Compassion ~ Thought

  • 10 Posts
  • 912 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 24th, 2024

help-circle




  • Originally I meant that the Lemmy ecosystem is generally speaking more authoritarian than the PieFed one. This is in large part due to the preferences of the devs.

    I will now also add the new related point that I think the coding design of Lemmy lends itself more to authoritarian control. It seems geared and marketed more towards instance admins, then mods, then users only last. Tbf PieFed is the same way here, but with a different focus due to the preferences of the main designer.

    Lemmy is even more authoritarian than Reddit itself in many ways: Reddit at least sends a user a notification whenever their content is removed, plus users (and anyone who commented or otherwise has a direct link) can still see their content even after that. Reddit users may also contact the moderators via mod mail. In contrast, despite how Lemmy has the modlog, again there are no notifications for removal, and the modlog just says that the action was done by a “mod” (it used to always have the username, but now it can just say “mod”, so over time Lemmy has actually moved in the direction to become MORE authoritarian than it used to be, not less).

    To be fair, PieFed also lacks a mod mail or notification upon removal of content, but I feel like for Piefed it is simply because it is new and new features being added monthly, even practically weekly. Whereas for Lemmy it gives an impression at least that it is a design choice that seems unlikely to ever change towards more democratic principles. We will see how they each develop over more time I suppose.

    For now, many Lemmy instances are very free and open, subject to the software constraints, while others are extremely closed down, most especially lemmy.ml that the main Lemmy developer seems to spend an inordinate amount of time moderating rather than tweaking the codebase. That’s fine btw, it’s his code and he can do whatever he wants with it, although for me I choose PieFed instead, for all the above reasons and so much more.

    Speaking of, none of what you said sounds to me like it should result in someone receiving a visual icon due to poor reputation. I’ve had some massively downvoted content myself, but if the system is implemented properly then it will consider more like a median downvoting rather than maximum or even average. Theoretically someone who only made 10 comments and >=9 of those were downvoted heavily, yeah they would get that icon. However, the icon does not cause filtering of their content (there are other things that can but those are entirely separate and not based on the user account), it’s merely a visual display. I’ve upvoted, downvoted, and replied to people’s comments even when I can see that icon - so it in no way blocks me from doing so or from seeing it in the first place. But it does (helpfully imho) label it, so that I have a better indicator going in what I am getting myself into.


  • 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:-).


  • 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.



  • OpenStars@piefed.socialtoFediverse memes@feddit.ukAmazing Art
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 days ago

    It’s like NSFW or even more relevant NSFL (also spoiles) - perfectly fine for some recipients but not for all, so best to LABEL IT. Labeling is compassion.

    Then again, people who post AI slop against the wishes of the recipient communities tend not to be the most conscientious?

    A relevant rule #1, above even the one about NSFW and another one about spam:

    AI Art: While we appreciate AI generated art, there are more appropriate communities to post that type of art to. Please keep posts to non-AI generated art only. This rule includes AI art that was then manually manipulated (e.g. drawing on top of something generated by AI).

    That reads pretty clear to me?





  • I think there’s a way to make that happen. Sorry I don’t use apps, I just played around with it in the past, but I recall not liking it until someone told me how to make the images larger - buried VERY deep in the customizations somewhere - and then afterwards it became my favorite app (except I don’t actually use apps, but IF I did, it would be Voyager. Or Thunder. And with full sized images that don’t cut parts out.)