So, it seems like PieFed is becoming a real alternative to lemmy.
What are the differences between these two? From a tech perspective, and also morality/ethics, if you want. Any differences in vision for these services?
Say whatever is on your mind. I want to know.
On which one should we put our weight?
Edit: I will leave this post here, which is a post by one of the devs of Lemmy that enumerates some of the things Lemmy 1.0 has. Lemmy 1.0 seems to be already in alpha stage and is already testable. The feature selection does look fantastic. Here is the post I am referring to: https://lemmy.ml/post/40744781
I have no idea. I’m a vanilla, semi-norm who came from Reddit, mainly because they banned me after 15 years of active and mostly chill engagement.
I’m basically just a slightly opinionated guy who’s interested in what other people have to say on a variety of subjects.
I’m only dimly aware of PieFeed. I like lemmy as it feels like early Reddit and I access it through the boost app on Android, which was the peak Reddit experience before they locked down the APIs.
I’ve no interest in spreading myself over multiple platforms - I just want access to other humans via the path of least resistance.
With this in mind, is PieFace better? And if so, in what way?
Same here.
Piefed has a bunch of tools Lemmy doesn’t have: Flairs, Hashtags, Custom Feeds (Private and Public), Scheduled Posts, Combined comment sections for crossposts, Emote Reactions, Events, Polls
Most of these will also be available in Lemmy 1.0 soon!
Hello,
Hope you are doing well. Any time-frame (even rough) in mind for Lemmy 1.0 release?
We are currently finishing to implement the last feature community post tags. Once that is done there is still some cleanup and bug fixing to do. Soon after that we will publish the first beta version of 1.0 (likely in February), and ask app devs to start implementing the new API v4. How long the beta phase lasts is hard to say, it depends how many problems pop up.
Thank you for the summary
Interesting…Can you use boost or a similar app with it? Also, how popular is it compared to here in terms of user?
Apps do work with Piefed, but they do not necessarily have all the features Piefed has.
Why vs when we can just interop?
We are not like traditional websites. When one community does well, we can all do well.
Piefed users comment and post to lemmy and via versa.
I see a lot of piefed posts on Lemmy - are we not federated across so that we’re getting the milk without needing to buy the cow?
I’m gonna fuckin buy it and milk it and treat it tenderly
I’m going to just fuck it.
Not really. I think its more like everyone gets free milk but the lemmy milk has tankies in it.
OOooooooh… ok, well that’s a feature not a bug.
God, I hate tankies. I definitely worry about the future of lemmy with how nuts the developers are
I wouldn’t necessarily say I “hate” them but god any sort of interaction is just tedious.
I do have a lot of respect for the lemmy lead dev in that he’s been a pioneer in the fediverse, and lemmy has become a popular opensource project. However, his ideological views are incompatible with mine, and he seems unusually passionate about them.
Yeah I like Lemmy, i donate and have massive respect for the devs that worked hard for years building this software. But their views are disgusting and it will kill Lemmy eventually. We’re to small at the moment to start infighting so I dont worry to much about it. At the moment its more important for people to move away from corporate platforms to free and open platforms.
we need another Stalin to take care of…like you
Removed by mod
It is still important to support the better project, be it with our attention, or with our money/donations. What “better” means here depends on the metric.
Again, in this time and age, specially with everything going on around the world, I would hope that there is more thought about using/buying something.
I mean, I don’t jump from trend to trend, so I’ll support Lemmy until either the project gets depreciated and no more updates happen. I can still see everything because piefed is federated, so why jump from platform to platform every few months? What features really are there that make a difference?
For me I jumped the ship because ever since I got introduced to Lemmy, the knowledge of who the main Lemmy devs are left a really sour aftertaste to everything.
Piefed doesn’t have this baggage and as you say - Lemmy and Piefed can federate so I can still keep connected in the communities. And you can export your Lemmy profile and import to Piefed so the switch is really easy (though saved posts don’t get imported, but oh well).
Sorry, what’s the story with the Lemmy devs?
Transphobic tankies
Long story short, they are supporting and apologetic to various dictatorships, be it past or present. And anybody that disagrees is a Nazi.
