I want to read this, but it said “slammed” so… I guess I won’t then.

Click-bait.

Who is the fourth one, if you are okay doxing yourself? (/s)

Surely they have daemons inside of them?

But if Lemmy devs allowed true instance blocking, then people might block Lemmy.ml? Gotta make sure that people always have access to that source of tRuE “alternative facts”!

Edit: tbf PieFed’s is not a “true” instance blocker either - the so-called “blocked” accounts can still reply to and vote on your content, e.g. making fun of and taunting you, so that only you are unawares but everyone else can see it. Afaik true instance blocking does not exist on the Threadiverse, short of full defederation, and even that has severe challenges (namely the same problem that PieFed has: others can still submit content in a one-sided manner, leading to all kinds of confusion unless the defederation is implemented in the reverse direction as well).

Just to add some additional points beyond what others have already said here: Voyager provides only experimental support for PieFed instances. That said, there are numerous features that you could set by rarely switching over to a browser environment that will continue to affect the content that your account sees inside Voyager on a more daily (hourly?) basis. Some examples are personally blocking an entire instance (Lemmy has something named an instance block but it is so pathetic by comparison that it might legit qualify as disinformation to call it that - suffice it to say that it still shows content from users on that instance, allows them to reply, DM you, triggering notifications, basically it’s a community muting and not an instance block at all, whereas PieFed’s is more of a TRUE instance block), and keyword filters. Bc those features are run on your home instance - in your case PieFed.social - they will still work when using Voyager to access your content.

I agree with everything that you have said, in theory.

And when you read it, you will understand more: that’s not what this is.

Oddly enough, this will actually have the effect of increasing bot interactions over humans - although mainly this has nothing to do with bots whatsoever, only limiting human interactions to be more equitable, at the expense of the highest (voting) contributors among us, e.g. PugJesus.

But we cannot discuss this further until you’ve read it.

If you read Rimu’s analysis post it explicitly is NOT that. (If it had been, e.g. if it would have rate-limited to like one vote per second or some such, then I would have agreed with you, it’s just that it is not the case.)

It will not turn away a single bot (at least there is zero evidence that it would, nor is it meant to). It will only turn away humans. By design.

Hell yes. Tbf most of that is done already from PieFed.social. I also personally added to that a block of Lemmy.ml and I used to all the time investigate (by visiting the home instance of a post) why the comment counts looked different. I can only ever recall a single time that I regretted missing out on all that content (that one time involved Dessalines himself, who I would legit add an exception for if I could).

PieFed.zip and Lemmy.zip do an interesting thing where when you join a user-level block is automatically added for hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, and instructions sent to your inbox on how to remove that block. Thus for them, federation with those instances is opt-in, so that noobs won’t come here and not be able to tell the difference (e.g. 3rd-party apps such as Voyager by default do not show the instance name of an account), and then quit the Threadiverse in frustration before they can figure it all out.

They are thus truly New-user friendly indeed. I am talking about the language used in the PieFed instance picker, in opposition to those instances which say that they offer a “choose your own adventure” experience. That instance picker seems broken right now - e.g. zip does not appear in it at all - but it was a fantastic idea imho to offer such a list, to meet the different needs that people have.

Now unfortunately PieFed.social’s shadow-censorship of votes (even for Lemmy users) without notification as to what content has/is/will be removed make it no longer “Newbie-friendly” imho.:-( Though it does put forth significant efforts towards ensuring a “nicer” experience for its users, e.g. by outright defederation of hexbear.net, Lemmygrad.ml, and banning of certain highly-contentious accounts on dbzer0/anarchist.nexus.

Do you really want to vote more than 240 times per day? That’s one vote per minute for four hours straight - only the terminally online would ever want to do such a thing.

I was not discussing the content of slurs, but the process of HARD-CODING them into the software (especially only in English). Elsewhere PugJesus gives a fairly great explanation as to why a slur filter is not a great idea though - e.g. those people should be banned, not merely filtered, but not by an automated procedure and rather by a human being who can judge nuance.

He has a good heart, trying to help people, e.g. offering PieFed as FOSS.

Talking about baking ideology into the code, the Lemmy devs previously HARD-CODED an English slur word filter. Nutomic said in response:

If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.

This sounds fairly opinionated to me. Fortunately after a HUGE outcry, they did later relent.

Rimu did not have to go to all the trouble of making the vote quota into an environmental variable, easily changed without needing to modify the code (even when running PieFed from a docker container), but he did. Note I am not even defending him here, simply stating facts.

My opinion - shared by most programmers I presume - is that the ideal in both situations would have been to use an opt-in feature, rather than make it opt-out or far worse, HARD-CODE it directly in. Also, it would be nice to announce such things rather than leave people to stumble upon them.

Fwiw, people have previously reported that PieFed hard-codes other matters as well, but this was shown to be misinformation caused by merely looking at lines of code in isolation without bothering to figure out how the code actually works - in particular how those lines are never actually run without particular settings having been turned on.

IF (setting) THEN (feature)

Is NOT the same as hard-coding a feature!!

Also, Lemmy refuses to so much as notify people when their content is removed - overall its set of features is heaviest on giving power to admins, less so to mods, and least of all to the end-users. In contrast, PieFed offers tons of power to users, for instance at least bothering to tell them when their content gets removed by a mod (but ironically not when the voting quota is exceeded, reputedly).

