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Piefed admin settings that allow to enable or disable content filters (they are disabled by default, see body for details)
(i.postimg.cc)
Edit about the 4chan image blocking, I asked Rimu directly:
I wrote a long message about how that checkbox only notifies about federated posts.
So the difference is for local posts it blocks the creation of the post entirely, but for federated posts it just notifies the admin.
https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/3-general/topic//near/10529
-- Original message:
A few people in the other thread assumed that it was required to fork the code to disable those filters. That's not the case, the filters can be configured, and are off by default.
To hide the reputation system, here's a line of CSS that admins can add in the admin area to hide it for every user
That CSS line can also be used by any user wanting to hide the score at the user level.
It's as if someone saw a federated social media codebase that enabled the free movement of users and expression online and though, "someone should fix that".
It isnt that the codebase 'forces' moderation decisions - it's that it's undoing the work done in the lemmy codebase to flatten moderation across instances and make them transparent, and introducing arbitrary metrics that can be used to limit the visibility of expression not just on the local instance but across many
You're free to use whatever software on your server you like, but IMO these 'filters' are petty, low-effort workarounds to features in the lemmy codebase that are what make it truely democraticand decentralized, and they degrade the health of the entire federated network by extension.
Honestly I don't mind if it would be visible to the users. Like how long would this be secret if it wasn't for the code audit.
I mean, I disagree, but that's my own preference.
Ranking/sorting/filtering systems should always be up-front and user-configurable, and their implementation should be instance-agnostic. Hiding it in the code is definitely the worst part of this, but far from the only problem.
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.)
Investigate just a tiny bit into the moderation practices going on at lemmy.ml.
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!?:-)
Yea, see this is what I mean by 'petty vindictive development'.
None of this speaks well of the project and risks undermining the entire federated network.
Tolerating intolerance doesn't make a community more tolerant. We need good mod tools to remove authoritarians from our communities.
I really want a Xitter filter so I can prevent screenshots from the Nazi website from showing up on our website. Because I think Xitter is worse than 4chan.
There's never going to be parity of administration philosophies across all instances regardless of tools. Some will use word filters. Some will hold very strong opinions on 4chan culture. Some will block new community creation for members. Some will force account age limits to interact on locally hosted communities (i've seen this in the modlog).
It's one thing to empower admins with mod tools, it's another to establish reputation ratings based on opaque rules, hide them behind fake error messages, and then enforce them using destructive workarounds that cause nothing but confusion to users and other federated server admins.
Go ahead, be restrictive with who can participate on your server - that's perfectly fine. But be transparent about how your moderation tools work and don't hide punitive ranking systems in your codebase.
It certainly makes it seem like the devs have an axe to grind, and don't care how their careless decisions effect the rest of the network.
The reputation ratings of users are purely based on downvotes received, it's not really opaque.
The 4chan thing again, can be turned off.
The reputation/attitude system is not concealed at all.
That isn't true - the comment filters also dock users reputation points, and without any notification to users that it's happening.
None of this is presented to users - that's the definition of opaque. They've shoehorned these features into their code without any notice to other users or instance admins, and have provided no way of notifying anyone of what is happening on the backside that might effect how content is handled or federated.
All of this irreparably injures the reputation of not just the piefed implementation but of the broader fediverse.
This can be turned off by instance admins who would see this in their settings. I agree maybe a public-facing form here could be of use though.
There's nothing in the code that I can see that indicates that any of the penalties are undone by turning off the filter - but that's kind of the point. They've introduced a new metric that thumbs the scale of content visibility that's hard-coded and inscrutable to everyone but those with knowledge of the codebase, and that makes the entire project and the devs who made those choices un-trustable.
Is there a version of their reputation system that's less objectionable? Sure. But it would need to be exceedingly transparent with clear documentation on how to configure, alter, and revert if there's a mistake made. But there's nothing here that indicates the devs of piefed are willing or capable of transparency or even just clear documentation.