You can check out !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works for some examples
Wrongthink
Piefed has flairs, custom feeds, events, scheduled posting, hashtags, word filters, emote reactions.
TIL - FINE, I’ll give a try!
Piefed lists comments from crossposts together, grouped by post, so there is less repetition due to crossposts.
Piefed lets me tag users so I can mark who is a dumbass and not worth replying to, which is nice because I block fewer users and don’t miss out on their posts that are fine because their comments elsewhere are terrible.
The two things I don’t like about piefed is that they don’t have a compact view for image posts and they don’t make the modlog easy to get to or search.
My lemmy-client (connect) also shows crosspost comments since a couple weeks.
I consider clients are their own thing since they vary significantly from the lemmy web sites.
Thanks for the rundown. OK, I’ll give it a shot.
On top of what others have said, I’m going to recommend piefed to my friends when they want to jump in because of the built in on boarding.
From the start it’ll show you and let you pick what topics you might like to see (so sort of like multireddit that groups together similarly themed communities into one feed / group), and shows what you want to filter and partially hide and or outright block posts with certain terms. It just kickstarts someone new so quickly with what they would want to see rather than going to all view and swim through a lot of posts that might turn you off of Lemmy/mbin/piefed.
And like you said Lemmy and piefed still federates with each other so still can leverage the content already existed.
And later on you could create your own topics/grouped communities just like multireddits.
It is still important to support the better project
If everyone went to the “best” instance it would crash it…
Like, you do realize the whole “decentralized” thing is why most of us are here, right?
OP is talking about the software all of the instances run on, not the individual servers themselves.
I would say that having a variety of software options also helps keep one party from having too much power, which is the main focus of federation. It’s not as important as having a variety of instances, but we can have both, so why not take advantage of it?
I would say that having a variety of software options also helps keep one party from having too much power
I don’t disagree, but since Mbin, Piefed, and Lemmy are all open-source and interoperable, none of them can ever have any meaningful power no matter which one became dominant, as each project can be forked if they go off the rails or if development from the OG devs stopped (as happened with Kbin, which was forked into Mbin).
As an example, the app ‘Organic Maps’ recently had controversy because the main dev was using donated funds for personal expenses without informing anyone. This caused a lack of trust, and it was just forked into CoMaps instead. That’s the inherent advantage of free and open-source software.
This is not about an instance, it is about a project.
And also, different people have different metrics for what constitutes “best”. Picking what one would think is “best” would not crash an instance. What are you talking about…
Read the last line in the comment you replied to.
It would not crash an instance. What are you talking about…
Ah, someone who wasn’t around for the reddit exodus to Lemmy.
Piefed and Lemmy are act-pub/fediverse software systems, same with Mastodon and many others. Since Lemmy and Piefed are so similar in their structure though as link aggregators that people vote and comment on you could think of them as the same network with different clients.
I switched from Lemmy to Piefed somewhere around piefed’s 1.15 version as I recall. On a technical front Piefed is a solid margin ahead in admin and usability features, at least as of when I switched. I haven’t noticed a major performance difference, but mine is a single user instance so that might be better shown at a larger scale. Lemmy was a bit easier to deploy initially since there wasn’t a need to have anything compile locally but rather just pull an image and go.
Ethically, I’m less concerned using Piefed than Lemmy. The devs of Lemmy are notoriously vocal in their support of Russia/China/Korea, and basically anything that could be considered in opposition of western liberal/progressive policies. This is troublesome since there is the potential for updates being made that help create even more aggressively divisive bubbles than we already have in many parts of the fedi. Those could be applied to any software of course, but the Lemmy devs make their stances quite visible in that regard.
There are a lot of tankies on lemmy, but I’ve only seen it on a couple of instances. It’s not worth the time to make common cause with them I’ve learned, they just want to make the cheap point of west bad, not fix anything, their whole point is it can’t be fixed. As if the alternative of getting a one party state would lead to a better outcome. They can’t even have their own opinions or make up their own minds it appears, they need permission from their leaders to even agree on something not already endorsed.
I picked Mbin
There are dozens of us!
I switched to piefed to help it grow, although for me the lemmy experience is still superior, due to the difference in clients available for Android.
