• OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
    83·
    5 hours ago

    I found this here https://join.piefed.social/features/ :

    Note how that link points to PieFed.social. Yes, those are defederated at the instance level, so a user cannot work around that - Lemmy defederation works the same way. However, PieFed.zip is a separate instance from PieFed.socual, and does not defederate from much at all.

    Low Reputation Indicator

    I find that feature very helpful. It’s merely a visual indicator placed next to the username, which is very different than the software making decisions for me on what content to show or not, and that indicator helps clue me in that responding to e.g. an argumentative person is unlikely to enhance my day. Also while I don’t recall the details on how it is set, imagine if you will that someone receives 10x more downvotes total than upvotes. Such an account is usually a troll. Most people get downvotes occasionally, but that would not trigger the indicator to be shown (and again, even if it somehow did, it’s just a visual icon, not a block or anything).

    Lemmy is FAR more known for authoritative censorship than PieFed. Particularly those instances mentioned like hexbear and the infamous lemmy.ml where you cannot criticize Russia, China, or North Korea without being banned from every community on the entire instance including those you’ve never even heard of.

    • Wren@lemmy.todayEnglish
      3·
      4 hours ago

      The link doesn’t point to the instance, that’s the main blog/info site for piefed.

      Either way my question about blocking was answered, now I know the block list isn’t baked into piefed itself.

      I don’t agree with the low rep feature. There are rules, reporting and blocking available moderate communities. If one user doesn’t want to interact with another for non-rulebreaking reasons, they can block them, tag them, or just not respond. This just opens up new reasons to manipulate votes and downvote unpopular opinions.

      I’m on Lemmy.Today, so I disagree that it’s authoritative. This instance doesn’t block/isn’t blocked by any instance, and allows all opinions that aren’t bigoted or insulting. There’s a whole spectrum of vibes across the instances but there’s nothing authoritative about the Lemmy ground rules.

      • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
        3·
        3 hours ago

        Yeah, I think OpenStars means the ruleset in lemmy.ml which is the equivalent instance to lemmy as piefed.social is to piefed.

        However hypothetically authoritarian piefed.social might become, it doesn’t reflect on the piefed software itself necessarily.

      • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
        43·
        3 hours ago

        I doubt that a normal user would get themselves flagged with the low rep icon though. Even receiving twice as many, triple as many, quadruple or quintuple as many downvotes as upvotes would not do it. To receive ten times as many downvotes as upvotes is someone who is entirely ignoring the consent of users to have to read their crap ahem “offered opinions”. That is Reddit-level hostility there, and something that your average conscientious Threadiverse participant will never experience - except unfortunately on the receiving end, as some very few people seem to take great pleasure in absolutely flaunting the rules in every community that they visit.

        It would also take a MASSIVE vote-altering campaign to counteract that effect. Something which if only due to its sheer scale might be noticed. And at that point it would be easier to create a new Lemmy account - some instances require nothing to make that happen - or even spin up a new instance in order to skirt the effects of downvoting.

        In short, reputation is a part of the normal human set of interactions. PieFed acknowledges that and exceedingly gently places an icon next to the usernames of the most egregious offenders. I for one do not think that is a bad thing, even on purely theoretical grounds. We aren’t trying to recreate a new 4chan here (we already have Hexbear for that - seriously! 😐)

        Skavau already covered the point about lemmy.ml being authoritative whereas Lemmy.today is not (in general there are 4 well-known tankie authoritarian instances and Lemmy.today is not one of those:-).

        • Wren@lemmy.todayEnglish
          1·
          53 minutes ago

          I was responding to this comment:

          Lemmy is FAR more known for authoritative censorship than PieFed.

          I’m aware of the weirder instances. I was saying Lemmy itself isn’t authoritative.

          I’m not opposed to the reputation thing because I think manipulation will end in false positives, but because there are better systems to moderate users than popularity. Without knowing the details of it, seems like a straight ratio would disproportionately affect people who don’t post as often. Some people have like 30 comments over a year, most with two or three votes. At that point it just takes one or two really unpopular opinions to shift that ratio drastically. But I donno, maybe there’s a threshold.

          Even so, right now I don’t mind leaving my more unpopular comments up because the fruitcake of conversation is better with a few odd chunks, and it doesn’t affect anything. The threat of a reputation label, no matter how unlikely it is to get one, is an incentive to please the crowd, and I think making votes mean anything was part of the problem with reddit. I don’t want anything to get in the way of a passionate user and their rant, I’m here for the crazy.

          Plus, In moderating my community I found a few people who just straight downvote everything. One of the accounts I checked had hundreds of hours of downvoting, like an insane amount of clicking arrows. Tens of thousands of downvotes. I don’t want any kind of system someone like that can influence.

          Regardless, I respect your argument and your points are valid. We might have to agree to disagree, and maybe I’ll see you on piefed soon, despite my criticisms.