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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?

PieFed (at least, piefed.zip that I tried) already has the answer - present the user opt-in global filters upon first sign-in. Allow people to block certain places, radical ideologies, or whatever - just make it a user’s choice. When that’s the case, even tankies themselves usually don’t complain.

The whole conflict is about having a blocklist that exists without users or even instance admins opting in.

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OpenStars@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Yes the .zip admin team - for both PieFed.zip and Lemmy.zip - are highly worthy of respect in that regard (plus all other regards that I have seen as well).

About the hidden blocklist aspect though: that’s the thing - Lemmy hides the communities that an instance admin team has blocked, and PieFed does too, so in that respect they are identically opaque.

So moving on, people have claimed that PieFed also has a series of “hidden blocklist features”, but everything that I have seen about that claim demonstrates that is untrue. It’s been months now but iirc there was even direct links provided to the actual portions of the codebase. These blocklists are NOT “hard-coded” as claimed - they are opt-in, just like the PieFed.zip situation offering that choice to the users, except in this case it is a decision offered to the instance admins. Opt-in is the polar opposite of hard-coded, the latter being worse than opt-out? Opt-in is the most friendly an option could possibly be?

Although those options are fairly opaque iirc rather than transparent, that much seems true. At least with PyLova you know what you are getting, while with PieFed the experience could in theory vary greatly all the way to the more authoritarian, walked garden style PieFed.social to the more free and open and choice-providing PieFed.zip. Which to me seems analogous to the spectrum between Lemmy.ml (an instance that falsely claims to be merely one for discussions about FOSS, with next to zero mention of its more political leanings) and Lemmy.zip.

Again, yes PieFed allows more censorship features, but against the backdrop of it just plain offering more features overall. All of which an admin is free to either turn on or leave off. The two software platforms truly look equivalent to me then, in terms of offering free speech.

With the exception of the vote quota that is, which low-key changes everything. The trajectory of PieFed edits is trending ever more towards authoritarianism and opacity rather than transparency - again, not that Lemmy is a bastion of transparency either, so they both get rather poor marks there, plus PieFed at least bothers to notify someone when they are banned from a community, so overall it might even be ahead… although with a trajectory that looks like eventually it could leave it behind, regardless of whether it currently is now or not. Does that make sense? Lemmy does a lot worse than people admit to knowing, and even if PieFed is not as bad as certain specific claims have made it out to be, it is not perfect either.

Which puts an exceedingly large burden on each and every instance admin team to try to pick up the slack left by the gaps in the software, and thus the .zip team should get all the more credit for rather successfully navigating this whole minefield even as it provides services for both platforms.

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