Comment on Lemmy or Piefed?
OpenStars@discuss.online 13 hours agoUltimately I think you are correct but a lot of the details here are slightly to majorly incorrect. For instance, unless something has changed, wasn’t Dessalines rather than Nutomic the main dev, with the former having started the code and then brought in the latter later on?
Lemmy most definitely shadow-censors people’s experiences too. Did you know that every Lemmy instance - not just ML - has a hidden list of communities that it shadow-bans? Some instance admins are extremely friendly and go out of their way to publicly declare this fact, but most do not, and unlike the listing of (de)federated instances, Lemmy inherently chooses to hide rather than display this information. Lemmy.ml also by default acts as the arbiter of what communities are allowed to be suggested to new instances upon first installation (though both this setting and the communities themselves can be adjusted later by someone who knows what they are doing and how to accomplish that).
Most of the manner in which Lemmy is opinionated though shows up in the features that are less obvious or non-existent rather than displayed right in your face like PieFed does. e.g. PieFed chooses to bother to notify end-users when a moderator bans them from a community or even an entire instance, while Lemmy merely buries that information deep in the modlog and most people either never find out or only do so months to literally years after it happening. Do people have a “right” to know such? PieFed prominently displays such so vehemently declares yes while Lemmy merely remains merely silent, a more implicit but equally vehement no. Likewise, upon deletion of a post Lemmy displays a page that acts like it never existed in the first place and in fact looks more like a server error than content issue or acknowledgement of the facts of the true situation, whereas PieFed by default deletes only the OP’s contribution yet keeps the comment section intact, available to anyone with the original URL (mods can override this though).
That said, PieFed’s vote quota shadow-censoring contributions from users on other platforms - Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, etc. - without disclosure of that fact is fairly heinous, and particularly the manner behind its rollout (in defiance of all advice to the contrary) may be the forerunner to spelling out loss of confidence in the entire software project, provoking fears of additional such changes coming in the future, without notice and against all push-back. PieFed is quite opinionated indeed, and also seems to be veering away from Reddit-esque “social media” and more towards a professional, serious-content-only microblogging style.
That said, most of the criticism against PieFed has been shown to represent outright disinformation, as digging deeper most accusations were shown to be not just slightly but blatantly false (though despite that the original post remains up without having been corrected), hence made (and spread) by people without knowledge of how software works. e.g. most of the “hard-coded” features turn out not only to not be hard-coded after all, but outright (and extremely friendly) opt-in rather than opt-out (unfortunately not the vote quota though - that one is opt-out).
Someone installing their own instance can get a great deal out of running PieFed rather than Lemmy, with the former’s significantly enhanced feature set, while for people relying upon a public instance your experience will be affected far more by choice of admin team than the software that they choose to be running under the hood - especially if you are accessing it via a 3rd-party app like Voyager that offers only rudimentary access to many of the bells & whistles only accessible on PieFed anyway, like user and post flairs, polls, combining together comments across all cross-posts, categories of communities which represent user-customizable and shareable topic feeds, the initial account sign-up wizard, etc.
So a lot of what you related here about PieFed filtering out content is not fully true - like lemmy.ml’s extremism it applies to the PieFed.social instance itself, and yes it is possible to turn on that same filtering by choosing the opt-in feature upon installation of another instance (much like installation of a Lemmy instance can by default populate itself with communities that are acknowledged i.e. not banned by Lemmy.ml), but an instance admin can also make different choices too. For instance the vote quota can be essentially disabled by assigning it to a ridiculous value that would be impossible for an actual human being to reach.
Overall: PieFed is a shiny and new, fast-paced, but also opinionated and controversial project. Whether it’s going to be a “peace of mind” or “power tripping dev hellscape” software is only for you to experience.
This is… entirely accurate, sadly. Fortunately as you mentioned there is the PyLova fork actively working against these censorship features, plus adding new ones of its own, for instance admins that don’t want to have to put in all the effort to do so entirely on their own.
I hope this was helpful to get you started in your research to show that the situation wrt PieFed is nowhere close to being as bad as people have presented it to be (though certainly far from ideal, and at its core still somewhat valid in that it is quite opinionated software and becoming more so all the time), nor is the situation wrt to Lemmy all sunshine and rainbows and anywhere close to being as free of censorship as people make it out to be (though in the end it does manage to keep its politics out of the software better, hence someone may choose to place their hopes into it as a better option in the future to maintain freedom of speech).
Allero@lemmy.today 8 hours ago
Yes, I believe Dessalines came first, but now it seems like Nutomic pretty much took the reigns in maintaining the software. Hence, I listed Nutomic.
