Fediverse

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 2 weeks ago (21 children)

Institutionally at least, anything goes - including the worst CSAM.

Perhaps this is an exceedingly poor way to describe it - I just meant that federation (like with ML, hexbear, lemmygrad, and any new instance) happens by default. Instances that host CSAM - like extremist far-right content - are quickly defederated from by the rest of the Threadiverse, but such requires effort on behalf of the instance admin. I thought, though perhaps I am wrong.

Anyway it could still be misleading even if correct, bc this is at the instance level, whereas someone still has to subscribe at the community level in order for content to begin coming in. So the potential for content - good, bad, or whatever - to spread is baked right into the ActivityPub Protocol from the start, by design. Just like what people keep saying about 4chan (though admittedly I never went there personally).

And people must have subscribed to hexbear and lemmygrad and ML communities on all of the major instances, therefore all of that content was already there for me to stumble upon as a new joiner myself, fresh from KBin where it had been severely curtailed. I - like all other new joiners - then bad a decision whether to flee this place permanently (which I almost did, and continue to revisit that thought every year or so as expectations keep not being met, making it all the harder to hold out much hope for the future) or to begin blocking people, one by one, and even making a (successful) petition to defederate discuss.online from hexbear.net.

All of which is a lot of effort, especially since it must continue to happen with each fresh new alt made to subvert bans. Each new joiner must then be subjected this again and again, like a hazing ritual that we who have been through such already now offer little to no help to new joiners to avoid. Except for your codeberg request that will help to change that - hooray!

Ultimately, it's arguably fine for places like 4chan and nostr to exist (unless you take the position that the echo chamber then breeds toxic trolls that when they leave it, act to harm others, though keep in mind that in this analogy, the Threadiverse itself is 4chan and nostr, in that we allow anything and everything, especially on ML that we then host on all of our machines too - e.g. if ML were to ever go down, that content would continue to remain, foreve, just like happened with Lemm.ee), but what's far less fine is to allow people to stumble upon it unawares, particularly when it is labeled oppositely from what it truly is. A place's reputation should proceed it, not be entirely ignored and force each new joiner to discover it all over again on their own, as what happens with ML.

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[–] Vicinus@piefed.zip 2 points 2 weeks ago (20 children)

... are quickly defederated from by the rest of the Threadiverse, but such requires effort on behalf of the instance admin. I thought, though perhaps I am wrong.

I have no source for this, but I think, now, first content/post/comment from a new instance has to be approved by an instance admin (could be wrong and misremembering though). If not, might be worth seeing if that is a option admins would want added. Thoughts?

... or to begin blocking people, one by one ...

All of which is a lot of effort, especially since it must continue to happen with each fresh new alt made to subvert bans. Each new joiner must then be subjected this again and again, like a hazing ritual that we who have been through such already now offer little to no help to new joiners to avoid. Except for your codeberg request that will help to change that - hooray!

On that note, it seems Pylova has finished writing up the block subscription code (yesterday) and it'll be in the next update (unknown date).

... if ML were to ever go down, that content would continue to remain, foreve, just like happened with Lemm.ee) ...

It could remain forever, but I think most instances (or at least Piefed instance) are set up to delete old content after "x" amount of time. Alternatively, admins could just manually delete the old content, if they wanted.

... A place’s reputation should proceed it, not be entirely ignored and force each new joiner to discover it all over again on their own, as what happens with ML.

Agreed. I think .zip's approach where it has the default blocks and explains them is a good approach. If the subscribable blocks also make it into the on-boarding, I think there will be a large swath of new .zip users who almost never encounter the triad issues (assuming Pylova subscribable block list spreads back to Piefed and beyond). If that on boarding spreads throughout the Threadiverse, the triad could be dealt with, without major confrontations, which I think most admins don't want to deal with.

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 2 weeks ago (19 children)

I think what you are referring to is not content so much as that new communities needed - in the past - to have been added by someone before others could find them in the community listing. This was not restricted to admins though & people like Blaze had an army of alts and did much of that, as did I on my own instances as well. This was necessary before the first post could come in from each new community, needing to be performed on a per-community basis.

However, PieFed made an improvement to not need to do this anymore, and then Lemmy followed suit as well, and now the whole process is much easier. Although it gives Lemmy.ml specifically veto power in that if a community is banned or the instance it is on is defederated from Lemmy.ml, then the automatic pulling in of the community name is no longer done. Technically admins - or again, I think anyone - can always add it the old way, but only if you know that it exists and how to make that happen (which isn't hard but requires crafting a URL rather than mere clicking on links). Also, the admins can designate a different instance than Lemmy.ml, though Lemmy.ml is set as the default, so this procedure is opt-out.

Those PyLova devs are hella impressive!!! Rimu seems less interested in the Threadiverse these days and more in interoperability with Mastodon, despite how most of us seem to not even want that, and Mbin already exists. It's okay for him to work on whatever he wants, but it makes it all the more impressive to see how responsive the PyLova is to the needs of the people on the Threadiverse.

I don't think that most instances do delete old content. Lemmy.world self-reportedly has content from decades in the past from nodeBB but I think their database got corrupted and I don't trust that. However, here is an example on my own instance https://discuss.online/post/5497584 showing the retaining of a post to a community on Lemmy.ml from 8 years ago.

