Comment on PieFed 1.4 is released - emoji, federated stackoverflow and AI content filters
rglullis@communick.news 4 days agomaximum anonymity, but this was widely disliked so it was dropped.
Maximum anonymity is a lie. Users still need to trust the server admin. The truth is that the Fediverse is not a secure/private messaging platform, and attempts to hide this from the users might be well-intentioned but will bite the devs in the ass, sooner or later.
this has vast fediverse support because it enables community modularity, which is needed in a world where instances will go offline, causing communities to be orphaned.
To solve this it would be better to have the PieFed team pushing/implementing the appropriate FEPs (FEP-7952 and FEP-EF61) instead of an-hoc hack.
This was agreed with the moderators of said community.
Not the point. The point is that the devs are taking the “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to features, prioritizing any type of functionality that is minimally useful to the users instead of putting some effort on the harder stuff.
I have suggested (lemmy-federate) be opt-in rather than opt-out.
Doesn’t matter. Admins will see it, think “that is nice!”, turn it on and only realize later that their database is completely bloated with data that is not really needed. Meanwhile, the real problem of content discovery could be solved by implementing pull-based federation and client-side caching, but again this type of work is not being done because it’s not something that the users see directly.
Skavau@piefed.social 4 days ago
Sure. Pseudonymity. Again, it was dropped.
I’m not here to quibble about the mechanics of the implementation, but purely noting that it is popular. You seem to be opposed to it on principle.
Then attach with it an explanation that it could cause data bloat and increase costs for them. You’re against admins having the ability to turn this on if they want?
rglullis@communick.news 4 days ago
No, it was not dropped. “do not federate votes” is not a privacy guarantee. It just reduces the exposure of the information from the whole Internet to the server admin. People still need to trust the admin.
If you are one of the developers of the project, you should be quibbling about the implementation. “It is popular” is not a good enough reason to effectively fabricate information.
What I am against is this constant release of poorly thought out features and the prioritization of “easy” vs “correct”.
The more you try to justify what PieFed is doing, the more you are cementing my original opinion:
You might feel offended by me calling it “a pile of hacks”, but I can not think of any other term to describe this.
Skavau@piefed.social 4 days ago
Well, sure. But it’s still less of an ‘exposure’ so to speak, than a vote federating out.
People don’t see it as fabrication if the community movement is reflected in the public logs - which it would be. I think I’ve only seen one other person object to the mechanic of community migration on the basis of “fabricating” information, other than you. You are in a vast minority. Most people are keen to see it go further and move subscribers too, from what I can tell. The end-game is a situation where most people recognise that communities on the fediverse are functionally modular and can be moved if necessary. Most people would understand, if this was the norm, that communities are modular and can be movied in certain circumstances.
That’s not what I asked you. I said the lemmy-federate functions should instead be opt-in, and you still seemed to oppose it.
rglullis@communick.news 4 days ago
We are talking past each other by now…
My point, in one sentence: it’s not up to the developers of a project building on ActivityPub to define policy regarding “exposure”.
ActivityPub is a protocol for public social networks. It’s not about private communications. Anyone looking for privacy should be told that and instructed to not post publicly.
It’s as simple as that. If the developers of PieFed do not understand the basic principle of “use the right tool for the job” and keep trying replicate anti-features from centralized websites (such as the fake-privacy that is provided by closed networks), then I will have no trust on their ability to design a good ActivityPub system.
This is a good example of selection bias. You are getting most of your feedback from other PieFed users, who clearly are not aware of the implications of such implementation.
Yes, I am opposed to any functionality being added to the server when it can be solved at the client. Content discovered can be done by the client and using a separate service like Fediverser, fedidb, or anything else. It makes no sense to have this built-in into the ActivityPub server. It is one of the many examples where the piefed devs are adding a feature because they can without thinking whether they should.