PieFed, at the discretion of community mods, offers restriction of voting to only subscribed community members. This limits drive-by downvoting from All, where people would not have read the community rules (which in PieFed are repeated in their entirety at the bottom of every post from that community).

It also offers restriction of voting to only “trusted” instances, thereby introducing a third category between the binary federation vs. defederation.

I have also seen communities on PieFed that disable downvoting entirely, even to subscribed members, even on the same instance.

Community mods can enable or disable these settings at will iirc.

“B-b-but my side virtuous (in all ways, and can do no wrong), while their side ignoramus (everything they do is because they are poopy-heads)!”

I wish I could add /s here but a good half the population on earth seems to hold to this as an invariant position, solidarity in the face of all obstacles, i.e. the Nazi bar effect.

Case in point: who doesn’t love it when a religious institution offers food and shelter and medical care to the needy, or counsels people to forgive, laying down their burdens and seek therapy to thereby travel lighter through the world? It is the diddling kids part that for some strange reason (/s on this one) people tend to get upset?

Since we were talking about Zionism here, I will mention that Deuteronomy 13:5 (in the Torah, part of the Old Testament for Christian and Muslim and offshoot religious branches such as Mormonism) provides an EXTREMELY stern warning about those who would misuse their authority to lead people astray.

TLDR: intolerance paradox - if you tolerate the intolerant, it corrupts the entire system, giving it a bad reputation when people see the worst excesses and extrapolate that to infer the properties of the whole. e.g. Reddit is fascist, hence we did not stay and put up with it but rather moved here.

(Alt-)“Left” != Left, and in fact shares far more in common with Right (aka: fascism).

One of PieFed’s earliest features was the separate distinction between NSFW and NSFL / gore. Although with Lemmy lacking that, I would guess that any poster would be afraid to rely on it without also toggling the NSFW label as well.

Most Lemmy issues lay in wait for literally many years before being worked on at all. At best, the devs struggle to work with their command of the difficult Rust language, while at worst they pick and choose primarily issues that they want to see implemented on their home instances lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad.ml, while the needs of the wider Threadiverse are less important to them. (Or both?:-P)

Which btw is somewhat fine - this is FOSS we are talking about here - except that many people would like to donate to them in hopes that an increased level of code development would occur, only to be extremely disappointed to find out just how much of those funds goes instead to maintain lemmy.ml (seemingly including time spent moderating extremely controversial topics such as criticisms of Russia, China, or North Korea).

Also, there are very long-standing bugs that have been well-known for many years that go unresolved. This is why I say that it is likely unintentional. Authoritarians tend to not have much sympathy for people who want to individually curate their experiences on the platform, vs. simply taking what is given and STFU about it, at least as far as admins are concerned - i.e. curation for them is done at the instance or community moderator level, rather than the individual human. So not much time is expended upon those features - see e.g. the horribly named (so much so as to almost be disinformation) “instance block” that still allows “blocked” users to read, vote on, and reply to your content, plus send you DMs, and then a later code change further added the ability for those DMs to trigger notification pings - again, this is what rights the “BLOCKED” users have, to someone wanting to block them, whereas conversely the rights of people wanting to institute such a block include: shutting the fuck up, and move to a non-Lemmy platform (including the OP’s dubvee.org since he personally instituted real blocking capabilities there, at least specifically for Lemmy.ml, whereas PieFed allows a user to custom block any instance they choose, independently of instance admin approval).

See also https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed and https://slrpnk.net/post/29381524 for some discussions about those long-standing bugs that remain unfixed for years and years and years. i.e. I have no problem believing that the devs gave so little attention to this particular issue as for it to have caused unintentional side-effects - at this point it would be more shocking to me to have read that it had been implemented correctly. 🤷‍♀️

It would have been helpful yeah.

Tbf, this behavior is very much unintentional, as OP explicitly lays out, and would like to make others aware and stop it from happening.

Also, an individual user can “speak about” an instance just fine without getting thus censured - it’s only community sidebar descriptions being caught up in this sweep unintentionally.

So yeah, OP himself shares your distaste that this is a bad thing? But it is not a thousandth as bad as you are making it out to be - which given recent flamewars about Tankies vs. PieFed I wanted to make things crystal clear even if you meant every word there in jest, so that others do not get mislead.

Maybe this can be your first code change PR? 😉

Whoopsie!

Like all of it?! At once!?

I doubt you have what it would take to satisfy.

Sorry to resurrect this old issue but @robottoaster@mander.xyz and I were discussing after that other thread got locked (likewise tagging @blaze@piefed.zip for relevance in feedback), and we realized that a wording choice may be leading to confusion for people.

