(I’m a different person than who you were responding to earlier)

Those other things that you mention here are validated, however the “hard-coded blocklist” was demonstrably disproven. I suggest removing it from your comment because it only complicates the matter to mix in lies with the truth. There are a bunch of valid reasons to criticize PieFed over, we don’t need to spread misinformation muddying the issues.

Actually I think it predated a good amount of that. Iirc PyLova was started much earlier than most people realize, stemming out of a frustration from wanting to contribute to the project but then Mia’s contributions were reportedly taken by the main PieFed dev without seemingly proper acknowledgement. And then yes the PieFed drama caused additional attention to be paid to PyLova than previously (particularly in the earlier stages of the fork - surely that’s a huge learning curve).

PyLova hasn’t done a whole awful lot yet in some respects, but especially some of the more recent inclusions may be absolute game-changers moving forward, especially the ability to support user shareable blocklists. That should go a long way towards retaining people coming here from Reddit who would otherwise flee this toxic shithole (well, some major parts of the Threadiverse are that way at least - certain highly notable politics communities in particular spring to mind, though after blocking this place can become much more chill! even if noticeably quieter…:-P). And PyLova un-does a lot of the minor annoyances that the main PieFed dev did not feel fit into his vision - e.g. a user can choose to display both upvotes and downvotes side by side, just like in Lemmy.

Meanwhile, PieFed is off chasing better compatibility with Mastodon. Some people want that, so it is a laudable goal, but then PyLova is focusing on improving the existing experience here within the Threadiverse, which also seems laudable to me?

However it got started, it is contributing to improving things, as software forks often do - that ability is part of what makes FLOSS so great!!

Your choice of admin team is much more important than which software platform you use, especially if you use a third-party app like Voyager.

That particular part of the PieFed controversy was disproven, yet continually shared as misinformation nonetheless.

All of that kind of stuff is opt-in by the instance admins, nowhere close to hard-coded. Unlike the Tesseract situation. Also, Lemmy v1.0 will embedd a veto ability such that communities not acknowledged by Lemmy.ml will not be suggested to new instances - though this is opt-out as it can be configured from within the code, so also not hard-coded (though as opt-out rather than opt-in, is much closer to it).

There are plenty of reasons to not use PieFed, which is quite opinionated software (though Lemmy likewise is somewhat opinionated also, yet on the spectrum perhaps less so overall), but hard-coded blocklists is not one of them. Like Lemmy where people rail against the tankie devs, people just have a hate-on for the PieFed antifa dev, and like to smear the software with unwarranted accusations (weirdly instead of actually valid ones, which do exist, but perhaps those resonate less well somehow?).

Who offers free code as FLOSS, so there’s that. Life isn’t always binary coded.

I do need to find better language though, so that I don’t annoy people when I say that it is sometimes hard to have hope that this place will grow.

Bc really, growth isn’t the point?

Though it is necessary, even to remain afloat.

I don’t know if such an admin tool as you describe already exists - perhaps the grafana one meets that need? - so I will leave it to those who choose to install the code and become admins (even of just a personal instance) to comment further and give feedback.

That said, the community that you pointed to might be in a weird lockdown state, since I noticed that it has zero active mods. See the sidebar on the home instance and then the modlog offers the further knowledge that the only prior mod has been banned from that instance. If you want to revive it, you could appeal to the instance owner and become the new kid of it?

And that situation illustrates the difficulties that people face when coming here: this place isn’t quite a ghost town, but it is more empty than it is full. The people that have thrived here so far are those who approach it from an IT hobbiest standpoint and are willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work building it. But most people are not willing or capable to do likewise, which turns many away. The tools are still being built, and definitely lack polish atm.

But we are building them nonetheless (well, Mia is:-P, though we can help with suggestions!), steadily over time. So I am less concerned about current number of MAUs than in seeing the challenges be overcome, such as building these tools. Although that requires funding which in turn requires some level of MAUs, thus I am ecstatic about these subscribable blocklists to help keep people from fleeing this place!! 🤩

All the credit goes to you who actually bothered to implement them, that’s so great to see!!! 😁

On a privacy scale of 1 to 100: 2.

