There’s never going to be parity of administration philosophies across all instances regardless of tools. Some will use word filters. Some will hold very strong opinions on 4chan culture. Some will block new community creation for members. Some will force account age limits to interact on locally hosted communities (i’ve seen this in the modlog).
anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
It’s as if someone saw a federated social media codebase that enabled the free movement of users and expression online and though, “someone should fix that”.
It isnt that the codebase ‘forces’ moderation decisions - it’s that it’s undoing the work done in the lemmy codebase to flatten moderation across instances and make them transparent, and introducing arbitrary metrics that can be used to limit the visibility of expression not just on the local instance but across many
You’re free to use whatever software on your server you like, but IMO these ‘filters’ are petty, low-effort workarounds to features in the lemmy codebase that are what make it truely democraticand decentralized, and they degrade the health of the entire federated network by extension.
Skavau@piefed.social 2 days ago
anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
It’s one thing to empower admins with mod tools, it’s another to establish reputation ratings based on opaque rules, hide them behind fake error messages, and then enforce them using destructive workarounds that cause nothing but confusion.
Go ahead, be restrictive with who can participate on your server - that’s perfectly fine. But be transparent about how your moderation tools work and don’t hide punitive ranking systems in your codebase.
It certainly makes it seem like the devs have an axe to grind, and don’t care how their careless decisions effect the rest of the network.
Skavau@piefed.social 2 days ago
It’s one thing to empower admins with mod tools, it’s another to establish reputation ratings based on opaque rules, hide them behind fake error messages, and then enforce them using destructive workarounds that cause nothing but confusion to users and other federated server admins.
The reputation ratings of users are purely based on downvotes received, it’s not really opaque.
The 4chan thing again, can be turned off.
Go ahead, be restrictive with who can participate on your server - that’s perfectly fine. But be transparent about how your moderation tools work and don’t hide punitive ranking systems in your codebase.
The reputation/attitude system is not concealed at all.
anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
That isn’t true - the comment filters also dock users reputation points, and without any notification to users that it’s happening.
None of this is presented to users - that’s the definition of opaque. They’ve shoehorned these features into their code without any notice to other users or instance admins, and have provided no way of notifying anyone of what is happening on the backside that might effect how content is handled or federated.
All of this irreparably injures the reputation of not just the piefed implementation but of the broader fediverse.
OpheliaAzure@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
It 100% was! no one outside of the people who coded for piefed even knew this was a thing until the recent posts, if it is such an important part why isn’t it stated clearly and upfront!!!
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 days ago
Tolerating intolerance doesn’t make a community more tolerant. We need good mod tools to remove authoritarians from our communities.
I really want a Xitter filter so I can prevent screenshots from the Nazi website from showing up on our website. Because I think Xitter is worse than 4chan.
OpenStars@piefed.social 2 days ago
Okay so you have some good points, especially towards the beginning, but just so we are on the same page: are you aware that moderation reports do not federate? Or rather, that they do in PieFed but not in Lemmy. Things are rarely so black and white, good and evil, healthy or not. (I forget, will Lemmy 1.0 add this capability? Anyway PieFed already has it.)
introducing arbitrary metrics that can be used to limit the visibility of expression
Investigate just a tiny bit into the moderation practices going on at lemmy.ml.
not just on the local instance but across many
That one is harder to investigate but there too - Lemmy devs (who also are the same ones moderating lemmy.ml, and yes monetary funds donated towards “Lemmy development” absolutely go to that, rather than code changes, with no way to opt out of that, unless you donate to Nutomic directly, which brings up… shall we say other issues relating to limitations on free expressions, particularly for trans people) in the last year added a hard-coded instance name that can provide a list of which communities it wanted to suggest to new instances as being popular, essentially giving that instance veto power. ONE instance, controlling all new instances, unless the admin does additional work to discover those shadow-banned rejections and add them manually.
Take one guess which instance was chosen to have that veto power? Yeah, lemmy.ml, surprise. Tbf, this has since been walked back, and while the instance names are still hard-coded, the new instance admin now has multiple options that they can select from (so the selection of any particular one of those is not, anymore). I am not sure how transparently this is presented to them.
Things get better with time and even more with attention. The PieFed devs are extremely receptive to feedback. The Lemmy devs… well, they are at least somewhat receptive - tbf Rust is a difficult language and that seems to constrain how much they are willing to do in any given timeframe (unless there is some other reason that requests go for years and years and years without being done?). Lemmy is just older, and also it receives funding (except again, it is exceedingly difficult to ensure that such funding actually goes towards code development), so then in that light, PieFed’s development is SUPREMELY impressive. Yes more work will need to be done with it still.
Let’s get busy and make the Threadiverse healthier - all of us, together!?:-)
anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Yea, see this is what I mean by ‘petty vindictive development’.
None of this speaks well of the project and risks undermining the entire federated network.
OpheliaAzure@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Honestly I don’t mind if it would be visible to the users. Like how long would this be secret if it wasn’t for the code audit.
anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
I mean, I disagree, but that’s my own preference.
Ranking/sorting/filtering systems should always be up-front and user-configurable, and their implementation should be instance-agnostic. Hiding it in the code is definitely the worst part of this, but far from the only problem.