Compassion ~ Thought
Well, they at least claim that they aren’t trolls.
🤔 Although isn’t that exactly what a troll would say?! I say, I’ve cracked the case! 🧐 They are trolls! Either that, or… they are not, or something else, I dunno.
If you go by the metric of “if not troll then why behave as troll would?”, then the answer becomes much easier to find:-).
we’re not attracting the best and brightest here but rather the ones who have nowhere else to go. And they bring that behavior here and it just seems like it takes us further away from becoming a real alternative people actually want to go to.
This right here. There’s a famous adage that goes “why would I want to be a member of a club that would accept me as a member?”, which encourages us to look within, but it’s undeniably true as well (however much we may want to deny it) that we are influenced by the actions of those who we choose to spend our time with. Echo chambers that act to funnel misinformation (or worse, active disinformation) are so incredibly dangerous. Yet it seems nearly impossible to escape from such - though we do get to choose our favorite flavoring of it.
I will note that making an account on PieFed does not represent any kind of “commitment” at all, and in fact has ancillary benefits such as reserving your username in advance in case you ever do decide to switch. Simply make an account on PieFed.social and you’ll get to see first-hand what all it offers! Do beware though bc most likely one glance at that sign-up wizard will make you fall in love 💕, and then more and more often you’ll find yourself using your PieFed rather than STW alt account. But is that a bad thing, to have options to choose from?! 😋
For a new member coming to Lemmy, my advice would be to:
We need to move past these bare-bones basics. Which I don’t see much activity happening there on the Lemmy side to improve any of that, though I do see much happening in PieFed, hence I am placing my hopes for the future into it.
I just remember that it was very very much work curating my feed (and constantly needing updating as new communities came out needing to be blocked), back when I was on Lemmy, and then when I switched to PieFed it became incredibly easy. Tbf it did take me a few weeks to get used to it, but ever since I have almost never switched back to scrolling All.
Even then though, why downvote content simply for existing? Like I don’t live in [insert name of specific neighborhood/town/city/state/region/nation/continent/area of world], or follow [any sports team at all], but even though I don’t want to see its content (usually, I mean like on a daily basis, although perhaps rarely?) I do not begrudge such a community for its mere existence? In fact I celebrate it! I highly disagree with the philosophy displayed by people who downvote such posts that are not relevant to them, harming those communities that are just struggling to get off the ground. I don’t think that’s terribly productive.
That was a common problem even in the old/bad place, once a post reached r/All causing a flood of toxic newcomers (this one more about receiving toxic comment replies than votes I think). And actually PieFed offers a solution where if the mod configures it such, only votes from subscribed community members gets counted. That aspect won’t federate with Lemmy though, since the latter is only aware of the binary options for voting and can’t handle such nuances currently.
I presume that people already know about the older communities like [email protected] and all the communities listed in its side-bar, but also check out the newer [email protected].
(unless there’s just a massive bot problem which I don’t have reason to suspect)
Actually those are known to exist - see e.g. https://lemmy.ca/post/58955248 - though as evidenced by that same post, the admins tend to be pretty on top of shutting them down.
Below that though, at the level of communities, Lemmy has a moderation problem. Reports from one instance to anther do not federate (well, on PieFed they do, but on Lemmy they don’t) - although like everything else this is promised to be fixed “soon” (same as last year iirc, and to a lesser degree the year before that too, though probably more in the sense of just having put it onto the roadmap), which allows toxicity to thrive. Ironically it also encourages having toxic mods as well, seeing as they are the only ones willing to put up with the majority of the negative flood pushed at them.
And don’t even get me started on the lack of notification to someone that their content was removed by a mod - people tend to find out days/weeks/years later/if at all, meaning that they continue unabated, not even aware at all (or at least, at first) that they have been so censured.
Lemmy also is lacking is so many other ways, e.g. content discovery is often primarily achieved by browsing All, rather than lets say by browsing Topic areas (I am not discouraging the existence of the All Feed, just bemoaning the lack of many alternatives to it). So communities get “stumbled upon” much more readily by people not actively searching for something anywhere close to that content type, who might tend to emotionally vomit upon people rather than be genuinely interested in constructive dialog.
Reddit is a multimillion dollar company and even though the vast majority of the features rolled out over the last decade either ignored or actively went against what the userbase wanted, it nonetheless was a fully feature-complete product. e.g. it triggered notifications upon removal of your content, it had a modmail allowing you to communicate with the team to ask why, and posts removed from a community remained active to anyone possessing the URL, allowing people to continue discussions already begun, which personally as a mod of a small gaming community I used to explain to the OP why I felt their post had to be removed, and we could talk about it back and forth. None of that can be done here (although PieFed now retains deleted posts, rendering them inactive/locked but preserving their content to be read, so that e.g. a Q&A would preserve the A part even if the OP deleted their Q).
The Threadiverse is great for FOSS, not so much great as in overall terms. We make sacrifices to be here, and the benefits tend to be more abstract and harder to explain in few words (at least without needing all kinds of MAJOR caveats about what does not work). Even Linux took decades to arrive at where it is at today, and until then it was primarily a CLI tool for all that time (gfx options often did not work as well or even properly at all, earlier in its development).
The amount of Karening aka entitlement that I’ve seen here (tbf it’s probably far worse in the likes of Reddit and Facebook by now) has shocked me. Mainly I mean: why would people downvote things simply for appearing in All… that’s literally what you asked to see, by choosing to browse “All”, and then you act like it has assaulted your delicate sensibilities? If you do not like it then block it and you’ll never have to see it again… or it’s even easier simply to scroll down.
Fewer here than there though (presumably).