The PieFed thing was once again another of Rimu's rants against "unserious" meme content. He is obviously entitled to not feel forced into providing unlimited hosting for images, but I am saying that the limitation built into the PieFed software and enacted on e.g. PieFed.social may not be universally applied. I could well see e.g. lemmynsfw.app choosing differently to retain every image forever. Unfortunately there's almost no way to know short of directly asking the admin team, who may not even be aware themselves what settings are in place on their own machines.

This is a limitation of all Fediverse software that I've seen, including Lemmy and Mbin, so not just PieFed. Though PyLova does have the most transparency of all of them... and yet I haven't seen even PyLova expose whatever these settings are to the public. Even though someone might make a choice as to which instance they want to make an account on (or even start up their own) if they could find the answer.

I think even subscribable blocklists would only be the first part of an overall answer. Like UBlock Origin, it's going to require people to manufacture and maintain those lists. But... at least the software will support that now, so yes indeed this is the very important, crucial first step!!

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[–] Vicinus@piefed.zip 1 point 2 weeks ago (18 children)

I think what you are referring to is not content so much as that new communities needed - in the past - to have been added by someone before others could find them in the community listing. This was not restricted to admins though & people like Blaze had an army of alts and did much of that, as did I on my own instances as well. This was necessary before the first post could come in from each new community, needing to be performed on a per-community basis.

I'm aware of that aspect, and I may be conflating it with on-boarding new instances.

Although it gives Lemmy.ml specifically veto power in that if a community is banned or the instance it is on is defederated from Lemmy.ml, then the automatic pulling in of the community name is no longer done.

Also, the admins can designate a different instance than Lemmy.ml, though Lemmy.ml is set as the default, so this procedure is opt-out.

The Lemmy software now utilizes a centralized authority, TIL.

Rimu seems less interested in the Threadiverse these days and more in interoperability with Mastodon, despite how most of us seem to not even want that, and Mbin already exists.

I don't want to prescribe motives to his actions, but I feel like some of his positions and efforts are to "dominate" the threadiverse and knock out the competition.

In this case, Mbin. From my understanding, Mbin is pretty far behind in development (lots of bugs and missing features), only have 2 part time developers and they are trying to supplement that with AI/LLMs. I suspect the LLMs will help them for a bit, but the project will die when the code is only manageable by LLMs and prices for vibe-coding go up significantly.

When that happens, all the Mbin users could "easily" migrate to Piefed. Though, I imagine, if Piefed gets Mastodon implementation working properly, that may cause a migration then too (possibly death spiraling Mbin, if the migration is large enough).

Those PyLova devs are hella impressive!!!

... it makes it all the more impressive to see how responsive the PyLova is to the needs of the people on the Threadiverse.

Yeah, they are :)

I don’t think that most instances do delete old content. Lemmy.world self-reportedly has content from decades in the past from nodeBB but I think their database got corrupted and I don’t trust that. However, here is an example on my own instance https://discuss.online/post/5497584 showing the retaining of a post to a community on Lemmy.ml from 8 years ago.

Yeah, now that you mention it, I'm not sure how wide spread deletion is. I believe I recall one of Rimu's blog posts mentioned it in some depth, so I assumed at least some instances are taking advantage of it (especially with the price of hardware).

Unfortunately there’s almost no way to know short of directly asking the admin team, who may not even be aware themselves what settings are in place on their own machines.

... yet I haven’t seen even PyLova expose whatever these settings are to the public. Even though someone might make a choice as to which instance they want to make an account on (or even start up their own) if they could find the answer.

That's a good point. Maybe worth another Pylova feature request?

I think even subscribable blocklists would only be the first part of an overall answer. Like UBlock Origin, it’s going to require people to manufacture and maintain those lists.

Hmm. I'm imagining someone will just make a block list as their only blocking measure and anytime they need to block someone, they'll just add them to the list, and people will subscribe to that list or multiple lists.

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 1 week ago (17 children)

The Lemmy software now utilizes a centralized authority, TIL

Actually that probably will not begin until v1.0, now that I think about it. Anyway it's only for convenience of pulling in community names, to help onboard a new instance, while existing instances won't need it. Also the central authority could be let's say Lemmy.zip, or sh.itjust.works, or whatever the admin sets it to. If they even know that setting exists, and are willing to tweak the code to make that happen. Otherwise, yeah it's Lemmy.ml that gets the first even if not final say in what communities are suggested to new instances.

It is things like this that prove the lie to people complaining that Rimu is too controlling of PieFed instances, when features like the above exist showing Lemmy.ml the same or even more. The vast majority of Rimu's features that have been complained about are offered as opt-in, with a graphical wizard even helping guide the set-up process, whereas this centralized authority for community names - which is not chosen to be a third-party resource - is opt-out. The difference is night and day. Go figure, the same people that claim that Ukraine is responsible for Russia invading it somehow claim that PieFed is more authoritarian than Lemmy?

I am not wanting to ascribe motivations behind Rimu's actions either, though what I mentioned earlier is based on the set of features released recently, planned to come out soon, and his speaking about the situation for the past year and also looking ahead. e.g. he is not interested in the slightest in fiddling with the UI, preferring to leave that to others - ideally third-party apps, although as a whole they have been exceedingly slow to add more than merely rudimentary support for PieFed specific features. The low number of people that actually use PieFed likely plays a role there, as too surely the decreasing subscriber counts in the Threadiverse as a whole world as well.