Mods can see it, all someone has to do is spin up a private instance and they can see it too, plus there’s Lemvotes. It’s kinda neat like I can see that I upvoted 8,052 posts and downvoted 17 from that account, or from this account I upvoted 15,327 comments and downvoted 86.

Some instances though - like PieFed.social - have defederated from Lemvotes, so anyone’s vote offered to a community on that instance will not be counted by Lemvotes. But ofc that’s merely one of many tools for me to find the data, whereas if someone spins up their own instance then they - or a community mod - can still see it by other means.

The reason I went into all this detail is bc if is relevant to your purpose that not everyone on the Threadiverse shares the same view about vote privacy. Some instances will defederate from yours in an attempt to retain control over the visibility of votes from their own. So perhaps you can devise some mechanism to allow admins the choice to opt-out, without having to defederate from your entire instance wholesale?

How ironic given the matter under discussion that Lemmy would throw out part of my comment reply. At least it did not simply silently discard ALL of it!! Though neither did it tell me about cutting it off either… the tools of the the Threadiverse really are quite inferior to those of Reddit (e.g. unpolished). Well, here is the rest:

…cover that my post had not federated. Worse, when it eventually did get federated, it did not appear to others as “new”, and instead looked like it had been submitted several days in the past, at which point people were not alerted to it, and it became buried amidst all the flood of prior posts that had already been engaged with, even though those had not been. It was quite sad, how bad the connectivity of the Threadiverse was 3-4 years ago:-(. These days it is a LOT better! Anyway, I feel like an admin tool would be a better fit for that situation than changing the way that all posts federated all of the time - if I understood you correctly there.

Oh, do you mean the private voting issue? I went on record as being against that right from the start, before he even made it. Obviously (to me) it was going to come across rather poorly when a ton of votes start flooding in that in every way looks indistinguishable from spam, plus it did not accomplish what it set out to do as it was implemented - it had enormous holes in it that could easily be worked around. It can be difficult for people to accept, but we need to live in reality, not a fantasy, even if the fantasy sounds nice.

If it helps, I had previously responded to some of the more controversial points that users had raised a year ago. I think I might have phrased things differently and even tweaked my position slightly since then, but the overall core remains the same: individuals should be free to do as they choose, including having the ability to block out content that they do not wish to see. That is nowhere close to the same thing as an institutionalized “echo chamber” effect such as goes on inside of the Tankie Triad - that is just people making choices for their own selves.

Absolutely. I was ready to leave Piefed over it.

I essentially did. I admit to being very wrong here - I thought, and even said publicly - that surely Rimu would reverse course and walk back that decision, as he had so very many others previously. But he instead dug down deeper, doubling down on being adamantly against people’s wishes. Which, as above, is his right to do so, but we have our rights too. I saw so many individual people complaining and even mentioning whole entire communities that had wanted to migrate over, but now indicated that they will not do so as a direct result of that decision. Plus the slrpnk.net entire instance was ready to migrate as well (that link is not from slrpnk.net bc it is down now for unrelated reasons so this is a cached copy on my own instance), but now is not doing so - that one I do not believe has had the full reasoning explained, and is a mixture of at least partly other factors, namely their Lemmy database corruption issue I think getting resolved or mitigated or some such. Through it all, Rimu’s response has been the same: “get used to it” / “deal with it”. He acts like Huffman, treating people as landed gentry on his platform. Which is… the truth!! Hence people have left it, and even more are choosing to simply go to it. Nonetheless, I truly do wish the best to the project… I just no longer have any hope that it will continue, most certainly not like it had in the past.

Here is a very interesting exchange illustrating that fact: https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2191276/upvotes-turn-green-but-number-doesn-t-change. The complaint was that “Upvotes turn green but number doesn’t change” (title text), and goes on to add “Basically the title. Sometimes it is logged as a failure but most often it’s not logged. Been happening for a few days…” The OP user made several comments like “I like being positive and I want to encourage people to post and comment. Often times I might not like or even agree with the poster/commenter but I value their interaction and viewpoint and think it’s important to encourage participation.”, and Rimu’s response was “There are a ton of other ways to support the fediverse. Find interesting content to post, write nice comments, moderate some communities, improve the docs for Lemmy, translate the UI, report a bug in the issue tracker, report spammers, spread the word on mainstream social media, donate money, and so on. Get creative.”