On Android, the Voyager Lemmy client is better than the Blorp Piefed client.
Since the blorp Dev reads these comments (thanks for making us free software!), here’s my list of features to bring blorp up to parity, from most to least important:
- Choose what type of link to share by default: community link, poster’s link, my instance link, or blorp link, or other… Currently when I want to share something, I have to open it on Voyager to get a link.
- Ability to select text in comments. Voyager has this in the context menu.
- Ability to hide read posts. Blorp has this setting but it doesn’t work. When I open piefed I see old posts, but on Voyager I see fresh stuff.
- Ability to download .webp images. Downloads fail, but I can “share” the file to a file manager and save it that way.
- Put the profile button on the bottom stripe so it is easier to reach.
I thought Voyager supports piefed now?
it does. i am using voyager on piefed right now.
I guess I’m bad at logging in. Thanks.
Hm, perhaps your instance needs to update to a newer version? I notice that it’s on 1.4.6, while Piefed.social is currently running version 1.5.3
EDIT: Ah, nevermind, 1.4.6 is only a couple weeks old! I was thinking of the gap in those releases in relation to Lemmy’s, where that would be a massive difference.
Is voyager updated to the latest release?
I have Voyager 2.43.2 which is the latest on fdroid and also the latest stable release on GitHub. Maybe it is on the blahaj side?
Hm, could be. Very strange it isn’t working for you :\
I can login to blahaj on blorp and summit piefed clients, just not Voyager.
I had to sign up for the experimental bug test version of Voyager to gain access to piefed compatibility, though that was several months ago now; not sure if it’s been added to the main version yet or not. I haven’t had any issues using the experimental version.
It does. The only thing I miss compared to the Lemmy experience is that “auto fill title” does not work yet when link posting. However, most of the PieFed features aren’t integrated into Voyager yet, so it will be similar to the Lemmy experience but you will miss out a lot of PieFed stuff.
Ah, good to know. I’m already pretty happy with the lemmy voyager experience for just passive scrolling, and mostly do anything important (mod actions, longer comments, etc) on desktop anyway, so for me at least, that switch would be pretty seamless. Though hopefully Voyager supports more piefed features in the future!
Do you mind opening a GitHub issue? You can just make a single issue with that checklist. It’s just easier for me to track what needs to be done in GitHub instead of random Lemmy/PieFed comments. PieFed hide read should be an easy fix.
When I moved from Lemmy to Piefed, I just dumped apps all together. I’ve been using the web version since and it works absolutely fine for my use. Granted, I mostly comment, having only created a few posts ever. So perhaps using built in “share” feature of phone OSs is useful, but besides that, the web version works great.
Would you be willing to try Summit? That also supports piefed instances for some time now.
I didn’t know voyager now supports piefed. Have to give it a try some time.
I was using Lemmy, I now use Piefed and I quite satisfied (it’s not perfect, sure, neither am I ;).
Can’t recall why I switched but I know there was some technical reason.
To me, they’re just two ways (among a few more) of accessing the same fediverse. I use the Web UI, on a desktop computer as I don’t do social media on my phone.
Piefed Game Changer number 1: Custom feeds, ex:
that way I can look at non-tech non-politics stuff (either few memes or all memes) when I want.
Piefed Game Changer number 2: Scheduled posts. That way when I got free time I can make a bunch of posts and schedule them over the next couple days or weeks.
I still keep a Lemmy account bc a couple things are still easier there. Plus to see what the posts look like to other people.
Basically custom feeds are just a content recommendation algorithm.
See my complaint about the non-existence of Content Recommendation Algorithms on the fediverse today here
It’s not even recommendation, it’s just a way to see the same content (whatever sort you use) but in one view per topic instead of everything altogether.
Piefed has some neat features unique to it, such as:
- a very nice gallery view for image heavy communities.
- the ability to combine comments from multiple communities under one post, if the same link was posted to all of them. You can see an example of that here (notice how the comments have dividers for each community).
- the ability to create and subscribe to a pre-made list of communities, sorta like a multi-reddit.
On the sysadmin side of things, it’d bring some nice advantages regarding network resource usage and page loading speed, and benefits from using tried and tested industry standard frameworks (I.e, Flask), instead of bespoke solutions.