We seem to be in a downward spiral where we would need to attract more people, in order to improve the experience here, which in turn would attract more people. Previously we had the hopes of a brave new world free of corporate enshittification to bolster at least those of us who came here. But now we see the reality that the grass is only somewhat greener on this other side, and that in particular there are other forms of enshittification that have nothing to do with corporations.

Oh well, we can only do so much, and the outcome will take care of itself.

Mbin mentions a lot more contributors at https://github.com/mbinOrg/mbin#contributors, although I didn't look to see how active they all are especially recently, and it also mentions that it is based on PHP (https://github.com/mbinOrg/mbin#requirements). I know very little about that language beyond that it is a scripting one, but recent news stories does make me concerned that it is a difficult one especially regarding security.

And of course you know better than most people that there are <1K total Mbin users (without bothering to check I thought it was like 500-600), so even if every single one jumped over to PieFed it would be not all that significant a change compared to its already 6-7K. I also suspect that Rimu's vision of Mastodon integration will go much deeper, like Mbin suffers from splitting its purpose to be 2-in-1, whereas PieFed would become simply one interface that trafficked in both types of content. And perhaps more besides - Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, etc. That would be grand, except the Threadiverse alone barely functions especially if the goal is to attract more people, who say that they are very turned away from its default web-browser accessible UI. Which if the goal was to incorporate Mastodon posts makes more sense to deprioritize for now anyway, to avoid having to redesign it again later.

Though Rimu proving extremely difficult to work together with is a major distraction from the advancement of the PieFed agenda - as he said himself in his blog post where he decided to step back from administration of his personal instance (although then couldn't actually manage to stay away, e.g. leaving the admins surprised that the instance was now implementing a daily vote quota and shadow-censoring contributions from other PieFed and even Lemmy or Mbin instances, without disclosure of this fact).

The PyLova devs were actively seeking suggestions so perhaps it is indeed worth pushing some additional thoughts their way - it's a win-win there!:-)

Speaking of, I hope the subscribable blocklists will allow integration of instances, communities, and individual accounts - possibly also even domains (aka webpage URLs, like various news sources). That way someone could subscribe to just one and get it all. It's not the worst thing if that cannot be done, but if it's easy then...? Yet another thing to ask them, because they would know better what's easy or not:-).

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[–] Vicinus@piefed.zip 2 points 1 week ago (16 children)

Actually that probably will not begin until v1.0 ...

Good to know.

If they even know that setting exists, and are willing to tweak the code to make that happen.

The PyLova devs were actively seeking suggestions so perhaps it is indeed worth pushing some additional thoughts their way - it’s a win-win there!:-)

On that front, I opened another Pylova Issue for instance settings (user facing and one for admin installs). Hopefully that will bear fruit.

The vast majority of Rimu’s features that have been complained about are offered as opt-in ...

My recollection is that they are now opt-in. They didn't start that way and didn't become that way until backlash. I think he's learned his lesson at this point, to make everything opt-in.

... this centralized authority for community names - which is not chosen to be a third-party resource - is opt-out.

Yeah, I mean Marx-Leninism (ml) is an authoritarian ideology. Seems par for the course.

... as a whole they have been exceedingly slow to add more than merely rudimentary support for PieFed specific features. The low number of people that actually use PieFed likely plays a role there, as too surely the decreasing subscriber counts in the Threadiverse as a whole world as well.

Yeah, that's my read as well. Before a spike the Threadiverse was ~40k and Piefed was ~2k (5%). Now Piefed is 7k (17.5%) of that same ~40k, not a huge user-base/market and Piefed being the smaller part of that.

Mbin mentions a lot more contributors at https://github.com/mbinOrg/mbin#contributors, although I didn’t look to see how active they all are especially recently ...

My "2 part time developers" (looks like it's actually 1.5 developers, 1 full, 1 half-time) is from a recent post.

... even if every single one jumped over to PieFed it would be not all that significant a change compared to its already 6-7K.

My feeling is it's less about MAU numbers (best case: +10%) and more about becoming 'the only game in town'. I think good integration of Mastodon, could significantly increase Piefed MAU over Lemmy and would make Mbin redundant. Making a good Lemmy to Piefed conversion script after that, could knock Lemmy into a death-spiral as well. Piefed would then be the only fediverse Reddit-alternative.

I also suspect that Rimu’s vision of Mastodon integration will go much deeper, like Mbin suffers from splitting its purpose to be 2-in-1, whereas PieFed would become simply one interface that trafficked in both types of content. And perhaps more besides - Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, etc. That would be grand ...

Agreed. I think I was sold on the original 'dream' of the fediverse all being connected and it was a bit disappointing when I learned that wasn't really the case.

... who say that they are very turned away from its default web-browser accessible UI. Which if the goal was to incorporate Mastodon posts makes more sense to deprioritize for now anyway, to avoid having to redesign it again later.

It wouldn't surprise me, if that were the case.

Speaking of, I hope the subscribable blocklists will allow integration of instances, communities, and individual accounts - possibly also even domains (aka webpage URLs, like various news sources). That way someone could subscribe to just one and get it all. It’s not the worst thing if that cannot be done, but if it’s easy then…? Yet another thing to ask them, because they would know better what’s easy or not:-).