Instances hiding certain communities from main feed is a pretty normal thing, as long as it’s instance-level. I was not aware some defaults are set upon installation. Also, some transparency would be nice, if that’s the case.
And I also agree moderation actions should be more visible on Lemmy. But hey - this information is open, just poorly communicated.
In any case, thanks for extra context! I’ll take it into account.
OpenStars@discuss.online 3 hours ago
RE: Dessalines vs. Nutomic
Interesting, and noted. Though when they send out the calls for funding I thought they included both. I do think that Nutomic became more the public-facing side. I don’t know what Dessalines has been doing lately.
Yes and surely PieFed provides this functionality as well? I don’t know that with 100% certainty or even really at all but it stands to reason? So it’s not that PieFed does it while Lemmy does not do it - they both do it, though PieFed provides a means to do it a lot more often.
Then again, have you read the comments in pretty much any Reddit post where people complain about Lemmy’s tankies and/or toxicity? It makes sense to me: tankies freely state that they wish death to all Western civilization, including and especially not only those on the Right side of the political compass but also those not far enough on the Left… and what is Reddit full of if not primarily American and secondarily European centrists, i.e. those very people marked for death and destruction? I am talking about people that did not feel that we were too confusing - they passed the first hurdle of checking us out, passed the second of choosing an instance on which to make an account, and many (the ones I pay attention to most) report having remained here for literally several years. They adamantly state that they will never, under any conditions, return to the Threadiverse.
But I wonder… especially since 3rd-party apps do not show instance names by default, how many of such people had a run-in with Hexbear trolls and did not know how to block them all - i.e. might return if they could be assured that no hexbears would be here to harass them any longer? Or maybe it wasn’t the hexbear trolls, perhaps it was the tankie debate-bros - MANY of those are among the most respectful people to dialogue with and I can somewhat to even really enjoy the discourse despite differences in opinion - however many MORE are not respectful, and seem to relish aggravating people. Though moderation is hellish here, with most people willing to do so having either quit entirely or at least stepped back from moderating.
Hence PieFed is stepping up to offer a safe space where people can play and be more free of that toxicity. It’s different than the Tesseract dev situation for the plain & simple fact that the features are opt-in, not even opt-out or particularly mandatory i.e. hard-coded as people have so often claimed.
i.e., PieFed itself merely facilitates but does not push forward the censorship issues. Lemmy also has censorship of its own - e.g. the slur word filter. Or it would be better to say that Lemmy facilitates the decisions of individual instances, supporting them if they wish to have a slur word filter running on their machines. Though on the spectrum where they both do that, PieFed does offer more features - both overall, and with respect to this specific, like it does for pretty much all issues actually. If an instance wants to avoid them though, then simply leave them turned off, as they are default anyway.
Sorry I got off a bit ranting - I 100% agree that the key is transparency. PieFed can do whatever it wants, as too can Lemmy, but when things are done in secret then people start to get pissy. Both Lemmy and PieFed have a long way to go to increase transparency in their respective codebases, particularly about these censorship matters. e.g. why not offer a page that lists communities currently being shadow-banned? It already does this for instances being federated/defederated with. Except if it did this, then it would no longer be "shadow-"banned and would instead merely be called “banned”:-).
And in the matter of the modlog too, PieFed is ahead of Lemmy, in offering greater transparency in bothering to send a notification upon a moderation event. Lemmy would do well to add such - but notifications have been around for several years, as too has the modlog, but connecting the two is apparently not a priority. Though if you look at the number of moderation events occuring on Lemmy.ml, apparently a great deal of time is spent curating the content and userbase on that instance. Also, Dessalines refuses to allow donations that are sent to enhance Lemmy to be used solely in enhancing the Lemmy codebase (the only way would be to send donations directly to Nutomic), so many of those funds (we also are not told now much) are being used to spread the political ideology of the dev.
Whereas for PieFed, at least at the moment, most of the donations are seen to be creating changes to the PieFed software.
Anyway it’s not like PieFed is authoritarian while Lemmy is not authoritarian - both are, just in different ways. Though the trajectory of PieFed is increasingly leaning towards that end, more so than it did previously, and also like Lemmy in its earlier days, not doing so great a job at keeping those beliefs out of the software itself. Both are somewhat political (these days, PieFed more so, at least within the software itself), PieFed offers more features overall but also is more problematic to someone valuing freedom of speech, even while simultaneously offering more “rights” to the end-users than Lemmy, in some ways but less so in others.
Clear as mud now, right!? 😜 My TLDR is that the PieFed software itself is fine, either for someone installing their own instance or if you trust the instance admin team to resist Rimu’s trending towards authoritarianism - like PieFed.zip looks really impressive, and quokka is even running the PyLova fork that straight-up hard-coded removed most of the more controversial features.