That linking of comments is pretty cool.
Page loading speed is interesting. Your link only tested on mobile. A few days ago I did a non-scientific test, on desktop, (just me browing on piefed) and I thought lemmy was faster. But I may be wrong, or it was just instance specific.
In most cases, when bandwidth/latency is not a bottleneck, the thing that limits page load times is the database (in both lemmy and piefed’s case). So, if an instance has a beefy server they are running their db on, then it is going to snappier most of the time.
The difference in speed could be due to differing hardware specs of the servers, locations of the servers in relation to you, and the amount of user activity on each server.
I’m not sure if piefed.ca is hosted in the same location as lemmy.ca, or if their server specs are similar, but it probably has a better chance of being able to compare relative speed.
On my end at least, they both seem about equally as fast, but perhaps it would be more noticeable on a slower internet speed.
I thought PieFed and Lemmy were one and the same.
I am not savvy on how this place is structured.
Lemmy and piefed are like different brands of phones. They do the same basic things for communicating with any other phone, but have different features for the user to interact with and different limitations.
Thank you.
Great analogy! Stealing it…
The beauty of open standards!
This is beautiful. The fediverse has achieved it purpose.
To be so seamless that you can’t tell a difference.
I like piefed.
I dont have a client, just the web ui in my phones browser is fine.
It honestly just feels exactly like lemmy to me, but I prefer not to support lemmy for ideological reasons.
I have borh and i find mobile with firefox is still the best.
PieFed all the way. It’s developing at lightning speed, while Lemmy lags behind as the transphobic genocide denying devs beg for donations with in built donation begging banners on all Lemmy instances front pages. Instances are apparently scared to defed from .ml for fear the devs wont support them with help.
Rimu has made some interesting choices, such as blocking 196 from default federating posts until a user subs first or a dislike for meme subs. But when spoken to has been receptive and removed such things or made them optional for admins.
Ethically and feature wise PieFed is in the lead, its not perfect but its open to change and receptive to ideas.
Rimu has made some interesting choices, such as blocking 196 from default federating posts until a user subs first or a dislike for meme subs. But when spoken to has been receptive and removed such things or made them optional for admins.
Huh? You’re mixing up a few things here, but 196 was removed from an auto-community look up filter. Currently in any Piefed instance, a local user has to subscribe to an off-instance community in order for new posts to populate though.
Why should we withdraw from the tankies, insufferable though they may be. Just don’t follow their posts. We don’t need or want to withdraw into echo chambers to protect our own people from wrongthink. Use your reason to dissuade from wrongthink.
More than just the tankies, we want to expand the people federated to include the right wing. You don’t have to follow their bullshit if you don’t want to, but segregating from them is a mistake, one that has led us to where we are today, in different realities.
we want to expand the people federated to include the right wing.
Non-nazi conservatives already can use the existing general instances. Every ‘free speech right wing’ instance that has been created immediately became nazi bars that welcomed fascists. Tolerating the intolerant will simply push away the non-fascists from participating, which is what ultimately caused previous reddit alternatives like Voat (and Bitchute, Nostr, Odysee, etc) to fail.
The majority of conservatives are not nazis even if they unknowingly support them. It does makes sense that nazis are looking for a home and colonized offshoots like lemmy though as the explicit ones would be forced from mainstream outlets.
Obviously there is a line there, where do you draw it? From banning out and out nazis, to what? Who says who is a nazi, or a fascist?
We should have a clear set of rules, and violations, or censoring, should go through a process ending in a jury trial of users before any final decision is made. Not only would it be fun to run such jury trials on violations, and give a sense of community, but it would prevent moderators and developers deciding for us what we can see and prevent abuses of their power, and prevent government and business interests getting their hooks into the moderation.
In the case of banning instances idk about that even, my instance doesn’t block any instances and I’ve seen no nazis. Even if I did, so what, I could avoid them, same as I do with tankies. It’s better to be able to see what they are doing anyway, insight is valuable at times. The instance could have a banner explaining they are condemned by the other instances, where you have to affirmatively click on it like a nsfw post.