Yeah, I'm quite curious how they are going to implement it. I suspect, if it needs to be iterated on, it won't be that onerous to change how it can be utilized.

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 1 week ago (15 children)

I've asked for #1 already (but not in Codeberg issue format) so this is good confirmation for them that such is still desired. #2 already exists though - for PieFed/ PyLova though not for Lemmy afaik - but also instance admins are not going to rerun it each time they update to the latest software, so their "surprise" came about due to the lack of #1, and bc Rimu tried to sneak it in buried amidst a rather large list of other features as if it were a tiny unimportant matter (even though he knew that it was a huge deal and extremely controversial - I've seen many people either outright leave PieFed or stating that they had plans to imminently switch to it that they cancelled as a direct result; that was an extremely poor communication rolling out those anti-features, which along with other similar matters previously essentially Kickstarted PyLova to be created).

My recollection is that they are now opt-in

Ah... interesting. I don't know the full history and it likely depends in part on what features under discussion. There was one set of features that someone on a Lemmy.ml community lied about, stating that a bunch of "hard-coded" features existed buried in the PieFed codebase, and Rimu responded that they were the opposite of hard-coded since they were wrapped inside of an if-statement that was turned OFF by default, so that one was opt-in (fwiw, the original OP there never did acknowledge afaik that they had been in error - the post remained up for at least several months when last I checked and people continued to point to it as evidence of PieFed betraying the principles of the Threadiverse, despite how the entire thing had been debunked). I can well imagine others being opt-out or hard-coded at first and then upon push-back being converted into opt-in. Rimu in the past has usually been quite friendly and responsive to such, except when he digs his heels in and insists that his way is better even in the face of all opposition (maybe it is even, but it is too much at once and people don't like having their choices taken away from them, so not the right way to go about making such changes, imho).

Speaking of, the last I knew the shadow-censoring daily vote quotas are not opt-in, but rather turned on by default, being instead opt-out.

Yeah, I mean Marx-Leninism (ml) is an authoritarian ideology.

Only if looking at their actions rather than words 😜. By the same token, MAGA is "against" the government telling people what to do.

Before a spike the Threadiverse was ~40k and Piefed was ~2k (5%). Now Piefed is 7k (17.5%) of that same ~40k, not a huge user-base/market and Piefed being the smaller part of that.

Okay but by FAR the biggest change there in PieFed subscriber numbers was due solely to fedinsfw.app, which in turn resulted from the demise of lemmynsfw. Other than porn, which Rimu almost but not quite does the opposite of support, PieFed stats are still fairly similar to what they were before, right? (I'd have to take another look myself to update myself but that was my thought at some point?) Hence this singular change is essentially an outlier that may - or may not - be representative of the situation as a whole. Or you could take the opposite position that the number of these events is simply too hard to be able to say much of anything about, but in that case what is there to learn at all? Personally I think that a more nuanced take might be to look at the increasing number of instances total - even if they are only tiny ones, that's still something? Otoh, pound for pound, Lemmy already has both those AND the huge buckets of users, so perhaps it's not worth digging into such, bc in essence such matters are already baked into the comparison between platforms anyway.

And even if we do bring in the porn instance into the comparison, as the largest PieFed instance, it is still far smaller than the largest Lemmy instance, by quite a large margin. Also, people may literally have multiple accounts - one for porn and another for other matters, for separation. And it begs the question for me: how many MAUs did Lemmynsfw have, compared to fedinsfw.app? Like, yes PieFed gained ~7k MAUs, but how many more did Lemmy lose? I doubt they were equal, which again illustrates the overall pattern of decline across the Threadiverse instances.

becoming 'the only game in town'

That sounds logical. I only hope that Rimu considers why Mbin became so irrelevant, especially after the huge start given it by the demise of Kbin: Mbin does multiple things yes, but it does neither of them well. Barely any third-party apps support it, and its web browser UI assumes that post titles will be very long, so for short ones it wastes a very large amount of space, plus other layout concerns as well. PieFed has numerous layout concerns too, such as making it exceedingly difficult to distinguish between downvotes vs. upvotes in the overall count (+151 & -100 is enormously different than just +51 & -0, or +71 & -20 - that is outright information that PieFed obscures and in many cases makes nearly impossible to get readily).

I'm quite curious how they are going to implement it.

Very exciting indeed!! :-)

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[–] Vicinus@piefed.zip 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (14 children)

I’ve asked for #1 already (but not in Codeberg issue format) so this is good confirmation for them that such is still desired.

Looks like they like the idea and it'll be in v5.1. Looks like they already completed it.

... also instance admins are not going to rerun it each time they update to the latest software, so their “surprise” came about due to the lack of #1, and bc Rimu tried to sneak it in buried amidst a rather large list of other features as if it were a tiny unimportant matter (even though he knew that it was a huge deal and extremely controversial ...

Fair point.

... essentially Kickstarted PyLova to be created ...

Silver linings :)

... “hard-coded” features existed buried in the PieFed codebase ...

Yeah, I remember that 'argument'. That was annoying to deal with.

I can well imagine others being opt-out or hard-coded at first and then upon push-back being converted into opt-in.

