OpenStars

@OpenStars@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ghost of Lemm.ee?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It would have been helpful yeah.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit is now promoting ads for fascist paramilitary invaders⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Like all of it?! At once!?

  I doubt you have what it would take to satisfy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Like phone calls, and texting, bad actors ruin everything that they touch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Piefed admin settings that allow to enable or disable content filters (they are disabled by default, see body for details)⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨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!?:-)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Piefed admin settings that allow to enable or disable content filters (they are disabled by default, see body for details)⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  lolz, so much disinformation there though. Like:

  What’s sad is that since lemmy.ml is blocked by default, most PieFed users won’t see it.

  I think there might be one major instance that chose to do this, and I cannot even recall offhand which one, so obviously it’s not THAT major. This is some LLM-level of analysis right there (Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net are blocked from many instances, and people often lump lemmy.ml together into a triad, hence lemmy.ml must be automatically blocked as well!).

  Funny enough, Lemmy.ml disallows what they consider cuss words, which were even hard-coded, and when asked they told the community to take a hike ("create a fork and stop bothering us about it"), until after a huge outcry they did eventually relent.

  Lemmy users be like “why can’t we all get along…”, yet feel absolutely free to criticize every tiny aspect (including - in fact especially - fictional ones) of PieFed, while ignoring how e.g. lemmy.ml kicks people out of communities they’ve never even so much as heard of for not praising Russia, China, or North Korea hard enough.

  My side always does good and never bad, other side always does bad and never good. Much tribal, so cringe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Piefed admin settings that allow to enable or disable content filters (they are disabled by default, see body for details)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  To be clear, defederation has nothing whatsoever to do with PieFed.

  Defederation happens on Lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, nodeBB, and every other type of software across the entire Fediverse. It is even an absolutely crucial tool to prevent CSAM which depending on the locality of the affected instance could get it shut down and potentially the instance owner exposed to actual criminal charges. (There are other ways, but typically defederation is the easiest.)

  Likewise, lemmy.ml famously censors what they consider cusswords on their instance - with a hard-coded list even, iirc, at least it was at one time, years ago - but then after much outcry this censorship was made optional in the code.

  So defederation is a reason to not join an instance in favor of some other one, but has nothing to do with wanting to either avoid or preferentially pick an instance running PieFed. In fact the opposite is true, as the PieFed software allows additional options beyond simply federate vs. defederate, allowing instance admins choices between those two extremes. This finer granularity is so helpful! e.g. the PieFed.zip instance blocks Hexbear.net by default for new users, but explains how to remove that, thereby offering hexbear as opt-in content, rather than having to choose between treating it identically the same as all other instances or else cutting it out entirely.

  PieFed also allows notes to be placed onto content, which is particularly helpful for places such as Beehaw where their stated ToS differs from the usual across the rest of the Threadiverse.

  In fact I am not aware of any particular reason to avoid running PieFed, but anyway even presuming that such exists, defederation is definitely not among them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh let me be clear, I think we are toxic as fuck here. Setting aside the constant trolling barrages by Hexbears, the fact that the fights between tankies and others pervades EVERYWHERE (even/especially shit posting, memes, and for some reason especially comics), and do you really think that a Windows user will feel at home in this shrine to Arch btw Linux?

  It can also be a fun place to be, even chill depending on where you go. But to a user looking at us without any blocks (for users, communities, even whole instances), it looks very different than it does to most of us. Especially if they use Windows are right-leaning on the political spectrum. Sigh, e.g. whether women should have the right to do whatever they want with their own bodies is somehow “political”, so looking at how we talk from the perspective of let’s say a teenager who never knew any different than what they were taught, we are not terribly welcoming. We can be a pretty self-righteous bunch. 🤔

  Remember, messages require the consent of both parties as to what they mean: you can intend to convey whatever, but they decide what they feel having received that. And if they feel that being here was “grating”, and they did not feel “welcomed”, and say that other centrists to right-wingers are likely to feel likewise, then that’s their decision and they have a right to feel that way (because it is subjectively true:-).

  Which brings me back to: it’s fine to not want right-wing people here. So why not be honest about that? We’re toxic AF, and also unwelcoming to people unless they pass the moral purity testing, which never ends. 😋

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No magnesium⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The best kind of correct!! 😉🧐

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No magnesium⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s… actually good!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of people on Reddit are from the USA, and are centrists to right-wingers by their standards. Ironically these often think of themselves as left-leaning (e.g. critical of Republicans locally) but without realizing that they are actually solidly on the right in comparison on the global stage. e.g. Bernie Sanders supporters.