What about people critical of Israel? Israel’s superfans insist it’s bigotry to not support their final solution against their others, to question them forcing millions of people into ghettos. Are we to censor anyone disputing such narratives because bigotry is alleged? Because they equate criticism of their policies as naziism, quite literally, while themselves being nazis of a new sort. The bad (worse) guys always accuse their victims/opponents of doing what they are doing. Why should developers and site administrators decide truth on their own?
I do not see what good it does banning instances in the first place. You think your own users are going to become nazis after seeing their posts? To protect their weak minds from wrongthink? It doesn’t really work like that, and people not being exposed to it can make it more likely they get seduced to it not less. And it’s not in the best traditions of western culture to censor viewpoints as such.
it would prevent moderators and developers deciding for us what we can see and prevent abuses of their power, and prevent government and business interests getting their hooks into the moderation.
What prevents that is the base structure of the fediverse itself. Anyone can spin up a new instance, and choose to federate with whomever they wish, and users can choose which instance most closely aligns with how they want their experience to be. That’s not possible on centralized services like Reddit.
If a business were to somehow place themselves as admins on an instance and it became pro-corporate, it would be easy to defederate them, as 90% of instances already have done to Threads.
Are we to censor anyone disputing such narratives because bigotry is alleged?
That’s a strawman argument, as it implies that any allegation, no matter the evidence behind it or who makes it, will somehow be enough to justify defederation.
You don’t just defederate on allegation, you verify based on actions. If an instance is openly pro-genocide zionists, or openly fascist, or openly encouraging or tolerating racism, bigotry against minorities, etc, then they should be defederated if you don’t want to turn into a Nazi bar.
You think your own users are going to become nazis after seeing their posts? To protect their weak minds from wrongthink? It doesn’t really work like that, and people not being exposed to it can make it more likely they get seduced to it not less. And it’s not in the best traditions of western culture to censor viewpoints as such.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a Nazi Bar. The short version is: If Nazis frequent your bar, and you don’t kick them out, more Nazis will come, the rest of your clientele leaves, and your bar will become a Nazi Bar.
You can’t give some nazis just a couple booths of your bar and tell the rest of your patrons to ignore them, the other patrons will leave and not come back, because they don’t want to associate with nazis.
If you federate with nazi instances, they will not engage with the rest of the fediverse in good faith, they will disrupt and troll and put off normal users from wanting to engage with the platform at all (many people have said that the high tankie presence on Lemmy is offputting enough to avoid it, as an example, it would be even worse if nazis were also welcomed).
I think it’s rather close minded to reject the jury trials for violations on instances, under clear rules. Moderation, both site wide and in communities, is a big reason half the people are on here. You expect them to shop around to every instance to find ones where their beliefs are in alignment with moderators, and how they could read a disagreement you may have with people on here, that could be misunderstood or taken out of context, or downright wrong?
To say jury trials could be co opted, not if you set it up right, it would be less able to get co-opted as imperious edicts from administrators as you are advocating would be.
Your arguments in favor of censorship always boil down to us trusting the people running the joint. If a drastic step like banning an instance is taken, then it wouldn’t be hard to prove that to a jury of your peers. And other remedies could be available as I said, like hiding their posts under a nsfw with an explanation.
Reasonable people can differ on where to draw the line in banning instaces, as I said you would have to ban the nazis (talk about strawman,) you keep using in your definition, but the majority of conservatives are not nazis. It would be like banning all left groups for tankies that purport to be left.
This kind of thinking is why the fediverse hasn’t taken off. We have all the wrong people in charge, from business to government, to developers of lemmy apparently, and their cheerleaders promoting censorship to protects us from wrongthink, out of a sheer contempt for our intelligence.
You keep calling it censorship like defederation blocks any ability for a user to access the defederated instance. It doesn’t. A user can still visit it directly if they really want to, and they can move to an instance like yours that doesn’t defederate anything if they really want to.
You are very dismissive of admins or moderators who may not want to take on additional moderation load of dealing with nazi bars. Lemm.ee shut down due to admin burnout, moderation load is not a triviality that can be glossed over.