There was another feature/set of features that were opt-out and poorly communicated before the vote-limiter, maybe a year ago. I don't remember what it was though. I recall it went over just as poorly as the rate limiter and made me view Rimu in a different light.

Speaking of, the last I knew the shadow-censoring daily vote quotas are not opt-in, but rather turned on by default, being instead opt-out.

That's my understanding as well. I had to ask my admins to remove it.

Only if looking at their actions rather than words 😜.

Haha. Yeah. I do think their call for a vanguard kind of gives away the game (wiki: "According to Lenin, the purpose of the vanguard party is to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat"). I think using the word "dictatorship" at all is unlikely to go well or attract the people you want that would be okay with giving up power, once they have it.

Okay but by FAR the biggest change there in PieFed subscriber numbers was due solely to fedinsfw.app, which in turn resulted from the demise of lemmynsfw.

And it begs the question for me: how many MAUs did Lemmynsfw have, compared to fedinsfw.app? Like, yes PieFed gained ~7k MAUs, but how many more did Lemmy lose? I doubt they were equal, which again illustrates the overall pattern of decline across the Threadiverse instances.

Absolutely. According to Fedindex, it looks like Lemmynsfw may have only had 3.6k MAU when it crashed. FediNSFW is now at ~3.6k MAU. So, weirdly it came out to be an even exchange.

PieFed stats are still fairly similar to what they were before, right?

Looks like Fedindex is putting Fedinsfw creation on 02-18-2026. Fediverse-Observer data, puts Piefed at 4816 MAU on 02-17-2026. Piefed is at 6742 MAU and Fedinsfw only at 3583 MAU, leaves non-Fedinsfw Piefed at 3159 MAU today.

Last time Piefed was below 2k MAU (1990 MAU) was 2026-01-20. So, up ~59% in 10-ish months, not bad, percentage wise.

Personally I think that a more nuanced take might be to look at the increasing number of instances total - even if they are only tiny ones, that’s still something? Otoh, pound for pound, Lemmy already has both those AND the huge buckets of users, so perhaps it’s not worth digging into such, bc in essence such matters are already baked into the comparison between platforms anyway.

Looks like Lemmy has had 63 new instances since 2026-06-08, 20 still active (Piefed: 18 new, 8 still active). So better percentage fro Piefed, better volume for Lemmy.

From 2026-07-28 to 2026-10-27, Lemmy alive servers went from 321 -> 294 (Piefed: 66 -> 59). So, with the increased total threadiverse MAUs, it looks like some consolidation is happening.

And even if we do bring in the porn instance into the comparison, as the largest PieFed instance, it is still far smaller than the largest Lemmy instance, by quite a large margin. Also, people may literally have multiple accounts - one for porn and another for other matters, for separation.

I only hope that Rimu considers why Mbin became so irrelevant, especially after the huge start given it by the demise of Kbin: Mbin does multiple things yes, but it does neither of them well.

With you there. 'Whole ass 1 thing, rather than half-assing 2 things'.

PieFed has numerous layout concerns too, such as making it exceedingly difficult to distinguish between downvotes vs. upvotes in the overall count (+151 & -100 is enormously different than just +51 & -0, or +71 & -20 - that is outright information that PieFed obscures and in many cases makes nearly impossible to get readily).

This has legitimately been a huge annoyance for me on web (and a reason I prefer Voyager). I made FR about this too.

I’m quite curious how they are going to implement it.

Very exciting indeed!! :-)

Looks like it's already live. Looks like it's only contained to users. I was hoping this could also be an admin feature to help stop scraping (with automation only 1 instance has to be hit by a scraper before the subscribed instances are 'inoculated'). Added another FR.

Edit: added an additional sentence to the ml discussion.

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 1 week ago (13 children)

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!?:-)

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[–] Vicinus@piefed.zip 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (12 children)

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:-).

Yeah, no worries :)

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.

I don't think that was it but maybe?

... all of which Lemmy will ignore, as is its right and choice to do so.

Agreed.

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?

Absolutely. I was ready to leave Piefed over it.

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).

Yeah, Snoopy leaving is interesting, in that I'm not sure how much new blood Rimu is going to attract in the future (he's burned a lot of bridges). The Codeburg commits lists Rimu, Walter Schwenger (wsj018), and wltb as the only developers over the last 3 months. Looks like there were quite a few more other people pushing commits 4 months back. Looks like the Pylova split happened 5 months ago and a couple of the light commiters followed Mia to Pylova.

The Innuendo Studios YouTube series The Alt-Right Playbook does a superb job at explaining how someone can fall into authoritarian thinking.

Sounds interesting, I'll have to check it out.

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.

It would be kind of funny, if the effects weren't terrible :(

PieFed is still growing despite that though, just not by nearly so much or robustly ...

~~Yeah, looks like there is some significant growth in the Threadiverse this week (~+750 MAU). Roughly 600 for Lemmy, 170 for Piefed, and -10 for Mbin.~~ Edit: looks like I was running the analysis on the same processed data instead of processing each new day's data before the analysis (only ran two of the scripts to check the daily numbers instead of all 3 :/). So, actually +250 MAU, rather than +750 MAU.

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.

I vaguely recall this, so might have seen your post/comment at the time.

PyLova has already done it though ...

They did? I just checked their instances and it has the same consolidated total votes UI. It would be great if they already did it, maybe it's an option and not the default?

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.