Well damn, now I want to know just how good those cookies must be…
Also, username does not check out, unless there is cheese in those cookies, perhaps? 🧀
If it is Top, then that is what people are choosing to upvote. But you don’t have to browse by Top. PieFed even offers keyword filters, plus the ability to unsubscribe from all such communities while also allowing you to see them with just the touch of a button to go to a Topic Feed showing it when you (rarely) actually do want it. You could also replicate this behavior in Lemmy, but it takes having one account per Internet area and that’s a huge pain. Or you could just sort by New. Or block the users submitting such content. The list of configuration options available to you is practically endless, and nowhere explained in the slightest degree that would be helpful:-).
[email protected] does a pretty good job of keeping that stuff out.
And those who buck the system are fired.
… or worse.
That’s a fairly perfect answer imho, ticking all the boxes: (1) choosing to see that content becomes opt-in, rather than have to opt-out, crucially the reason why being that they have failed to abide by the rules of the wider community, and even been caught outright lying to instance admins; and (2) explaining the reasoning behind it, and how to un-do that decision (which can always be reversed later).
Yes PieFed has a ton of features but I agree that it needs some work still on its level of polish, which Lemmy does ever-so-slightly better with, being older. Fwiw [email protected] has asked the community whether it desires more of the former vs. latter and typically the past answers have leaned towards more features (although I suspect the tide is beginning to turn on that based on posts submitted to [email protected]). I do think that PieFed will end up being the future and leave Lemmy behind (e.g. Jeena’s story), though it would be even more ideal if they could both compete in offering fantastic utility as FOSS to everyone world-wide, in efforts to combat against enshittification of the internet!
I have recommended piefed.zip (and also lemmy.zip) in the past to people, but after you explained that I have zero reservations about it being labelled as “Newbie-friendly” and will recommend it all the more as the default go-to instance - with nothing against piefed.social obviously (I am on it myself!:-P) but as a bulwark against centralization I agree with @[email protected] that it would be most ideal to spread people around, which right now means more off of piefed.social.
Thank you for being a MAJOR part of the solution to advance the Threadiverse forward. I don’t care that it’s a week behind, I am so very glad that you responded here:-).
Minor note: the ToS in the instance chooser on piefed.social for Piefed.zip points to https://piefed.social/tos which says “not found”. That is the instance chooser pointed to by https://join.piefed.social/ so even though piefed.zip has its own could be helpful to change for people thinking of joining.
But also when they would ban someone, they would do so from every single community on their instance, including ones that you’ve never even heard of.
And then never bother to so much as tell you about your being banned.
And also deny you the ability to appeal or ask questions - e.g. Reddit has both a modmail and the ability to continue discourse directly in a post that has been removed from a community listing. Which as a former mod I would use to communicate rejection reasons and sometimes we’d go back and forth for days talking about the subject further, e.g. ways that the newcommer could modify it as to not piss off the old hands in the community (e.g. NSFW is allowed but must be properly labeled or some such).
Oh, and soon a change is going to give lemmy.ml veto power on what communities are allowed to be suggested to new instances - and being baked right into the code so there is no way to change that - rather than use a third-party listing. Edit: this proposed change has already been walked back, and while still using a centralized source for that information, at least makes it configurable by the new instance admin rather than hard-coding lemmy.ml as the singular authority (except as the default option).
I find it highly ironic that in some ways Lemmy, in particular .ml, is more authoritarian than even Reddit.
Bc people keep putting money into it, thereby incentivizing the continuation of the never-ending cycle…
Try to let it go and practice radical acceptance. What else has the slightest chance of you finding happiness? Do with this message whatever you will.
I heard that was highly community-dependent - the more high-profile a community the more likely for it to be removed.
Not all of them…some wear white hats? 😜
Thanks for the validation - indeed being able to block out what does not match our values is quite helpful for our sanity.
Fwiw, I’ve been on a crusade against hexbear for years, as many others here do as well.:-P
Agreed except that given its history, I strongly doubt that most of it ever will be. The developers of the Lemmy codebase made the software for their own desires, and it functions perfectly well as far as they are concerned, fitting in very well with the authoritarian nature of lemmy.ml where even mods seem cowed to barely do anything and instead the admin is the strongest initiator.
I have simultaneously both great respect to them for having made Lemmy as FOSS while also I realistically acknowledge that they do not have the same goals in mind that I and most Westerners do about the rights of individual people vs. that of the State. In their own words:
If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it
(In fairness here, they did later recant on that position, after great public outcry, to remove the hard-coded filters for swear words like “fuck” that were baked into the code at the time. Though Nutomic is absolutely correct in the general sense at least: if people want something that the devs do not want, it is not necessarily the devs responsibility to provide it? Similarly for changing the prioritization of which features to work on first.)
Therefore even without knowing the future plans of either platform, I can practically guarantee that you will see such features added to PieFed, probably multiple years before they show up on Lemmy. In fact it’s already started a year ago now where Lemmy’s “instance block” that still allows users from those supposedly “blocked” instances to read, vote on, and reply to your content, plus send you DMs, even triggering notifications, whereas PieFed allows you to block all users from an instance. PieFed’s version works, while Lemmy’s was promised for years and then never did, and at this point I assume never will.
And in a second example, PieFed just changed how deleted posts are handled: the user controls their own content, but not the content of others, so e.g. if they ask a question they can delete that question, but they can no longer delete the answers delivered to that question by other people.
Sorry if I am salty but I have lost hope in Lemmy. And I am putting all my hope instead into PieFed:-).
Excellent points. Perhaps Lady Butterfly might want to help redirect traffic from the old to the new. Like the note in the sidebar helps greatly for discovery, though some content did not look to me like it was cross-posted and instead submitted exclusively to the old communities, so at first glance it does look like it’s remaining alive. But fair point that it doesn’t need to be “promoted”:-).
Like this post explains: https://lemmy.ca/post/58955248.