GET CREATIVE?!?

Rimu not only took away voting, and did so in a way that breaks the ActivityPub model - leaving users to scratch their heads wondering what error had occurred where the arrow turned green but the count did not change - but in response to why people were not allowed to vote anymore, he said to simply move on and do other things besides voting. He is wrong btw: people do not HAVE (as in forced) to accept his decision - the hidden, third option is simply to not engage with communities located on piefed instances anymore. And bam, just like that, communities such as [email protected] had their contributions drop like a rock (I skewed those stats a bit b/c I seemed to forget for a moment and submitted 6 posts before I remembered, as I tried out different 3rd-party apps to see what those experiences were like).

So I truly, genuinely wish the project all the success that it can muster. But yes, burning bridges does not bode well for its future. Technically the Snoopy thing might not be fully related, similar to slrpnk.net, but it certainly does not fill me with confidence that the stress fractures are not spreading further. Nor does the number of contributers declining. PugJesus shared with me in DMs that people were hopping mad at Rimu’s decision, but that he overrode all of their input and ram-rodded forward despite any complaints to the contrary. THAT process is the main thing that is killing off the code: not the decisions made, but HOW they were made. People need to feel like they are part of something, and that their input is valued. They feel… quite the opposite.

I do strongly hope for the success of PyLova. It has not made any major splashes yet - although this user-shareable blocklist feature alone could be a full GAME-CHANGER!! I do so eagerly anticipate more.

About politics: it is democracy itself that is dying off, globally. People were not willing to put forth the effort to maintain it, hence it is in decline, as it has literally always been throughout history. We are now doomed to repeat it, as was always going to happen. People being shocked says more about them then about the events that transpired to make them shocked.

Yeah, looks like there is some significant growth in the Threadiverse this week…

REALLY! That’s amazing! I would guess a migration over from Reddit. I hope they feel welcomed.

About downvotes, I misrecalled: Mia said that it was added to the to-do list to be added for the next release, although that was 3 months ago, and yet I have not seen it added yet. So something must be holding it off? The screenshots showing it in action (proof-of-concepts on a test server I presume?) are now gone too so perhaps they expired. That entire conversation with Mia is here if you want more details. Those screenshots of it working got me very excited about it!! And recalling those visuals was why I thought that it had already been done but… not so, in the public release, it would seem.:-(

On a different note, I ran across a post who deleted there account, because almost no one was voting on their posts. I think it was a federation issue, as in the community hosting instance never received the posts and they only stayed local.

There are a lot of “unfriendly” aspects such as this to the Fediverse. I see some people fleeing now because their instance went belly-up - off-hand I can think of mander.xyz and slrpnk.net and… at least one more that I cannot now recall the name of (their admin team simply listed a single account beginning with "The ", which at least at one point had not posted for years), all of which are having issues. Of course that is simply par for the course for the Fediverse model!

But less necessary are those bot spam posts made ostensibly to make the place look more welcoming and active and alive - at first glance, but then those accounts (almost?) never respond to anyone’s comment, which sours people and leaves a negative impression of this place as being a ghost town. Which arguably it kinda is, but not really, and if they would invest effort into learning more and figuring out how to block such then it can be better!! But… it is simply not worth the effort, when Reddit and FaceBook and Insta and X and Bluesky have REAL (high amounts of) content, so investing all that effort to learn and block what they do not want will yield significantly greater dividends… they seem to think, and by the mantra that “the customer is always right”, they are correct. Thereby if we want to attrack them more, we need to offer such blocking by default, making unregistered bot accounts either outright illegal or at least opt-in rather than allowing them to be opt-out. All of which Rimu was helping to lead the good fight against… until he chased everyone else away and poisoned the well. Now I would put my hopes into the shareable blocklists to do such.