I was thinking maybe a check-mark or something to let a user know their post or comment was successfully received by the target/host instance. I don't know if hosting instances tell sending instances they successfully retrieved data or not, so could be a significant increase in traffic.

Maybe not that significant though. Piefed only had ~1700 posts and comments over the last week, Lemmy top 20 most populated instances were ~12500 ("Activity" Data). Taking the most "active" instance (lemmy.world), they had ~4700 activities, assume worst case they are all for non-Lemmy.world communities. That would be 670 extra packets per day (28 per hour). That doesn't seem too terrible. Thoughts?

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 3 points 5 days ago (11 children)

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/summit@lemmy.world/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 !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social 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 !Fediverse@lemmy.world, 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

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[–] Quokka 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (8 children)

@Vicinus@piefed.zip - Didn't want to post this twice and figured you might miss it considering how deep this conversation is.

How votes are viewed is a user setting, letting anyone choose if they want combined, separate, or a percentage. Is this something you would also like settable as a global instance default choice?

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?

We mostly use Grafna

Also I occasionally search for PyLova and I love reading this comment chain when I do, thanks for contributing so many ideas.

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 4 days ago

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

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[–] Vicinus@piefed.zip 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (6 children)

Probably would have missed it. Appreciate the tag :)

How votes are viewed is a user setting, letting anyone choose if they want combined, separate, or a percentage. Is this something you would also like settable as a global instance default choice?

Honestly, as long as I can easily enable it, it doesn't matter to me if everyone has it by default (only viewed your instance without logging in). Might be worth a user poll, but I have no idea how wanted that feature is.

FYI I altered my [FR] on Codeburg to reflect you'd already implementing the feature.

We mostly use Grafna

Link doesn't work, but I think I know what it'll look like.

Given both your responses, it seems I didn't conveyed the idea well to OpenStars. My understanding is that an instance sends to the appropriate "hosting instance" a post or comment. My thought is, if it doesn't already happen, have the "hosting instance" send an 'acknowledgement' back to the sending instance. Then, if the comment has been 'acknowledged', the sending instance would put an indicator on the comment (check mark or something) to show "yes, my user, your activity successfully arrived at it's destination."

In my mind, this wouldn't be every instance checking every other instance's user's activity to make sure it federated properly. This would be an instance confirming things for only its own users.

Hopefully that makes sense. I graphical up-time graph is probably nice to have too. I was going to say those are available on fediverse measurement sites, but with a quick look, it seems like that was a Fediverse-Observer (RIP) only feature.

Also I occasionally search for PyLova and I love reading this comment chain when I do, thanks for contributing so many ideas.

Happy to help and thanks for being so responsive, open-minded, and just all around great :)

Edit: when making my comment to OpenStars, I checked a post I made to the !servo@programming.dev community yesterday, which did not federate (https://programming.dev/c/Servo is missing my post).

I think the “acknowledgement” feature could also help elevate the issue entirely. I’m not sure how to ‘force’ a re-submission of my post, but if an instance didn’t get an ‘acknowledgement’ the instance could check that the ‘"hosting instance” is still receiving and then try resend the post/comment after a certain time interval.

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 4 days ago (5 children)

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!! 🤩

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[–] Vicinus@piefed.zip 2 points 4 days ago (4 children)

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?

I was going to take your suggestion, because I doubt it is much mod responsibility, but it looks like programming.dev was having federation issues when I tried to post and the post never made it. Remade it just now and it went through, no issues.

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.

Agreed. I feel it's currently very much a make your own space and if people come by great, but don't expect or rely on it happening.

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!! 🤩

Agreed :)

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 3 days ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] Vicinus@piefed.zip 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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.

You may want to try using "feeling language". I've found it helps a lot online and IRL.

Ex: "I feel like that ...", "My understanding of the situation is ...", "To me that ...", etc.

Bc really, growth isn’t the point?

Though it is necessary, even to remain afloat.

Agreed, for all the reasons you mentioned earlier, plus I think it would be nicer if the activity, administrative, and development load was spread out a bit wider (makes it easier on everyone/less burnout, and provides redundancies).

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 2 days ago (1 child)

A lot of the problems with Lemmy boil down ultimately to overall lack of moderation. Many people were banned from Reddit for many reasons, among them including an extreme level of toxicity, so the need for such is dire - that is, assuming that our goal is not to provide a safe space for everyone to vent their feelings, and instead to offer a space welcoming to newcomers. The recent thread in the Fediverse community praising the devs of many Fediverse platforms is a great example: it became highly toxic, ultimately being locked.

So (1) we need to identify what we are. Some places, like dbzero and anarchist nexus will choose to become more like 4chan, with the admins themselves literally flinging actual death threats against admins of other instances. Others, like PieFed.Social, will become more actively hostile against such trolling and tankie (and tankie-supporting) behaviors. So there will never be a solution to this step that involves all of us getting onto the same page.

The problem here comes from lack of transparency. Hexbear's Chapotraphouse is fairly open about what it is... though many 3rd-party apps bury the sidebar quote deep into their menus, especially if you encounter a post on All and so you will basically never see it. I do decry the right of places such as Chapotraphouse to exist, but I do think that they need to be labeled properly, with a warning label, so that non-extremist mainstream normal folks do not encounter them unawares, and by virtue of their inclusion and lack of distinction from any other content here, think that the entire Threadiverse is a tankie haven, full of extremists who support genocide and the violent, bloody overthrow of the entire Western civilization.