Except on the most popular instances; Sysadmins, admins, and moderators are all putting in a not insignificant amount of effort keeping their servers maintained and updated, removing spam, illegal material, trolls, etc, all without receiving a dime. The fediverse is mostly all volunteer effort. To sustain that effort, you want to make the job of keeping all this going at least somewhat fun.
If you demand that they federate with instances that only bring with it endless trolls, fights, spam, fascist and racist material, it will stop being fun. Coming to the site will feel like a slog, and burnout will crop up quick. This is a studied problem.
This kind of thinking is why the fediverse hasn’t taken off. We have all the wrong people in charge
Anyone can be in charge of their own instance, you yourself could be the change you want to see. Instead, you seem to dislike the idea that most instances don’t agree with your views on federation, despite the federated nature of the fediverse allowing for the instances you desire to exist. We just don’t want to talk to them.
but the majority of conservatives are not nazis
Do you feel like non-nazi conservatives are not able to use the general instances?
What do you mean federating with instances that bring endless trolls, fights, spam, fascist and racist material? As I responded on a different reply I gave a brief recount of my wandering onto a hexbear post not knowing they were tankies and getting mobbed by like 100 replies, then having some follow me onto other threads for a few weeks. I got suspicious and caught a couple of them and called them on it and they stopped.
My crime, and I thought they were just super politically correct at first incensing me to argue back even more, was saying they are trying to turn us into an eastern style government, where we aren’t allowed to disagree with leaders or policies. Did not understand the vitriol. Really dumb trolling too, lots of moving pictures, gifs, I fucking hate those things. God rot gif givers, with exceptions.
But just being federated with them, their users come onto your threads and talk trash? But if not federated they can’t come onto your threads? What if my instance is federated with them, and your isn’t, and we are all on the same thread on an instance we all are federated on, can they only see my replies and not yours?
idk all the ins and outs. Less censorship is better in my opinion and other options short of blocking whole swaths of users could be employed but yes at a point you have to block them, can’t have nazis, or agent provocateurs could even be used to say illegal things and then try to get the authorities on that instance for not having it removed in time kind of thing. There is a line where you have to censor. I think that line should at least be under clear rules enforced faithfully, and the best way to enforce them faithfully would be for major decisions to be decided by a jury of users. Including decisions to permaban users, especially that.
In the case of banning instances idk about that even, my instance doesn’t block any instances and I’ve seen no nazis. Even if I did, so what, I could avoid them, same as I do with tankies. It’s better to be able to see what they are doing anyway, insight is valuable at times. The instance could have a banner explaining they are condemned by the other instances, where you have to affirmatively click on it like a nsfw post.
That’s up to you. You’re welcome to use a ‘free speech’ instance, but if lemmy.today does erode into an outpost, a hub for said reactionaries to organised and harangue the fediverse down the line due to low local moderation, then lemmy.today itself would become at risk of being defederated by the wider fediverse.
What do you mean “organize and harangue” the fediverse? Is disagreeing with you that? Taking an issue with your political picks and their stances and platform? Who put you in charge? I didn’t vote for you.
What do you mean “organize and harangue” the fediverse?
Using low populated instances, or poorly moderated instances as springboards by which to troll, spread misinformation and post in bad faith.
Is disagreeing with you that?
No.
Taking an issue with your political picks and their stances and platform? Who put you in charge? I didn’t vote for you.
I didn’t say, in this context, that I would be the arbiter. Just that if an instance was used that way by bad agents consistently, and it wasn’t noticed, it could find itself at risk of being defederated.
Beyond that, there’s little support on larger instances like .world, sh.itjust.works etc of re-federating with lemmygrad, hexbear, maga.place etc.
I see lemmygrad and hexbear, and they are insufferable, but I can avoid posts on their instance.
When I first got on here I didn’t know any of that and responded on some hexbear post and they piled on me, I defended myself thinking they were super politically correct until someone noticed and explained to me they were communists from other countries. Probably 100 replies from them.
All just to make cheap political points, west bad. No you can’t fix anything in the west stop right there west always bad, eastern dictatorship good apparently. That was my affront too, I said they were trying to turn the US into an eastern style government where everyone has to pretend to believe their leaders. While here in the west we’ve long been able to disagree with our leaders. They piled on, and I thought they were mad because of political correctness gone awry.