The page at https://piefed.zip/auth/instance_chooser where it says “Defederation: Negligent” was leading @robottoaster@mander.xyz to believe that a critical judgement had been rendered against PieFed.zip by virtue of it not having defederated from certain well-known “disliked” instances. Rimu indeed can be quite strong in his dislike of certain things - communities, post types, and the like.

So instead I recommend the word “Negligible” rather than “Negligent”, since PieFed.zip counts it a point of pride to be “a general instance open to anyone!”, and its lack of defederation from most instances is a positive, not a deficiency as the word “Negligent” would suggest.

I just thought that I would pass that thought along, in case it helps avoid future misunderstandings, and help entice people to try out PieFed.zip!:-)

Like phone calls, and texting, bad actors ruin everything that they touch.

Okay so you have some good points, especially towards the beginning, but just so we are on the same page: are you aware that moderation reports do not federate? Or rather, that they do in PieFed but not in Lemmy. Things are rarely so black and white, good and evil, healthy or not. (I forget, will Lemmy 1.0 add this capability? Anyway PieFed already has it.)

introducing arbitrary metrics that can be used to limit the visibility of expression

Investigate just a tiny bit into the moderation practices going on at lemmy.ml.

not just on the local instance but across many

That one is harder to investigate but there too - Lemmy devs (who also are the same ones moderating lemmy.ml, and yes monetary funds donated towards “Lemmy development” absolutely go to that, rather than code changes, with no way to opt out of that, unless you donate to Nutomic directly, which brings up… shall we say other issues relating to limitations on free expressions, particularly for trans people) in the last year added a hard-coded instance name that can provide a list of which communities it wanted to suggest to new instances as being popular, essentially giving that instance veto power. ONE instance, controlling all new instances, unless the admin does additional work to discover those shadow-banned rejections and add them manually.

Take one guess which instance was chosen to have that veto power? Yeah, lemmy.ml, surprise. Tbf, this has since been walked back, and while the instance names are still hard-coded, the new instance admin now has multiple options that they can select from (so the selection of any particular one of those is not, anymore). I am not sure how transparently this is presented to them.

Things get better with time and even more with attention. The PieFed devs are extremely receptive to feedback. The Lemmy devs… well, they are at least somewhat receptive - tbf Rust is a difficult language and that seems to constrain how much they are willing to do in any given timeframe (unless there is some other reason that requests go for years and years and years without being done?). Lemmy is just older, and also it receives funding (except again, it is exceedingly difficult to ensure that such funding actually goes towards code development), so then in that light, PieFed’s development is SUPREMELY impressive. Yes more work will need to be done with it still.

Let’s get busy and make the Threadiverse healthier - all of us, together!?:-)

Edit: to be clear, your point is a good one, I am talking below about the discussion going on in the link.

lolz, so much disinformation there though. Like:

What’s sad is that since lemmy.ml is blocked by default, most PieFed users won’t see it.

I think there might be one major instance that chose to do this, and I cannot even recall offhand which one, so obviously it’s not THAT major. This is some LLM-level of analysis right there (Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net are blocked from many instances, and people often lump lemmy.ml together into a triad, hence lemmy.ml must be automatically blocked as well!).

Funny enough, Lemmy.ml disallows what they consider cuss words, which were even hard-coded, and when asked they told the community to take a hike (“create a fork and stop bothering us about it”), until after a huge outcry they did eventually relent.

Lemmy users be like “why can’t we all get along…”, yet feel absolutely free to criticize every tiny aspect (including - in fact especially - fictional ones) of PieFed, while ignoring how e.g. lemmy.ml kicks people out of communities they’ve never even so much as heard of for not praising Russia, China, or North Korea hard enough.

My side always does good and never bad, other side always does bad and never good. Much tribal, so cringe.

To be clear, defederation has nothing whatsoever to do with PieFed.

Defederation happens on Lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, nodeBB, and every other type of software across the entire Fediverse. It is even an absolutely crucial tool to prevent CSAM which depending on the locality of the affected instance could get it shut down and potentially the instance owner exposed to actual criminal charges. (There are other ways, but typically defederation is the easiest.)

Likewise, lemmy.ml famously censors what they consider cusswords on their instance - with a hard-coded list even, iirc, at least it was at one time, years ago - but then after much outcry this censorship was made optional in the code.

So defederation is a reason to not join an instance in favor of some other one, but has nothing to do with wanting to either avoid or preferentially pick an instance running PieFed. In fact the opposite is true, as the PieFed software allows additional options beyond simply federate vs. defederate, allowing instance admins choices between those two extremes. This finer granularity is so helpful! e.g. the PieFed.zip instance blocks Hexbear.net by default for new users, but explains how to remove that, thereby offering hexbear as opt-in content, rather than having to choose between treating it identically the same as all other instances or else cutting it out entirely.