  So that can be quite a rude awakening for the uninitiated, to be told (truthfully) that you are right-wing. Also, some people - including those on the Threadiverse - sometimes just want to shut out politics for like 10-30 minutes a day, which is extremely difficult here as it pervades just about every single corner, without EXTENSIVE and ongoing efforts to keep it at bay.

  And those factors interrelate, like if you disallow politics then you end up having next to no content, whereas if you allow it then a good fraction of the viewers stop engaging.

  I am not saying that we need to be more welcoming to right-wingers, I am saying that it is a choice and we should honestly acknowledge that. We choose to make Redditors feel unwelcomed here, for the most part. If that desire were to change then it would require much effort to enact - a lot more than current moderation capabilities support. Hence those people will elect to remain on the likes of X, Meta, Facebook, or X where they feel welcomed. The toxicity that you know how to deal with, rather than a new brand of it that you don’t, and all of that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah Ada is pretty amazing, ngl that is likely why for you - not many spaces have such a fantastic person looking out for them. There is occasional drama like the 196 situation in the last year but even that she handled with grace and class and a deft hand.

  About Reddit, there’s a lot there: mainly it’s a network effect, and so people are just looking for any excuse to justify not having to move, and go somewhere with less content that is “different”.

  Also a big part is that while the main subs are toxic AF, the niche ones there are mainly free of toxicity (people say? I haven’t been back to see personally since the Rexodus!), so it’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison - but on the other hand, the niche subs here have barely any content, like after you spend 5-10 minutes reading every single comment even across every cross-post for the 1-5 daily posts (or worse, weekly, or worse still, monthly) posts, then there’s nothing left. So remaining in the niche subs here might leave you with zero to a couple upvotes mainly per comment, and almost no to possibly 0-3 mainly critical replies to a post.

  So here, people - especially new users - really are going to be drawn mostly to the largest communities, which ofc are going to be those with the most toxicity. Especially since Lemmy does not federate moderator reports so there is such a small pool of mods who are on that exact instance where the community is and willing to absorb that burden - and even then we keep chasing them off, saying how “we” (in terms of the Threadiverse as a whole) are better off without such, but then a new user takes a look at a mostly unmoderated 4chan-style discussion and nopes right back to what they are most comfortable and familiar with: smaller, niche subs on Reddit that have good mods, even despite how Reddit admins control things from above.

  I wish we had more like Ada here. But we don’t, so please just enjoy having her where you are at and don’t take her for granted:-).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With the current situation with Tiktok, it's time for the Fedivers to rise.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No? Life is rarely binary.

  For instance PieFed.zip both does not defederate with hexbear while at the same time not exposing new users to them unawares by placing a user-level block (which unlike Lemmy’s actually stops showing all content from those users) upon new account creation but then explains to the user how to remove that at any time. This makes interactions with them opt-in rather than have to discover it and be opt-out, so I consider it ideal. (Although I haven’t tested how that would show up to users browsing without an account - that might be a loophole.)

  Or, a true opt-out solution could place a message underneath every post from that instance explaining how users are known to be combative, arguing in bad faith for “the dunk” and extremely likely to break your own instance’s rules and not conform to generally accepted standards of behavior. Something similar is done for Beehaw on PieFed.social, using that community’s own exact wording and linking to their ToS that differs greatly from the norm. However, I would wager that virtually all 3rd party apps would ignore this.

  Defederation is not a first resort, it is rather the last one and for Lemmy, literally the only one provided when instance admins refuse to enforce both the rules of others and even their own stated ones (to keep trolling inside the community yet do not spread it to others WITHOUT CONSENT). Defederation from hexbear is not punitive - even members of hexbear have expressed a desire to defederate themselves from the outside world, to avoid all this drama - but rather protective of the wider Threadiverse overall, for new members to feel more comfortable joining us here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They are free to have whatever kind of vibe they want, but yeah their rights should end where mine begin and all of that. Except they don’t, as even outside of their local communities they constantly violate the rules of other spaces, then their admins refuse to police them, even going so far as to be caught lying to the admins of other instances.

  At that point, defederation remains the only available option, except even that is not the end of the matter when so many instances choose not to do that. Leaving the vast majority of the moderation burden to be placed upon the end user causes people to flee the Threadiverse like the 4chan-style place that we legitimately are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With the current situation with Tiktok, it's time for the Fedivers to rise.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed.

