help