The domain https://fediverse.observer/ redirects to sedo now.
On October 11th these two commits where made to the repo:
this will be my final release, glad to have contributed since 2011 to some fediverse stats, https://fedidb.com/ is a great resource with more interest
this software is no longer developed
Sad to have lost such a great resource.
PyLova: agreed, sadly.
Disinformation: yes, exactly like MAGA. They aren’t bad people, just disinformed - as in actively utilized as tools to achieve the objectives of the one(s) pulling the strings. Arguably we should all resist such, but as you say the barriers against such are high, and I think we can agree that some people are simply too preoccupied with the basics of living to have either the time or inclination to become properly informed. One implication then being that it is the very foundational principle of democracy itself that works against its own demise: when unedumacashiated people are allowed to vote, chaos is not nearly as likely to result (from such “random” inputs) as the system being taken over by a malicious actor who may then use it for their own nefarious purposes.
But even so, that explanation neither absolves people of their failures in the absolute necessity to remain curious, nor absolves us of our own failure when we allow the system to propagate, and in fact help it along.
According to this post PieFed.zip uses the same blocking system as Lemmy.zip for new joiners. See also this comment from the admin. Like programming.dev, the .zip instances (like all other instances) can also block particular communities - which unfortunately neither the Lemmy nor PieFed UI offers a mechanism to expose that list publicly to the users, making the transparency of this issue rather horrible, where I have to link to messages from the admins but there is no webpage that will simply show an updated status - like does exist for instance federation vs. defederation. The tools here, again both Lemmy and PieFed, are abysmal at such transparency topics.
This is the kind of stuff that I would love to see added - to Lemmy, to PieFed, or to PyLova - and I feel like the increased transparency would help entice new joiners.
I understand that viewpoint, but my understanding is that there is not a “good” solution. If “education” or “knowledge” requirements are implemented, they are, or at least to my knowledge have been, used to disenfranchise the most vulnerable. An example of this could be the Southern States after the American Civil War. They implemented “literacy tests” biased toward the wealthy and whites to restrict the poor, minorities, and immigrants from voting. The “best” solution I’ve heard to stopping an uninformed populace is to educate the masses to develop critical thinking skills. Unfortunately, that “solution” is generally on generational timescales.
How do they know to “remain curious”? How did you learn to? How did I learn to? From my experience in life and learning from others about their lives, I’ve found I’ve had a quite privileged upbringing with regards to education and emotional support. This leads me to be quite generous in my view of people’s “failings”.
Anytime I run across someone “failing” to understand something I consider basic or common, I try to think back to when did I learn that and from whom. In most cases, the person or situation I learned from didn’t exist for the person “failing”. From that point, I try to, with no judgment of them, explain my reasoning and thought process to them (just as someone did for me). If they want to take in and consider my words, great. If not, that’s alright too. I could always be wrong about the topic, they could not be ready to change, or any other reasoning (you don’t need to force every seed to sprout, just keep providing a nurturing environment and you may soon find yourself surrounded by greenery).
Mostly I just try to be open minded myself (like I am truly open to changing my viewpoint to theirs) and provide an open and safe environment for others to consider alternatives. I find it works quite well.
“This means some of the spicier instances are blocked by default, which users can remove themselves in the user settings.”, “… piefed.zip (and lemmy.zip) already blocks hexbear, lemmygrad, and lemmynsfw by default, and sends a PM to the user when they sign up to let them know why we do this, and how to remove it.” Huh, TIL. I was going based on the listed instance de-federations (where they aren’t shown).
Great point. This might be a time to “weaponize” Pylova. Since Piefed has been “back-porting” Pylova’s work, if Mia implemented this transparency addition, it would probably make its way to Piefed. Maybe Lemmy would follow suit, but no idea. I’m thinking worst-case its implemented in Pylova and the Pylovians all benefit. Thoughts?
Edit: Switched a word for grammar.
I was thinking the same, just didn’t want to promise anything in case I could not deliver. The devs are VERY eager for feedback though, so it’s truly doing them a favor to ask, plus as you said most likely also a significantly wider userbase as well. Then again I think I’ve already asked for something vaguely similar in terms of general transparency features, although this is concrete hence much more likely to move forward (otoh there is a distinct possibility that I’ve already asked for precisely this, so I’d have to look it up). Edit: okay, done - https://discuss.online/post/46939614.
We seem mostly in agreement on other factors as well. Stoicism suggests that we cannot fix the entire world, we can only do what we can in our little corner of it. Personally I would hope that PieFed.zip would automatically apply a user-level block to new joiners for Lemmy.ml, the same way that it already does for hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml. Bc whatever we personally think about tankies or magats and how much we can stand to put up with their alternative factual argumentation practices, it remains that new people are extremely put off by such, and keep fleeing here when exposed to it, then subsequently complaining about us to anyone who will listen.
i.e., being kind to and/or having empathy with people who enjoy trolling behaviors is not the same thing as offering them a platform. Especially one where their messages are presented identically alongside with all other messages, such that new joiners cannot distinguish between them. A warning label, an icon, a different color highlighting etc. would go a long way. But that’s a ton of effort, which anyone using a 3rd-party app won’t be able to access anyway, hence blocking is all that is left, short of full defederation.