I should add I think they followed me onto other threads and trolled me too for a couple of weeks, I actually caught a couple and called them out on it.
Other attempts to make common cause all ended in failure as well as a whole although I’ve spoken to a few reasonable people you will always get some that jump down your throat about something. They also seem to need permission to believe in something. Pathetic.
So I see where one would want to ban them, I think other measures could be better, like hiding their posts under a banner, nsfw style perhaps. It could come auto censored and you have to click on it, it could give you the options to set up how to block what. There could be ways to mute them or groups, idk the mechanics.
But if drastic action is taken, it should be under a clear set of rules, and I think those rules in an ideal instance could reach a jury trial of users, where someones argues the best arguments either side and a decision is made. I think that should also be available to other moderation actions like permanently banning users. Half the people on lemmy here were targeted on reddit with dishonest moderation in the first place, and everyone on there has seen moderators abusing their power, had false allegations lobbed at them, been accused of motivations they don’t have.
Clear and honest rules would prevent abuses and misunderstandings, and prevent manipulators, many of which are organized for ill purposes, from running malign agendas with armies of mechanized troll divisions and influence agents, some of which are paid for by our own governments and have hooks into social media companies to pretend not to see them and cave to their bad faith moderations asks, whether by mass flagging through those agents, or homeland security that sent lists of users to ban.
They don’t ban or violoate users for what they are getting banned for either, they find an unrelated subject, and pretend it’s against the rules, often with no plausibility. Because we have no protections, no honest system of appeal, they don’t have to show plausible reasons to violate accounts in the US. Jury Trials would fix that and instill trust, something soon to be in shorter supply, everything is going to go to shit(tier places.)
I agree. And you know what, Facebook’s sponsored algorithm makes more Nazis than Nazis alone. What we need is to be able to subscribe to community notes and misinformation alerts from trusted sources. There is room for everyone, even the fucking Nazis. We just need block lists etc. And before someone cries echo chamber, you know it’s kind of up to you to monitor your “trusted” sources over time. Things change and being informed is being informed. Apolitical people or people too thick for ethical decisions just don’t need an algorithm pushing political propaganda to their feed every moment of every day.
FYI, hexbear is a troll instance, and its admins have literally been caught lying to the admins of other instances. It is not their beliefs that get them defederated by other instances, but their combative and trolling behaviors that their instance admins refuse to keep constrained within their spaces.
So since they refuse to, the other instances must do the job for them. Hexbear is not nearly as bad as CSAM, but it’s a similar argument: when something is fairly wholly offensive, shouldn’t someone have the right to not have to have that content shoved into their face, without their consent?
Fwiw, instances like PieFed.zip allow federation with hexbear (and lemmygrad), but make it opt-in by initially blocking it for all users but telling users how they can remove those blocks. Hexbear in particular has earned their censure by the wider community, but this approach nonetheless allows discussions with them from their home instance. And btw nothing blocks anyone from creating a hexbear account - nobody here is talking about making them cease to exist, though offering them a platform and a full seat at the same table as everyone else, despite their refusal to play nicely with others, would be another matter altogether.
Check out communities such as Meanwhileongrad and yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com to learn more such details if you like.
I’ve tried to participate on their threads a number of times, all ending in them trolling me and me having to ignore them to end it. Just when we had this conversation I went on one of theirs, got some agreement, until one of their guys posted a link to the original comment I mad that pissed them off when I didn’t know they are tankies. We would still be at it if I kept responding.
So what I’ve noticed, they seem to have guys in charge, it’s not a group of independent dickheads, it’s like a hierarchy, with leaders and a chain of command of sorts. That they somehow found a random person commenting, garnering a small amount of agreement, nothing pulling downvotes, and they somehow ended up searching that user in their archives.
There is no agreeing with them either for long. They lead their people to have contempt for the western left. While themselves coming across as “woke” which is odd because their biggest sponsor over there is in league with fascists and themselves run by fascists and the like.
I don’t quite get that part, they are all using pronouns and supposedly against bigotry (which they define as anything critical of the governments they support,) while championing all of these governments that are the opposite. Like it all seems a organized effort, maybe a rather dumb and palsied arm of russian intelligence, so what is their game with it all? It doesn’t seem like they are just killing time for fun they are being led. Idk, fuck those guys though.