PieFed made huge strides towards this regard. Most 3rd-party apps barely support any PieFed features that differ from base Lemmy, but at least the browser UX is somewhat better, in some ways.

However, PieFed advancement in this regard seems to have ground to a halt before picking up speed in the opposite direction. But to focus on the former for a moment, e.g. the instance picker (the last time I checked) was very confusing and came nowhere close to explaining what individual users could expect when signing up to an instance. Fortunately PyLova has picked up the slack here and advanced that cause significantly forward. Unfortunately, PieFed seems to be continually actively working against this goal now, making the options more opaque rather than transparent - e.g. any PieFed community on an instance that does not explicitly disable the downvote feature (and which ones have done that? how is anyone supposed to know!?) is shadow-censoring contributions offered from many different software platforms (Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Friendica, Mastodon, etc.), without disclosure of that fact. However, I see no acknowledgement of that fact at e.g. https://feddit.online/auth/instance_chooser, where for PieFed.Social the closest item of explanation offered seems to be "Newbie friendly: yes".

Only after someone has been guided into picking an instance does the futher steps matter, like (2) picking a 3rd-party app (sigh... I guess to most Redditors, this is mandatory?), and (3) helping them sign up to discover new content (this PieFed excels at, at least at the software level even though many instances like PieFed.World do not take full advantage by fleshing out the Topic Areas). Though then comes (4) retaining people, which is where most of our exceedingly poor reputation seems to stem from, as people who jumped through all of the prior hurdles flee this toxic shithole, which simultaneously barely has any content and yet what content it does offer to people unfortunately turns people away due to how toxic it all is. I do think that Rimu had the right idea behind a lot of his social credit features - e.g. if someone is extremely often downvoted, by let's say "like-minded" instances (however that might be defined - e.g. it could be anti-genocide, or it could even be the opposite of pro-genocide, or neutral, or whatever), then their account name begins to come with a warning ⚠️ label, so that people do not stumble into a conversation completely unawares. Not everyone wants this space to be even more like 4chan than it already is - some do, but mainstream normal folks have spoken, and they refuse to come here because it is already too much like it for their tastes.

People demand freedom. Which ultimately means some restrictions must be placed, so as to protect others, e.g. people must not be free to say whatever they want, even against the wishes of the recipients, or else we have no freedom here at all. Voat & nostr already proved that: even the spaces that reputedly values "free speech" the most ended up as wastelands where nobody wanted to venture into, due to having no freedom to not listen to such vitriol literally 100% of the time (without any recourse to block it even for a moment, except to flee entirely).

So now it's a cache-22 where we won't get more content without more people, who refuse to come here. And also they demand 3rd-party apps, whose devs look to me to be tired on working to support new features, especially for PieFed. PyLova might be the single best hope the entire Threadiverse has to grow. We'll see what happens!

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[–] Vicinus@piefed.zip 1 point 2 days ago

A lot of the problems with Lemmy boil down ultimately to overall lack of moderation.

Yeah, I would say we are definitely at a "work-in-progress" level, with a ways to go.

The recent thread in the Fediverse community praising the devs of many Fediverse platforms is a great example: it became highly toxic, ultimately being locked.

I saw the post originally. Going back it looks like FiniteBanjo went to pick a fight. I'm not trying make any judgement on their comments, just that they appear, to me, to wanted to start an argument ("Well, not all of them. Some of them are a stain on this earth."). Not surprised it was locked at that point.

... with the admins themselves literally flinging actual death threats against admins of other instances.

My recollection and understanding of that situation was that it was an inferred threat, that, when confronted, was immediately rescinded and that admin stepped down due to their actions. So, I think, it's a bit disingenuous to use that as a negative against them. To me, they responded appropriately when confronted with how their message was taken (clarification that's not how it was intended and then stepping down from their position of authority).

I believe soon after the .world admins faked "evidence" that the anarchist admins were really fascists trying to sow discord or something (I don't recall the exact allegation, but I remember the evidence being shown and confirmed to be fake). My recollection is Rimu backed the .world admins even after their evidence had been shown to be faked. I want to say that is when Rimu introduced the instance "silencing" feature, to reduce anarchist influence after his and the .world admins' attempts to expel the anarchists with the faked evidence failed.

So there will never be a solution to this step that involves all of us getting onto the same page.

Decentralization. There doesn't need to be, in my eyes.

I do decry the right of places such as Chapotraphouse to exist, but I do think that they need to be labeled properly, with a warning label ...

... the instance picker (the last time I checked) was very confusing and came nowhere close to explaining what individual users could expect when signing up to an instance.

... as people who jumped through all of the prior hurdles flee this toxic shithole ...

On-boarding is a huge gap in my mind. From my view, we basically throw everyone in the deep-end and hope they learn to swim and aren't too concerned with fixing the issue, because we all learned to swim, so why can't they.

I could see an on-boarding that quickly explains the structure (like 2 sentences about decentralization/email-analogy and identifying a users name and instance. Then go into a quick questionnaire (for determining best host instance for them) about what kind of posts they want to see (one of those could be a quoted .ml account, to see if the new user wants to see "triad" content). From there some, basic filtering/block list yes/nos (block-list for spam accounts: yes/no, agentic accounts: yes/no, bot accounts: yes/no, etc.) and interested topics (software, cats, art, etc.). I think that would go a long way in helping get an easier and more welcoming environment (may only be fully possible via Pylova features at the moment (block-lists)).

