The thing that is funny about Piefed vs. Lemmy is the level of authoritarian control the admin has over what you see and whether votes count or not. Specifically, they can open each instance connected with them and add a vote weight to the instance. So if they didn’t like ML, instead of blocking the instance, you can set the weight to 0, and then those users would have no idea that their votes do not contribute to a rank at all. You can take an individual user and set their account to ban comments, ban posts, or both, which effectively shadow bans a user. If they’re remote, the comments, or posts never arrive at the piefed instance. None of this is visible to the end user, by the way, no alerts that this is happening to your account. You can be kicked from a community by moderators, an action that you will not even know is happening to you.
It leaves you to wonder how much of what you’re seeing is an accurate tally of votes and score. It seems driven purely to keep out opposing perspectives and stifle thought. None of these “tanky” instances have this level of user and content manipulation at their disposal. The Admin of a piefed instance can shape the feed silently, and without users even knowing it is happening, through the use of vote weights. Which is a pretty nasty feature if I’m being honest. One of the things people assumed was happening on Reddit was that the feed wasn’t an honest representation of user activity, that the feed itself was ideologically bias (one way or the other), and yet piefed explicitly gives you those tools.
Learned about this today, was mainly on lemmy.ml because lemmy.world was blocking too much instances -_- Now trying piefed.social
I’ve enjoyed piefed a lot so far. I think it’s a good choice.
The thing that is funny about Piefed vs. Lemmy is the level of authoritarian control the admin has over what you see and whether votes count or not. Specifically, they can open each instance connected with them and add a vote weight to the instance. So if they didn’t like ML, instead of blocking the instance, you can set the weight to 0, and then those users would have no idea that their votes do not contribute to a rank at all. You can take an individual user and set their account to ban comments, ban posts, or both, which effectively shadow bans a user. If they’re remote, the comments, or posts never arrive at the piefed instance. None of this is visible to the end user, by the way, no alerts that this is happening to your account. You can be kicked from a community by moderators, an action that you will not even know is happening to you.
It leaves you to wonder how much of what you’re seeing is an accurate tally of votes and score. It seems driven purely to keep out opposing perspectives and stifle thought. None of these “tanky” instances have this level of user and content manipulation at their disposal. The Admin of a piefed instance can shape the feed silently, and without users even knowing it is happening, through the use of vote weights. Which is a pretty nasty feature if I’m being honest. One of the things people assumed was happening on Reddit was that the feed wasn’t an honest representation of user activity, that the feed itself was ideologically bias (one way or the other), and yet piefed explicitly gives you those tools.