OpenStars

Thank you for the explanation. That seems all the more confusing then to see boosts done for threaded posts in communities, like is that even comparable to microblog emissions or whatever they are called in magazines, or is it a whole other thing.

People want - and demand - simplicity, or else they seek it out even at the expense of remaining on corporate social media.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1qm1uq1/lets_settle_the_reddit_alternative_discussion/

TLDR: here is a very long list of things that Lemmy will need to do in order to get people on Reddit to try it. Btw PieFed already does most of them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16hkxua/why_im_giving_up_on_lemmyfediverse/

Pretty much what I said earlier.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/143o5xd/reconsidering_my_support_for_lemmy/

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/170ie8t/regarding_the_recent_complaints_about_lemmy_being/

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16zq1dd/the_lemmyverse_aint_all_its_cracked_up_to_be/

This list could go on all day.

They will never reach feature parity.

Redditors, who are primarily USA Christian centrists, will never join someplace where extremists are constantly calling for Luigi-ing everyone in any Western civilizations.

Try it: make an account on lemmy.ml and use it for a day, and make an account on a PieFed instance and do the same. The feature differences are enormous - as too are those that you do not readily see, such as the fact that moderator reports actually federate on one of those two platforms but not the other (tbf they will eventually in an upcoming release).

You will be pleasantly surprised at the outcome if do this experiment.

Yes, although actually I am not aware of any instances that have NOT done this, even like a year or more before it needed done.

Tbf, a TON of information surrounding that issue turned out to be false. Though at its core you may be correct - and yet the same is also true of Lemmy?

Especially in the past, like when Lemmy at first hard-coded a slur word filter (in English no less), and in response Nutomic told people that… well, read for yourself:

If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.

(Though they later relented.)

PieFed is not perfectly administered (Rimu admitted this, and stepped back from being the sole leader of the project), and neither is Lemmy. Both are imperfect software tools, both offered as FOSS. Yay - we all win with that philosophy!!

At the end of the day though, if someone is relying upon a free instance service, then it is up to those instance admins to decide their policies, while your only choice is which one you will be beholden to. This too is not different from how Lemmy works, though one difference is in how extremely FAST PieFed develops new features, and also in how responsive the devs are. I don’t blame anyone for choosing not to move, but objectively speaking I don’t see Lemmy passing any purity tests more often than PieFed - especially given how it is way easier to install a personal PieFed instance than a Lemmy one.

Some instances also filter out trolls. Oddly enough, not all do that though…

But which upvote type - boosts or votes? Why do boosts exist at all then, if they don’t “boost” anything? I thought I remembered (granted it’s been a couple of years since I migrated from Reddit to kbin.social) that it was boosts, and it was upvotes that existed but were irrelevant? (If so, but not anymore, then how and why was that changed?)

Not that you need to answer every one of these - I’m just sharing my confusion, which many people seem to also share.

If I get rounded up and thrown into a concentration camp because of their shit, I’m going to be pissed 😡.

That’s likely an Mbin issue. Ernst, the creator of the original product Kbin before it got forked and taken over as Mbin, made a confusing decision to have both upvotes and boosts together, and not just on the microblog (Mastodon) side with magazines but even side-by-side also on the Threadiverse with communities. So when you press the “upvote”… I forget which action even occurs - upvoting vs. boosting. Sorting by votes also gets very wonky.

And yes, all those weird design decisions very much scare people away from Mbin: the largest Mbin instance has only <500 active accounts and all Mbin instances combined have mere hundreds of users. For comparison, the flagship PieFed instance has >1k users, the NSFW one has twice that, and Lemmy.world alone has >13k!!!

Frontfooted insult?

It is possible to see those numbers, it’s just super janky. If you click on the upvote count in a web browser, a tooltip pops up showing the breakdown of up vs. down votes. Usually… well, sometimes. It helps to zoom way far in and hit it exactly in the center of the number.

I miss Lemmy’s better UI presentation of things, and also its vastly superior searching, but otherwise PieFed seems better in every way.

Also, +10 & -10 is a lot better than just “1”. The former is controversial while the latter is lack of engagement entirely.

I’m glad he’s okay!

Disgusting, yet inevitable:-(.

Wait… when did you ever need to turn off your PC before you can unplug your mouse or keyboard? Did people genuinely used to need to do this? When? Why?

This issue is discussed a bit in the linked post.

The situation is a bit similar to that for NSFW: if all content is not perfectly labeled, then is the tag worthwhile to exist at all?