Have you or anyone attempted to ask rimu about this? I don't ever recall any piefed instance owner asking this.
He has already altered or rolled back a ton of functions due to scrutiny.
I'm not collaborating with a developer who has it out for the platform I'm working to improve. If he wants to fix the shit he broke, he can.
Then I don't know what you expect. He does respond to criticism.
It 100% was! no one outside of the people who coded for piefed even knew this was a thing until the recent posts, if it is such an important part why isn't it stated clearly and upfront!!!
Rimu literally wrote about it a long time ago. All instance admins would also know about it.
https://join.piefed.social/features/
Also, everyone can see the little exclamation points on accounts that are heavily downvoted from Piefed.
This is like hiding changes in a 500 page TOS - is everyone who is impacted by this code going to know to look at this thread any time a new way of fucking with user reputation calcs is introduced?
Absolutely not.
Every single instance admin will know about it too. The reputation/attitude system did not just get quietly added a week ago.
Is there any indication to users interacting with those instances that their content is being limited by metrics that may or may not be visible to them, and by rules that may or may not be documented anywhere but the piefed codebase?
These are wildly hostile features to anyone not using piefed, and it's feeling a bit like that's the point.
The reputation system doesn't shadowban content. You don't get comments silently autoremoved for having a low reputation. You don't get throttled either.
That's admin and community dependent - an admin or community can take that reputation metric and use it to automate moderation. There is/was an entire community whose whole gimmick was auto-banning users from every instance for activity across the entire federated network. But beyond that, piefed already drops content instance-wide for as little as a single user blocking another.
if parent_comment.author.has_blocked_user(user.id) or parent_comment.author.has_blocked_instance(user.instance_id): log_incoming_ap(id, APLOG_CREATE, APLOG_FAILURE, saved_json, 'Parent comment author blocked replier') return NoneThe codebase is riddled with shit like this.
There's no inbuilt system to automation moderating out low reputation accounts to my knowledge. Any instance that would do this would have to be using a third-party tool.
The Piefed system of blocking is more aligned with how most other sites do blocking. Lemmy doesn't prevent blocked users from replying, but Piefed does. So from Piefed, if it's working properly, you shouldn't be able to reply to users who have blocked you. Lemmy doesn't operate like that, so it just throws out replies. It's due to different blocking philosophies.
I don't know any other site that allows blocked users to reply to the blocking user but deletes the reply on the backend server for everyone on it.
But regardless - that decision was made unilaterally by piefed and corrupts the federation of the rest of the network. Huge holes of mis-matched comment threads are being created everywhere because piefed chose to implement a destructive blocking system rather than a front-end filter, or by working with the other implementations on a solution that doesn't misalign data across the network.
I understand that you agree with how piefed restricts certain content - my point is that the way piefed has implemented those features corrupts the integrity of the entire network. They've made it clear that they have no interest in collaborating with the other developers, even if it means creating incompatibilities between the integrations to the point of functional defederation.
"Move fast and break stuff" isn't something anyone should be aspiring to.
It doesn't. On Piefed if you are blocked, you should be unable to reply. It is whited out. But Lemmy obviously doesn't work like that so incoming replies from users who are blocked, coming from Lemmy, just have it automatically thrown out.
Did Lemmy take a democratic vote about how they wanted blocking to be handled? Some users prefer someone they block being unable to reply to them. I have even seem this expressed on Hexbear.
What do you mean "made clear"? Has Piefed refused help or support from other developers?
Yes, that's exactly what i'm pointing to. Rather than implementing this in a way that's non-destructive and transparent, they've created an asymmetry by dropping comments entirely. They could render comments based on block-checks and not create this problem, but instead they chose to say 'fuck the lemmy instances' and create hundreds of holes in the federated activity out of seemingly nothing but spite.