The alternative, which is the current method, is to simply get comfortable being a troll bar. We feature trolls here, we make them feel very comfortable, and offer only confusing methods to people and very little guidance to new joiners to avoid them.
Awesome! Upvoted :)
While I agree that would likely help new comers, I suspect the .zip admins have a similar thought process to Rimu (not antagonizing the Lemmy Devs, and keeping the lines of communication open in case there is an software issue).
I agree and block trolls immediately (“Don’t Feed Trolls!” is my motto online).
I thought previously a subscribe-able block list would be a great addition, at the user and/or the instance level. Users or instance admins could create a list of problematic users and/or communities and any updates automatically feed to the subscribing instances or users. Obviously issue is who gets authority to amend a list, but I think if the list was in a standard format and “forkable” it wouldn’t be too big of an issue for different groups to easily create and maintain their own lists without much issue.
This could be away to block the worst offenders/trolls without risking antagonizing the Lemmy Devs. Thoughts?
I don’t think we are “comfortable being a troll bar”, I think we are uncomfortable and taking steps, unfortunately slowly, to move past that phase of development. With ~80% of the Threadiverse on Lemmy and the Lemmy.ml admins being the Lemmy Devs, I think things have to move slowly (boil the frog slowly). There’s no way (to my knowledge) to switch instances to an alternative software (Piefed, Pylova, Mbin), so all the Lemmy instances are a little bit held hostage. I don’t currently see a way out from the hostage situation, but perhaps one will present itself in the future.
In the meantime, like you are saying, I don’t think that means things can’t improve with on-boarding or initial blocking for new users, to continue moving away from being a “troll bar”.
I love this idea. Topic Feeds are already user-customizable and shareable, so why not block lists? And while I haven’t read through it yet, see also supersquirrel’s recent post (last day or two) on the topic in the Fediverse community iirc, saying similarly for Mastodon. Admiral Patrick’s toxicity filter went behind people’s backs and did such opaquely, but when handled transparently and with full informed consent that would be an entirely different story. And then people could choose like no filter, minimal or maximal filtering, or perhaps some intermediary steps between those.
Some issues remain, like instance blocking does so without informing the recipient, who gets essentially shadow-blocked by the recipient. But that is not something fixable by PieFed alone, and would require cooperation with Lemmy to receive the signal and pass it on to the affected users in whatever way they chose.
It’s been like 3 years. I for one have lost hope, especially now that we are well past the era of Reddit enshittification. We cannot rely on future Redditors to come over anymore, and therefore where else are users likey to arrive - Instagram? Tiktok? Anyway, if anything happens, then I will believe it when I see it, but the likelihood of something happening to change things in a major way seems to me to be decreasing with each year that ticks on by. The time to do something, if we wanted to entice more Redditors, is now long past.
No actually there is - Rimu converted many Lemm.ee communities over to PieFed.social (I forget if they lost access to modify their older content, or perhaps if they messaged him before lemm.ee went fully down from their old account then he could take that as proof of ownership and grant such access), and Quokka has converted fully from Lemmy to PieFed and then from PieFed to PyLova, so aside from Rimu are the preeminent experts in such conversions. With Rimu’s community migration tools and Quokka’s experience, communities on Lemmy are not held hostage, anymore.
Otoh, Rimu himself is personally quite opinionated on certain matters, and rarely but decidedly goes against community push-back to enact his own agendas. In the second most recent event, prior to the PyLova code non-attribution one I mean, he decided fairly unilaterally to shadow-censor content even hosted on other instance platforms - restricting people’s ability to vote more than a given allotment per day, even if they use Lemmy, Mbin, Mastodon, nodeBB, etc. Which is arguably fine, except vaguely like the Admiral Patrick situation, Rimu continues to do so without telling the recipients that they are being thus censored. Like someone presses an upvote button, the color changes, but then the vote count does not change. MANY people disagreed - about the change overall, about its lack of transparency, and also in how it was effectively not communicated to the instance admins, leaving them surprised at the behavior of the code running on their own machines. Rimu lost a lot of trust in his handling of that situation.
So people are - correctly - hesitant now to put their trust into PieFed, when at any moment some similar situation could arise. Of course there is the PyLova fork, but it is extremely new, so I would wager that people are taking stock of it and seeing how it will shake out. Lemmy has a tainted reputation among the general public (for good reason), PieFed people barely know about but since it shadow-censors people’s contributions like Reddit does I can no longer see it becoming popular among the diminishing crowd that wants to flee Reddit’s overzealous censorship practices, all the more so since most 3rd-party apps only nominally support PieFed much less PyLova. The situation is not entirely untenable but it’s inordinately complex, and in those Reddit threads I shared earlier you can see people simply noping out of everything that we have going on here with all our in-fighting. The technology has to get better if we want to bring people here. Which I suppose it is, but at a pace that is exceedingly frustrating. Until it does, we remain a troll bar.