  It does not help that moderation reports do not federate among Lemmy instances. They do in PieFed, I don’t know about Mbin, but between Lemmy instances they do not, making the level of effort placed upon moderators really high by limiting the available pool to those on the same instance as the community.

  It also does not help when instance admins protect those doing the bullying, such as hexbear admins that have even been caught lying to the admins of other instances, and refuse to police (i.e. ban) their own account holders as they constantly violate the rules on other instances. At that point, defederation becomes the only option left, except that many instances including yours are so high averse to defederations that instead the behaviors in question are essentially given carte blanche to continue without any means at all to stop it.

  A fact that new visitors very much see - even if we old hands do not anymore, after having set up personal blocks aka blacklisting or otherwise view only Subscribed content aka exclude such via our whitelisting procedure. And new users that see what we have chosen to forget exists here go back and tell others about how unfriendly this place was to them.

  So long as we leave the vast majority of the moderation burden on the individual user themselves, the Threadiverse is not going to grow and instead will continue to shrink. i.e. all the weeds are choking the garden.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Tbf, most don’t seem to realize what they want, and some are literally and actually children. It hurts the Threadiverse that upon having a bad experience here, they go and talk about us there in that highly negative light. And it helps us here to know what is being said over there - i.e. it’s not solely the onboarding experience being difficult (having to choose an instance, getting through the sign-up process, then community discovery, which never ends, nor does the need to continually block new toxic users), but even for people that remained here for months to a year did not stay, and it’s good to know why (mainly lack of niche content plus toxicity).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Blocking hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml improved my experience on the Threadiverse by 90%. Blocking lemmy.ml improved it a further 90%, so yeah, blocking hexbear does so very much. I get that someone who intentionally chooses that should have the right to, which nobody is stopping anyone there, but definitely hexbear, like 4chan, is not for the uninitiated.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'll do it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t know that for sure!! (/s obviously:-P)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With the current situation with Tiktok, it's time for the Fedivers to rise.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Regarding the Threadiverse in general, it seems that (1) many people find having to choose an instance first to be very confusing (not applicable to your situation I guess), (2) upon arrival these primarily Western people immediately see content proposing the murder of Westerners and demolition of the entire Western culture, whereupon they nope right back out (can you blame them?) and then complain bitterly about their toxic experiences here on other platforms, including Reddit and Bluesky and X.

  Most of us forget how extensive our blocklists here have grown to be over time, and how much effort we put into Linux levels of tinkering to discover communities we like while blocking content we do not.

  If I am wrong then please ignore me, but it’s a thought to consider.

  Of course mostly it’s a network effect, so I am speaking about issues that we might actually be able to do something about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Only if it portrays Lemmy in a positive light. You can criticize our toxicity and left-leaning political biases as much as you like in r/RedditAlternatives though:-P.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do we need more users ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Worse, I find that Lemmy typically (vastly) under-delivers what was promised even. Like for many years people were promised the capability to do personal “instance blocking”, and for a long time after the Rexodus there were calls to avoid defederating places like lemmy.ml or lemmygrad.ml or even hexbear.net, because that feature was “coming soon^(TM)”.

  Then when that change did finally come, it only muted communities on that instance yet still left users to be able to reply in other communities, plus they could still vote on and thereby influence your content (hexbear is KNOWN for its brigading tactics). And then a subsequent bugfix opened it up still further to allow such “blocked” users the capability to send you a private DM, even pinging you with notifications - which on Lemmy (highly unlike PieFed) there is no way to stop that, even for WEEKs and WEEKs after you stop engaging… your consent to selectively stop such incoming pings does not matter, realistically (technically you could block every single person from an instance, one-by-one… but even there, you would have to bot that or do it the extremely tedious manual way, as the software provides no tools to aid with that). PieFed has offered the ability to block all users from an instance for over a year now.

  The only counter-argument to the above is that software - especially FOSS (although Lemmy devs even get paid?!?) - takes time to develop. Which makes things like the bugs and inefficiencies that remain in Lemmy for years and years all the more disheartening. And then here comes PieFed, running around Lemmy in circles, it is almost no comparison at all.

