Lemmy.ca&#39;s Main Community

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[–] TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca [S] 1 point 1 year ago* (4 children)

Transparency isn't a popularity game, but it is the fallback when the arguments against it have been exhausted or rebutted. Ironically enough (or the opposite thereof), reactionary populism is the sort of thing a lack of transparency within these systems stimulate since it allows the artificial simulation of a group for users susceptible to group psychology.

Not everything devolves into a popularity game. You are thinking of a reality show.

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

You're talking about 'transparency' in the accountability context. Transparency of voting, transparency of public posting history etc. I'm referring to it terms of honesty from the developer here about what they want, and reading into what the audience wants and why they want it.

Every site has to make some balance between privacy and transparency for its userbase. If the majority of a website audience does want some interaction on the site to be private, to be obfuscated, something that if made private would have consequences to the sites operations - then that's what they want. I think it would be bad if Rimu just said "screw everyone, I'll do what I like" and overruled the prevailing opinion.

But in any case, as I said, your criticism is not of piefed here but piefed.social as other instances could have always just implemented public voting entirely regardless of what piefed.social chose to do.

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[–] TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca [S] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

If a majority of an audience wants something, then they can fork. That's how open source works. If I considered the issue significant enough and worth the hassle, I could fork it - with varying degrees of success depending on how skilled I was at doing so. Security through obscurity is a big no-no in open source, and that's what this private voting is. Mbin, lemvotes, or just setting up your own instance as an admin - there are plenty of workarounds to get at the data for a bad actor, it just feeds speculation and manipulation for a problem that isn't there, and a popularity contest is not a counterargument.

"Screw everyone, I'll do what I like" is a hallmark of every principled open source developer, a tradition set by Linus Torvalds himself. People don't use their software because it is a popularity contest - there's no shortage of popularity contests that have been excluded from the Linux kernel - people use it because the function meets the demand, and the democratic recourse if they don't like it are forks.

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[–] Blaze@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 year ago

that’s what this private voting is

Private voting using anonymous agents that were used instead of the users has been removed.

What is possible now for Piefed users is

only vote locally, your vote stays on your local instance, but nobody except the instance admins and the community mods can see it
vote in a federated way, but then indeed you accept that your votes will be visible via Mbin, lemvotes or whatever.

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 1 point 1 year ago

If a majority of an audience wants something, then they can fork. That’s how open source works.

Yes, they can run their own. But obviously people will pressure an instance that is used more than instances that are not. In terms of lemmy, the public policy of lemmy.world is up for more litigation than lemmy.today. Same goes with piefed.social.

But in any case, your argument is still not criticism of piefed - but purely piefed.social.