And mods will abuse the system regardless - e.g. look at how often Lemmy.ml removes posts citing “rule 1”, despite that rule never anywhere anyway in any language stating that you are not allowed to criticize (or not support strongly enough?) Russia, China, or North Korea (or perhaps soon adding the USA and Israel?). Regardless of platform - Reddit, Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, etc. - mods are gonna mod regardless, and some will be better at that task than others.

Though it is still useful to have “rules”, and use them in communities, even if they aren’t properly implemented in all situations. The alternative being 4chan where anything and everything goes - not everyone is looking for that?

I guarantee you that Lemmy has for multiple years already abused non-AI content in a far worse manner: see e.g. the (non-AI) moderation tool santabot. Even so, Lemmy does not abolish the ability to post things, or to vote on it. i.e. the worst excesses of a thing do not preclude good uses for it. Knowledge that Santabot exists may encourage you to stop participating in the entire Threadiverse, but it does not need to? Systemically, the Threadiverse is fairly good, overall?

And now PieFed offers tools to detect AI content. I guarantee you that it will be abused, somewhere/way/when/how. Though at least now it exists, and can be improved? And we can be a part of that process too, by offering realistic suggestions to the development team, which demonstrably listens to and actively solicits such feedback all the time.

What makes the thoughts strong is that their implementation already exists.

Likewise, PieFed saw a number of opportunities to improve things, and rather than simply wishing that something were so, people expended effort to actually code them up so as to make them REAL, i.e. no longer mere thoughts but actions.

e.g. Lemmy offers a marking/tagging for NSFW, which PieFed expanded so that NSFL (gore) is an entirely separate category. Theoretically I could completely hide all NSFL while blurring the thumbnail of NSFW posts, or vice versa, or make both sets semi-transparent, or whatever. The Lemmy software might offer thoughts and prayers along those lines - e.g. theoretically you could dedicate different communities for each type, or even different entire instances (one for NSFW and a separate instance for NSFL?), or perhaps add standardized keywords (not that Lemmy allows keyword filtering innately, as PieFed does, but in case some 3rd party apps wanted to do so?) to distinguish between NSFW vs. NSFL - but multiple years ago now PieFed birthed that thought into a full-blown solution.

In the same manner, PieFed is far beyond the stage of merely beginning to have a couple thoughts along the lines of dealing with AI content: as that linked posts indicates, 5 months ago it already offered a full implementation of a solution.

PieFed has rather strong thoughts on the subject: https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/1523426/labelling-or-hiding-ai-generated-content.

In short, just as NSFW/NSFL posts or bot accounts are totally fine so long as labeled, so too AI posts are fine… unless unlabeled as such. And if users refuse to label them, then community mods have tools that help them detect and label them for the users.

PieFed’s options for AI content are:

• Show

• Hide completely

• Label as AI

• Make post semi-transparent

This method democratically puts powerful tools into the hands of end-users to individually choose what approach works best for them, rather than e.g. make an authoritive declaration such as defederation of instances that often allow AI content.

Thanks for the validation - indeed being able to block out what does not match our values is quite helpful for our sanity.

Fwiw, I’ve been on a crusade against hexbear for years, as many others here do as well.:-P

Agreed except that given its history, I strongly doubt that most of it ever will be. The developers of the Lemmy codebase made the software for their own desires, and it functions perfectly well as far as they are concerned, fitting in very well with the authoritarian nature of lemmy.ml where even mods seem cowed to barely do anything and instead the admin is the strongest initiator.

I have simultaneously both great respect to them for having made Lemmy as FOSS while also I realistically acknowledge that they do not have the same goals in mind that I and most Westerners do about the rights of individual people vs. that of the State. In their own words:

If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it

(In fairness here, they did later recant on that position, after great public outcry, to remove the hard-coded filters for swear words like “fuck” that were baked into the code at the time. Though Nutomic is absolutely correct in the general sense at least: if people want something that the devs do not want, it is not necessarily the devs responsibility to provide it? Similarly for changing the prioritization of which features to work on first.)

Therefore even without knowing the future plans of either platform, I can practically guarantee that you will see such features added to PieFed, probably multiple years before they show up on Lemmy. In fact it’s already started a year ago now where Lemmy’s “instance block” that still allows users from those supposedly “blocked” instances to read, vote on, and reply to your content, plus send you DMs, even triggering notifications, whereas PieFed allows you to block all users from an instance. PieFed’s version works, while Lemmy’s was promised for years and then never did, and at this point I assume never will.

And in a second example, PieFed just changed how deleted posts are handled: the user controls their own content, but not the content of others, so e.g. if they ask a question they can delete that question, but they can no longer delete the answers delivered to that question by other people.

Sorry if I am salty but I have lost hope in Lemmy. And I am putting all my hope instead into PieFed:-).