About your idea: I disagree. An admin that is hosting their own instance is different than someone who is simply using an existing instance. Such a person should have access to a “connectivity health” monitoring tool yes, but I don’t see why it would need to be on a per-post basis. Not having hosted an instance myself, I would naively hope that such a tool already exists, even if it is not graphical? Also, if the tool needed to spend 5 minutes and actively seek out that data to build such a graph, that is not so bad to have such a spike in traffic, for the express purposes of displaying it to someone who explicitly asked for such? I mean as opposed to having every single post do this across the entire Threadiverse, at all times. For instance if I make a post to [email protected], even as a mere user (not an instance admin) I can go over to that instance at https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse/ and look for my post there (similarly for comments). I have routinely done that many times in the past, especially from StarTrek.Website that had such horrible network connectivity at the time that I joined it, prompting me to seek out Discuss.Online that has such fantastic uptime due to spectacularly capable admins (including Jgrim the author of Sublinks). Previously though, I would likewise post something and then getting zero up- (or down-) votes, go seek out why, and dis

It is so amazing to see the amount of energy and enthusiasm you are putting into this project!! 😍 🤩

Like I’ve wanted in-like editing for 2 years now!!

And shareable blocklists I think will be a literal game-changer.

This is fantastic progress!!

Success!

- Grok’s accounting department

Oh, yeah they are. I just presumed that they would be merged back into PieFed like previous improvements.

You should really enjoy it!:-)

Feature parity with old reddit?

It having used LLM aid is going to be extremely unpopular here on the Threadiverse, but Reddit users won’t care in the slightest I would guess, so a non-issue as far as they are concerned.

I never liked old reddit myself, but a ton of people do so that’s a great way to welcome them!

And so much the better if it can also add in the RES features!? (I think that’s Reddit Enhancement Suite? another thing that I never personally used but heard about often)

The main blockers of course are a near total lack of content (from their perspective, as going from a flood about every subject imaginable to a trickle except politics, especially American, and Linux, is “near total” to them - anyway it is what it is, and nobody is saying that they have to switch to here entirely in one go, just start visiting here occasionally, if they feel like it?), and of course them not feeling welcome. Mainly bc they are not welcomed - e.g. right-wingers, even if they voted blue in the recent election in the USA, aren’t going to feel terribly welcomed here.

The shareable user blocklists should help a ton with that though, if people start building and promoting them - perhaps one chosen as a representative and applied by default?

I am a bit behind in catching up - thanks for sharing all that, both the topics with the PyLova devs and making sure I was kept in the loop as well:-).

I don’t recall the prior issue, unless it was the one with user blocking being silent. On that one I was swayed by the argument that it simply had to be that way due to limitations within Lemmy. Which made a lot of sense to me, since that happens a great deal actually. e.g. PieFed offers polls and user and post flairs, all of which Lemmy will ignore, as is its right and choice to do so.

But the vote quota crosses a line where iirc it doesn’t even tell other PieFed instances - nor Mbin nor nodeBB nor Mastodon etc. - what is going on. It’s horribly designed, or at least it was upon release and if it has changed since then I have not heard of such. Some features take literally years to be implemented, but this one is slammed down everyone’s throats against all objections to the contrary without anyone seeming to have been heard? Sure, whatever, Rimu can do as he pleases, but it makes it really hard to hold out any hope for the future of this project when people keep losing investment in it (now Snoopy having become the latest casualty, seemingly? at least it appears that way).

The Innuendo Studios YouTube series The Alt-Right Playbook does a superb job at explaining how someone can fall into authoritarian thinking. It doesn’t so much involve logic as emotional manipulation. Particularly interesting are those in the outer circle of the onion-like layers that are shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED 😲 😳, when they find out that the people who had been screeching all along at the top of their lungs who they are, suddenly start doing the very things that they always said that they were going to do if they only had the power to make it happen. With perhaps just one or two… “minor” adjustments, which now place them on the outside rather than in, as the enemy rather than beneficiary of all the absolute violence and horror. Like the target rather than the perpetrator of a genocide.