Not "other developers" generally, "the other developers". I'm speaking specifically of the already existing lemmy codebase. Piefed was created as an alternative to lemmy - at least in part - because of disagreements over the developer's political views. It wasn't because lemmy was poorly written, it was because a couple of developers decided they wanted to fork the project into their own that they could manage independently from lemmy.
How could Piefed make this disparity of blocking philosophy mesh with Lemmys here? If Rimu thinks that a block is a block, and that users who are blocked should not be able to go on replying to the user who blocked them, then I don't see why he would carry comments just because they come from Lemmy.
Correct. But even if there was no ideological dispute here (he also disliked the development cycle and choices - I don't want to make too many assumptions here), rimu may still have made his own reddit clone or someone else may have - which would handle things very differently.
Without forcing every server to adopt the same blocking system universally? It can't. What it's doing now is functionally no different than if they hid replies on the user front end for users blocking others outside the home instance, except instead of doing this non-destructively (and preserving data pairety across instances), they've decided to blow huge holes in the federation service that are no longer mirrored on the other instances.
If the piefed method of handling blocking is to make it impossible for all users in every instance incapable of replying to a user who has blocked them, then every server would need to adopt the same method universally. Piefed has every right to hide content from their users that their users have chosen to block, but doing so by rejecting that content for the whole server while the rest of the network carries on ends up creating shadow forums on every instance.
That would be preferable to the 'embrace, extend, extinguish' path that they are currently on.
Right, so it should be on Piefed to accept Lemmy's blocking system even if Rimu disagrees with it?
This doesn't bother me that much primarily because defederation differences can cause this anyway.
If a hypothetical lemmy-alternative existed, regardless of why, it could still cause disruption in all kinds of ways if there's a fundamental design contradiction ethos.
Which is why it's important for users to reject attempts at splitting the network into different codebases in the firstplace.
That piefed and many of its users reject working with lemmy devs on principle over political grievance doesn't change or justify the fact that they are destroying the democratic nature of the federated network they're taking advantage of.
Which is why defederation is a last resort and usually requires some democratic discussion as an instance. Same with instance-banning users - that ability is limited to admins, which means users can hold them accountable if there's abuse. It's a reason why i consider users who go out of their way to foment division against other instances or users over petty disagreements to be caustic and unwelcome, but are at least still working within a decentralized and democratic framework. When any user has the ability to create the same kind of holes in the network, all accountability vanishes and it starts to look like swiss-cheese.
It is what it is. Mbin also existed before Piefed.
You're assuming some hand has been offered that has been slapped away by Rimu. I'm not aware of this. I'm pretty sure they have shared information about things in the past.
I mean yes, and no (depends on the instance), that's true but you know as well as I do three instances of note are heavy defederated (hilariouschaos being the third incase you were wondering). Plenty of smaller sloppy attempts also get defederated fast too, usually stuff like maga.place.
Mbin isn't nearly as egregious as piefed in the way they introduce breaking changes to the network.
I'm not assuming anything, it's been stated repeatedly. Rimu could implement his preferred features in ways that don't degrade the health of the network but chooses not to.
I'm not sure what relevance that has, but you can count those instances on a hand missing two fingers (i'd note that dbzer0 does not defederate from 2 of the three that I assume you're referring to, nor would I advocate for it). It would be interesting for someone to map out just how much of the fediverse is effectively being defederated for piefed servers with large user block lists - i imagine it's quite a large chunk, especially when the most popular users to block are the ones producing the most activity. The larger those servers grow, the bigger those holes will become.
Is Mbin updated much?
Have Lemmy mods approached Rimu at all?
Just noting that there are already holes of communication due to defederation (hexbear/lemmygrad are pretty medium sized).
He chose to fork his own code rather than work with them - I think the better question is why he hasnt vetted his changes with the existing codebase better, or why he cant be bothered.
So in your mind just the existence of an alternative platform that reads Lemmy instances here is in itself evidence of a problem? It seems like that to me.
I haven't seen a single instance owner (on piefed or lemmy) complain about the interpretation of the block system as developed by piefed so far.