PieFed also allows notes to be placed onto content, which is particularly helpful for places such as Beehaw where their stated ToS differs from the usual across the rest of the Threadiverse.

In fact I am not aware of any particular reason to avoid running PieFed, but anyway even presuming that such exists, defederation is definitely not among them.

Sigh… yup.

Though Lemmy is still in beta (almost out though) and PieFed barely that as well. We of the “early adopter” mindset are helping polish the interfaces so that “one day” non-technical normie users can enjoy coming here.

At that time, availability of content will be crucial. But for now, I understand why they do not bother to do so. Anytime I want to know about some worldwide or local event that is happening, I end up having to go back to Reddit to have even a ghost of a chance at learning about it - and note that REAL normies don’t bother with Reddit even, as it is too niche and nerdy for them.

Only protest communities have a strong need to get out from under the authoritarian boot heels, but those should not be on the open clear web to begin with, leaving the Threadiverse as a tiny side project offshoot of Mastodon’s wider Fediverse. For now, but the tools are getting better all the time… PieFed practically weekly! 🥧🍰😋

No? Life is rarely binary.

For instance PieFed.zip both does not defederate with hexbear while at the same time not exposing new users to them unawares by placing a user-level block (which unlike Lemmy’s actually stops showing all content from those users) upon new account creation but then explains to the user how to remove that at any time. This makes interactions with them opt-in rather than have to discover it and be opt-out, so I consider it ideal. (Although I haven’t tested how that would show up to users browsing without an account - that might be a loophole.)

Or, a true opt-out solution could place a message underneath every post from that instance explaining how users are known to be combative, arguing in bad faith for “the dunk” and extremely likely to break your own instance’s rules and not conform to generally accepted standards of behavior. Something similar is done for Beehaw on PieFed.social, using that community’s own exact wording and linking to their ToS that differs greatly from the norm. However, I would wager that virtually all 3rd party apps would ignore this.

Defederation is not a first resort, it is rather the last one and for Lemmy, literally the only one provided when instance admins refuse to enforce both the rules of others and even their own stated ones (to keep trolling inside the community yet do not spread it to others WITHOUT CONSENT). Defederation from hexbear is not punitive - even members of hexbear have expressed a desire to defederate themselves from the outside world, to avoid all this drama - but rather protective of the wider Threadiverse overall, for new members to feel more comfortable joining us here.

Agreed.

It does not help that moderation reports do not federate among Lemmy instances. They do in PieFed, I don’t know about Mbin, but between Lemmy instances they do not, making the level of effort placed upon moderators really high by limiting the available pool to those on the same instance as the community.

It also does not help when instance admins protect those doing the bullying, such as hexbear admins that have even been caught lying to the admins of other instances, and refuse to police (i.e. ban) their own account holders as they constantly violate the rules on other instances. At that point, defederation becomes the only option left, except that many instances including yours are so high averse to defederations that instead the behaviors in question are essentially given carte blanche to continue without any means at all to stop it.

A fact that new visitors very much see - even if we old hands do not anymore, after having set up personal blocks aka blacklisting or otherwise view only Subscribed content aka exclude such via our whitelisting procedure. And new users that see what we have chosen to forget exists here go back and tell others about how unfriendly this place was to them.

So long as we leave the vast majority of the moderation burden on the individual user themselves, the Threadiverse is not going to grow and instead will continue to shrink. i.e. all the weeds are choking the garden.

Every single person that I’ve told about Lemmy has outright scolded me for having mentioned it to them. I may have lost a couple of acquaintance connections even as a result.

When people Google search for “Lemmy” or otherwise get taken to lemmy.ml (didn’t someone say that the so-called “random” instance picker chose either it or hexbear like 90% of the time?), see the content calling for murder of Westerners and the demise of Western civilization, is it any wonder that they choose not to come here, or if they create an account, to not remain?

Their preferences matter - to themselves at the very least, even if not to our instance admins that do not want to block it out so that potential new joiners won’t have to see it presented with zero warning or any distinction at all that it may differ from any of the other content in this place.

Regarding the Threadiverse in general, it seems that (1) many people find having to choose an instance first to be very confusing (not applicable to your situation I guess), (2) upon arrival these primarily Western people immediately see content proposing the murder of Westerners and demolition of the entire Western culture, whereupon they nope right back out (can you blame them?) and then complain bitterly about their toxic experiences here on other platforms, including Reddit and Bluesky and X.

Most of us forget how extensive our blocklists here have grown to be over time, and how much effort we put into Linux levels of tinkering to discover communities we like while blocking content we do not.

If I am wrong then please ignore me, but it’s a thought to consider.

Of course mostly it’s a network effect, so I am speaking about issues that we might actually be able to do something about.