I guess that's just something we have to grow to expect from Rimu, after the whole þ fiasco? I can think of lots of valid image uses that have the world "anonymous", such as semi-redacted whistleblowing posts.

[–] wjs018@piefed.wjs018.xyz 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

the whole þ fiasco

That has since been removed. Yeah, rimu is certainly opinionated and passionate about what he believes in, but has also been pretty receptive to feedback, both from users and from admins (like in the private voting case). Fortunately, there are alternative threadiverse platforms out there for people that want them. Both lemmy and mbin do some stuff better than PieFed, and that's ok. The different projects have maintained working relationships at the dev level to try to make sure interoperability outside the base activitypub spec doesn't completely break (the post-moving feature/FEP was a collaboration between PieFed, lemmy, and NodeBB for example).

[–] rothaine@lemmy.zip 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

the private voting case

What's this?

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Off the top of my head,

Since votes on Lemmy aren't private, anyone can view them. Piefed added anonymized votes (iirc, by sending them from a shadow user with a username that was a hash of the actual voters username), this raised concerns, as vote spam could be harder to spot/stop, so it was removed.

[–] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 days ago

That got built and implemented before that problem was realized and removed? Damn.

Even so, if the system is tracking votes as reputation, how were the anonymous votes actually tracked? That hash either hid the user or it didn't.

[–] rothaine@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 days ago

Oh interesting. Anonymous votes does sound cool.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 6 days ago

That's certainly good to hear. But still, it's worth to be cautious around.

[–] Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thorn fiasco?

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Iirc, a thing was added that converted the thorn character to a th because some user was annoying everyone by using thorns instead of ths.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 14 points 6 days ago (1 children)

No, not because a user was annoying everyone else. Because the developer seemed to have a personal beef against people who commit the crime of [*checks notes*] not behaving neurotypically on the internet, and went on to impose a collonialistic, imperialistic punishment (censoring of national language) on them. See: Spain vs. Cataluña.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 9 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

This is a really dramatic observation. The user did it specifically, if I recall, to try and evade AI detection or something.

It's also amusing because said user itself is literally on a piefed instance.

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 6 days ago

They thought it poisoned llms (it didn't, and they ignored people who mentioned it). Not to evade any ai thing.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Oh yeah, they made a statement about to "inconvenience AIs somewhat", which is not bad and is something that honestly more of us should be doing. The conformists claim that AIs can easily deal with such annoyances but that's the point. They still have to do the work, and we can poison the meaning of the data they collect (intentionally or incidentally), kinda like what happened with AIs suddenly starting to use em dashes for everything.

All that said, none of that merits the kind of backend-level censorship that was applied to that user. How can I trust a platform that offers a certain level of trust if my messages are being altered behind my back? How can I be sure that my statement anti AI are not being modded into pro-AI statements, for example? Even more if I'm being specifically targetted? Rimu simply does not, currently, offer that kind of trust of person, which is one of the reasons I've made no effort, nor plan to in the short term, into piefed as of yet.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It was direct character change into "th" which is what they used it for - it wasn't designed to change the meaning of a message, moreover the user wasn't doing it because they are neurodivergent (as you alleged previously). Although someone did note here that, as far as it is, the letter is part of Icelandic - so in that sense it was misguided.

Also, Piefed literally has (rudimentary, perhaps) flags for potential AI accounts that are forwarded onto instance mods if they choose to activate it. Rimu is not likely to bake in any pro-AI sentiment into the system when he's building tools to try and detect it with an eye on banning potential AI-run accounts.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I was using the pro/anti AI as an example but the point is, Piefed already has a history of editorioalizing user discourse secrelty and for the benefit (or whininess) of the dev. I could have used eg.: pro/anti shipping, or pro/anti consumerism instead. The point is the reputation is hard to earn back.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 1 points 5 days ago

It's not really editorialising anything here. It doesn't change the meaning of anything.