Unfortunately, PieFed seems to be continually actively working against this goal now, making the options more opaque rather than transparent - e.g. any PieFed community on an instance that does not explicitly disable the downvote feature (and which ones have done that? how is anyone supposed to know!?) is shadow-censoring contributions offered from many different software platforms (Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Friendica, Mastodon, etc.), without disclosure of that fact.

That's a good point I hadn't thought of before. I'm not sure how an instance could keep a user informed without keeping a larger database of community and instance settings. Alternatively, sending that info for each load or interaction the user makes. The larger database sounds much more reasonable, but still daunting and not easily implemented and probably with a significant compute cost.

... whose devs look to me to be tired on working to support new features, especially for PieFed.

This isn't surprising to me. Piefed has 20% of the users Lemmy has (and that increase to 20% is relatively recent) and developer generally want to get paid for their work (especially if they don't have a main corporate job).

PyLova might be the single best hope the entire Threadiverse has to grow. We’ll see what happens!

Yeah, definitely looks to be the brightest hope we have right now. Hopefully, they can keep up a sustainable pace and don't burn out.

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 5 days ago (1 child)

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.

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[–] Vicinus@piefed.zip 2 points 4 days ago

Oh, do you mean the private voting issue?

If it helps, I had previously responded to some of the more controversial points that users had raised a year ago.

Honestly, you could probably lay out a dozen controversial decisions Rimu has made and I wouldn't be able to pick which one I'm vaguely recalling.

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.

I thought so too.

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.

It's his, but at the same time, being open source, it could very quickly not be (ex. Pylova). As long as there is a solid conversion path, Rimu could one day wake up and find .social is the only Piefed instance.

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.

Yeah, his communication skills need significant work, which wouldn't be so bad, if he was open-minded, but it really seems, as you're saying, it has to be his way.

... the hidden, third option is simply to not engage with communities located on piefed instances anymore. And bam, just like that, communities such as !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social 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).

Absolutely. This is what I love about open source and federation. It may take time, but the 'system' routes around 'damage'. Looks to me like Pylova may be the route around the Piefed/Rimu damage.

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

I guess from Reddit too. It's been pretty consistently 100+ new users a day. Given instance "stickiness", I'd say ~60% stick around.

I've seen a couple posts from newbies, the threads look really positive, there still is the allow/block triad conversation/fighting, but it was very minor from what I saw.

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.

If you haven't seen her response, it's appears to be a user toggle-able setting, which may turn into an instance setting.

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!

Yeah, it's unfortunate, but I think it could also be an opportunity to figure out problems/frictions and solutions. I think for the worry instances go down, a few things would inspire confidence, for me. Off-site backup redundancy (data), a set up non-profit with financial transparency (finances), and a "succession plan" (admins: if admin people want to leave they can but there is a plan in place to hand things off and replace them).

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.

Agreed. I think clearly labeling that this a bot post, could be good to feature. I still like seeing articles, even if I don't want to comment on them. Maybe having them separated out as RSS feeds would be better though. I think something is happening with regards to RSS and Piefed, but I didn't look into the specifics.

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.

One thing I kept hearing from the new users this week, is how calm it is here. Like there is much less antagonism, insults, and rage bait and much more thoughtful discussion and nice interactions. So, I think, the threadiverse will hold some of the new converts until they learn how to curate their experience better.

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.

Now I would put my hopes into the shareable blocklists to do such.

Yeah, I think "informed default" (like .zip), where the blocks are setup by default, but new users are informed about them and there is an easy way to disable them, if the new user chooses to, is a good path forward.

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.

I mean as opposed to having every single post do this across the entire Threadiverse, at all times.

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.

It seems I may not have conveyed the idea well. So to try again, my understanding is that an instance sends to the appropriate “hosting instance” a post or comment. My thought is, if it doesn’t already happen, have the “hosting instance” send an ‘acknowledgement’ back to the sending instance. Then, if the comment has been ‘acknowledged’, the sending instance would put an indicator on the comment (check mark or something) to show “yes, my user, your activity successfully arrived at it’s destination.”

In my mind, this wouldn’t be every instance checking every other instance’s user’s activity to make sure it federated properly. This would be an instance confirming things for only its own users.

For instance if I make a post to !Fediverse@lemmy.world, 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 discover 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!

I'm think the feature I'm suggesting would do away with this "federation uncertainty friction". I rarely go to check other instances to see if my comment or post has federated or not. I'm usually on mobile and this is not an easy maneuver, so I often have a question if my post/comment federated or if I'm only talking to myself. Not a great feeling and definitely reduces the urge to contribute, for me.

I just checked the post I made to the !servo@programming.dev community yesterday, did not federate (https://programming.dev/c/Servo is missing my post). Glad I spent time on that post... :(

I think the "acknowledgement" feature could also help elevate the issue entirely. I'm not sure how to 'force' a re-submission of my post, but if an instance didn't get an 'acknowledgement' the instance could check that the '"hosting instance" is still receiving and then try resend the post/comment after a certain time interval.