It really helps to realize that sometimes people lie on the internet.

PieFed is growing, agreed, though mainly due to lemmynsfw.com having fallen and chosen PieFed as its replacement. Which is valid but an outlier, skewing the stats heavily by just that singular data point. PieFed is still growing despite that though, just not by nearly so much or robustly, if all the decisions about planned migrations that were cancelled as a result of the daily vote quota issue do not get reversed or replaced by others.

I’ve brought up the topic of separating downvotes from upvotes with Rimu years ago, it seems very unlikely to happen. Mainly because he does not want it himself, therefore does not want to expend much effort to put it into the code (understandable), and also it is legitimately a difficult UI issue that he prefers to leave to others. PyLova has already done it though, as you noted, along with so many other things that Rimu was never going to get around to. Gold lining, even Platinum!?:-)

The ones usually defederated from by most instances across the Threadiverse are hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and hilariouschaos.com. However, it would be weird to instance block them from PieFed.social because they look like they are still already defederated from, so there should be no need to add a block on top of that?

I am kinda glad that PieFed.social helps provide a less toxic environment for new joiners. The problem is, as you are discovering first-hand, the confusion that it creates when people have a really hard time finding this stuff out.

Now that your immediate problem is solved, do you think you’ll remain on PieFed.social, or switch to something like PieFed.zip or quokk.au?

How are you liking PieFed itself? For me it took weeks to figure out a whole new workflow, but once I adjusted I was definitely sold on it being better.

Oh wow, which ones are blocked automatically?

It seems like PieFed.social is quite opinionated, which is a fact that has not been made transparent to the community - e.g. I have a PieFed.social account myself, and I had no idea that these blocks were there (also, they aren’t present for me).

But that’s the instance itself - the software PieFed or its fork PyLova are outstanding, and definitely superior to Lemmy, even though your choice of instance admin matters far more than choice of software platform.

If you did leave PieFed.social - not that I am recommending that you do, especially now that you see how to remove the blocks, which solves your immediate issue - then I recommend checking out PieFed.zip or PieFed.ca as both having outstanding instance admin teams that take good care of their users. e.g. PieFed.zip also has a couple of instance blocks placed onto your account when you join, but you are sent a message explaining what these are, and importantly how to remove them, not leaving you guessing what is going on.

Again I am really curious which instances were blocked automatically for you, on PieFed.social?

One more note: Lemmy.ml is notorious for being an echo chamber as well, instance banning MANY people over the years, so the fact that PieFed.social has lately become similar is not a strike against the PieFed software platform itself anymore than lemmy.ml’s choices would be a strike against you having an account on some other instance like sh.itjust.works.

In Lemmy, no way.

In Tesseract (yes, that Tesseract!) there was a partial way, but only if the posts happened to come in as part of the same batch when accessing the instance. db0 helpfully made a fork of that, but the community outcry was so enormous that several instances simply dropped support of it entirely rather than switch to using that fork.

In PieFed, partially, but only for those sharing the same URL (like these examples probably do?) - so text-only posts do not qualify.

And then 3rd-party apps add a whole new dimension to this, by replacing the Lemmy/PieFed/PyLova/Mbin front-end with their own stuff. Note that Voyager provides only rudimentary support for PieFed. Overall, app support for the improvements that PieFed makes over Lemmy is still fairly shitty, sorry to say - note that you can tweak some settings in a web browser (like user blocks & such that are entirely impossible in Lemmy) and then that affects your using the 3rd-party app on a more daily basis, but many of the more advanced features of PieFed/PyLova are still inaccessible from most 3rd-party apps. See this wiki page for more details - like “Crosspost comment merge” is only supported in Interstellar, and some features (like a mod locking a post) is not available from any app, iOS or Android.

Lemmy is the same way - reducing such crossposts an extremely often-requested feature, for both software platforms, but so far I think only PieFed accessed via a web browser can do it even partially. Or certain 3rd-party apps (not sure which ones, though I’ve looked at several FLOSS offerings and did not see that - maybe only paid ones do?)