I know this may be difficult to believe but some people will lie on the internet, haha! 😆 In their defense, they primarily lie to themselves, although then they also still do continue to do so to others. It’s exactly 4chan behaviors, where much study has been done into the psychology behind the disassociation effect.
Echo chambers are dangerous - anyone who disagrees gets kicked out, leaving only those who either genuinely agree or at least do not go against the prevailing trends very much. Hence why those edgelord teenager types focus more on the appearance of logical argumentation practices without the reality of it - i.e. “the dunk” (aka slam) where someone says something with an attitude of utter confidence that only betrays a complete lack of deeper thought (bc real thinkers continually question everything), and that Lord of the Flies crowd just eats it up, never realizing that there are any other ways to be.
As for whether it’s a Russian psy-op I have no idea. I doubt it though - they seem quite willing to be that way entirely without either payment or help from outside. Although it is baked into many cultures of the word to be more cunning, so that if you are the dumb-fuck who fell for their false arguments then they look down on you for being so gullible, rather than on themselves for having mislead others. In any case the answer is always the same: just like an instance dedicated to CSAM, they are entirely free to do whatever they please, but then others MUST also be free to not have to consent as well.
Everyone learns what hexbear is about, eventually, and then it becomes a rite of passage. Or it seems more often, people simply leave the Threadiverse altogether, complaining on r/RedditAlternatives how toxic we are here, not being able to distinguish the nuances of “here” or “there”. By not merely allowing them the freedom to exist (trivially easy, in fact that takes zero effort) but actively platforming their content, helping them to spread it around, while having to ignore the lies told at the instance admin level and all the reports about bullying behaviors and accounts who violate the existing rules of other instances, yet passing on those reports to the hexbear instance admins to do something about it, but then nothing ever gets done…
It’s like an abusive relationship - what they chose to do is on them, but our response is on us.
Btw true leftist instances exist, like slrpnk.net, and LGBTQIA+ friendly spaces, like blahaj (Ada is an outright awesome human being), it’s just that hexbear happens to claim these properties without bothering to realize that they are doing active harm to them - although in their defense, to the degree that they are aware of that fact, and care, they probably find that funny as hell. They are edgelord teenagers (of whatever physical age), pure and simple.
And when you see that, then tankie philosophy also makes a great deal more sense. That one at least has some logic behind it - which I reject, but at least it’s there. It’s not “honest” to outsiders, but it is there. Maybe. I think the logic goes: other people are dumb as shit, so it’s okay for them to be exploited - those who see through the false statements will be okay and rise to the top regardless, while those who cannot deserve their fate (literal death, and worse, slavery). Hexbears are just funning around, but real tankies are deadly serious. They too borrow the leftist language, without meaning it in the same way, but rather in the way that “everyone else should be forced, at the point of a gun/tank, to be equal, so long as I am MORE equal than them” (which I would argue is the exact opposite of leftism, but remember: if you fall for their ruse, then that’s on you, according to that philosophy, while for themselves the only thing that circumscribes their actions are defined in the language of power).
The theory in question is how easy it is for organized interests to manipulate people into ill ends.
A bunch of them are just there for fun - whether their actual leadership has an agenda I would not know about, it sounds as if you’ve studied that aspect more deeply than I.
They defer to some users that act as enforcers and police the threads, and if called on something by one fall over themselves apologizing, which I didn’t do which is why they presumably told me to fuck off their threads last message I got from them.
It’s like they need permission to like something new as well. I have limited information obviously but am curious to know the story on them.
What? Tankies are the ones friendly to trans folks, and the ones who aren’t denying the genocide. I don’t even know where you got that idea, unless you’re trying to smear them.
Lemmy, I started with Lemmy and have not seen a reason to move away.
Piefed has some critical features like, non-nsfw blur, flairs, ability to disable notifications from relies on posts and more information is exposed to admins.
I used Lemmy for a few years, but switched to PieFed recently. They offer very similar functionality. PieFed suits me slightly better. I would be happy with either. And I’m still using Voyager.