  And then I’m sure that I do not need to list out the rather LONG list of features that PieFed offers that aids community discovery - it’s quite amazing to see actually:-). PieFed is a game-changer for the Threadiverse, and might just keep it alive whereas it would otherwise have either died off or at least remained in obscurity forever known as a mere linux (& politics) forum. As things keep moving forward though, I think one day it could rival BlueSky, at least in terms of features offered, though whether a non-profit FOSS could ever overcome the strong network effect will remain to be seen… For that I think we would need a modmail, definitely notification upon content removal, perhaps better searching capability, maybe better modlog access, but not much else? (& 3rd party apps catching up to offer its features but that is not PieFed’s work anymore, now that so much has been exposed in the APIs)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AAAAAAA⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨HELLA TITE⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh it’s far worse than that: we are a fungus that ate a bacteria and thereby gained superpowers that we used to conquer the whole world… (or so we tell ourselves)

  And then some of us ate a different bacteria and became plants, which now we use as fuel for our cars.

  And don’t even get me started on viruses… or prions for that matter:-).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lemmy irl⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Easy:

  1. go around the 4th wall
  2. climb above the top
  3. tunnel down beneath the wire
  4. why is this so hard, who wants the stupid yogurt anyway?!
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bye, X: Europeans are launching their own social media platform, W⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Then it sounds more like they want to be the European next Bluesky.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Captain, masking is highly illogical⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

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• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Captain, masking is highly illogical⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Other way around, his mandate is to emulate humans, so he seeks to understand so that he may do so better, even while lacking emotions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elon Musk and Sam Altman clashed on X after Musk shared a post about a man who committed a murder-suicide following delusional conversations with ChatGPT⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, it’s always worked before…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FYI: Reddit trademarked some community names (Digg link)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I meant that choosing to implement the algorithm to refer to a singular instance is a step towards rather than away from “centralization”. Other algorithms could be envisioned such as pulling from all instances that are federated with the newly created instance - although I don’t know the ordering of steps so that specific solution may not be viable, so I only meant it as a (possibly very bad) illustration of such a concept that would implement a more decentralized ideal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FYI: Reddit trademarked some community names (Digg link)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nutomic is not in my blocklists - I may not agree with the devs philosophies but I do highly respect them nonetheless (I realize that may not always come across well), for offering their software as FOSS rather than keeping it private. I did block all users from lemmy.ml though, as the VAST majority of the time those comments just waste my time so while that throws out good replies sometimes, I find the balance highly worthwhile, personally. If it were possible to make an exemption to that, I would have done so specifically for Nutomic.

  Anyway this is excellent news!! Sorta. It now being configurable, I will stop spreading this as misinformation, particularly against the lemmy.ml instance being authoritarian, and I thank you both for your correction in this matter.

  That said, at a quick glance it does still look like the way to replace it is to use a different instance’s community listing? (lemmy.world, lemmy.zip, whatever) Which is still a trend towards “centralization” - even if configurable now as to which source of bias the instance admins chooses?

  I agree that it is entirely fair that Lemmy sourcecode development is slow (possibly the constraints of language choice, and/or funding concerns, etc.), and so Lemmy instance admins must make do with things that can be changed more readily while awaiting more difficult solutions to be implemented, with lower prioritization.

  So overall still not an ideal situation, but I thank Nutomic and you for pointing out that it is a LOT better now than the earlier choice to hard-code lemmy.ml specifically into the codebase.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FYI: Reddit trademarked some community names (Digg link)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The original point here was that:

  The Fediverse doesn’t work like that.

  The sentence prior to that was:

  Effectively centralising information.

  And I pointed to an area in the (planned future release of the) sourcecode that did in fact centralize information. You even agreed:

  Lemmy.ml is the source of the initial list, true.

  I never said that this is the death knell or whatever of the entire project, just that it is a step towards, rather than away from, centralization. Which again, you agreed on.

  And imho it is not a good step, i.e. the direction that it is aiming towards is not a good goal to have for the Fediverse. Feel free to prove us all wrong by fixing the code and then getting the devs to agree to use your fix rather than continue to use lemmy.ml as the singular source aka central authority. They might agree actually, though it still did not make the step that I am talking about now a “good” one. Any step towards centralization is a bad one imho, especially when that centralization is put right into the sourcecode (as opposed to e.g. an external, 3rd-party website run by people who could be trusted to be more unbiased, and by unbiased I mean that lemmy.ml is VERY biased towards certain viewpoints, so NOT that, or another alternative could be to gather community listings from all federated instances and then combine them together, rather than have one “master” list to rule them all).