BOTH softwares are fairly opinionated. Lemmy has historically been far more so. Lately it has calmed down and it is PieFed making the waves instead - some of it unfairly, and some of it well-deserved.

Do you this this post of yours? Rimu said it was a bug and already fixed now. He is super responsive (usually) and tends to fix bugs fairly quickly upon reporting them.

I am not sure what you mean - ani.social is federated, though possibly some communities are blocked or some such?

Rimu can do whatever he wants, but yeah so can you as well. It seems like he is past caring, possibly burning out by all the Lemmy vs. PieFed drama, like the undisclosed vulnerabilities issue that was unleashed upon PieFed recently, causing most of the instances to have to shut down.

I hope he finds joy again. In the meantime, I hope you find what you are looking for as well:-).

Lemmy.ml famously limits your ability to upvote, comment, or post, and bans accounts that they hate, all while lying about the reasons why (the rules make no mention about saying anything critical about Russia, China, or North Korea, though it’s exceedingly obvious what is going on there).

Meanwhile, PieFed.zip does not limit your ability to vote - you would have to vote more often than once a second for every second within a 24 hour period to reach its cap of 86,400 daily upvotes allowed. Same for quokk.au.

At the end of the day, software is run by people. And there’s even a PieFed fork, which will benefit from all of the continued changes while maintaining the ability to remain independent - as every instance admin already has the capability to do.

I for one applaud Dessalines, Nutomic, Rimu, and all of the software devs for providing all of this software entirely free of any charge, and the instance admins for doing likewise.

But yeah, the way this has been handled has been fairly shitty. Instance admins can run their machines however they like, especially if they pay for it without accepting donations, though a little friendly warning would have gone a LONG way here.

There are just so many factors here.

One is that appearance is sometimes more important than reality - the mere fact that PieFed is now shadow-censoring votes is going to give people severe pause about joining any instances that use it (read the other comments in this & the linked threads - people have already outright stated such, and not merely as individual users but bringing entire communities here). Note how despite only 0.2% of people will be directly affected - this number is according to Rimu’s analysis - the indirect ripples are already spreading far out of proportion to that.

It would be different if this new anti-feature (I call it that since voting is a feature and this new addition removes a part of what used to be allowed, even encouraged) were much more transparently implemented - e.g. which instances use it currently, like some instances could leave those limits at the default of 240 per day, while others increase that to 500, still others 1000, maybe some lower it to 100, and these can change from moment to moment, however there is currently no way for users to know what those settings are. Some admins have even been caught by surprise, it would seem, as to what their own settings are (iirc it was a misspelled or misplaced configuration setting of the environmental variable).

Anyway this is a highly unpopular decision, but almost none of its unpopularity lies in opposition to the - as you pointed to - very sensible need to constrain resources. Look deeper than that.

Many people have been absolutely begging for people to contribute more - creating communities, offering posts (even if merely of recycled content, in order to kickstart a community of people who can then take something forward in a more sustainable manner), making comments on those posts (so that the posters do not quit in frustration due to lack of receptivity of people to their content), and yes upvoting as much as possible to people who do all of these things, to send a signal that yes we want more of such (more posts + more comments).

PugJesus did all of these things, then without warning essentially got kicked in the balls, not for having violated any rules but for doing as so many community growers have asked to be done, i.e. ostensibly the correct thing to do? He could have at the very least been offered a warning first?

PieFed is showing itself to be capricious and subject to change at a moment’s notice, without warning and reputedly in stark opposition to all discussions to the contrary. Yes it can do as it pleases… but content creators will also do as they please as well. I foresee lesser donations to PieFed in the future as a result - monetary, code changes, and content offered. This greatly saddens me, I do not say this out of vindictiveness or anything like that, but rather frustration since I would have loved to see PieFed flourish. And I think it still will, but not as brightly, not as quickly, and I now think nowhere near as extensively as I previously had hopes for.

Think ahead to the next steps. Yes you are correct in the absolute narrowest sense, but there is so much more to it than that.

“Communication” is a 2-way street, requiring consensus of multiple parties involved. Yes someone can spin up their own instance - running whatever software or variant you like, of e.g. Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, Sublinks, nodeBB, Friendica, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, etc., or something else entirely new even - but others still have a choice to decide whether to federate with your instance or not.

So at some point, cooperation becomes mandatory - if you want to do anything more than simply listen in to conversations going on across the wider Fediverse, and actually and actively participate in them.

Yes PieFed allows community mods to do some strange things on a per-community basis. One cool trick is to only count “subscribed” votes, which helps avoid drive-by voting from All.

Though this vote quota issue is a per-instance setting, not able to be overwritten by a community moderator.

I think Rimu is bored, not wanting to play with UI elements and wanting to jump ahead to more back-end concerns. He gets enough flack from the Lemmy community that he has to develop a thick skin to ignore all that anyway (see latest blog post prior to v1.7), though now may be too insensitive to his real supporters of PieFed.

This communication issue is the really big take-home, as it’s causing people like PugJesus to quit in protest and it will work strongly against new people joining.

Which C?

You said that it was already the plan to go about:

identifying the small percentage of accounts that may be abusing the system

I was pointing to a post showing that such had already been done, and the results of an analysis of such. There really is a lot of information about this subject, if you want to read about it - the link I sent, authored by Rimu himself - is a great place to start.

Voting agents provided a layer of protection

Not anymore they don’t. Building things that last requires consensus and buy-in from all the parties involved.

We don’t want to be incels who upon being told “no”, only continue to push forward harder.