Some will cheer, some will be mildly disappointed. But I’m out, I think.
I am sorry, I just found this thread (i have been less active online since i got employment, sorry). I have heard some bad stuff bout you bud, but in all my interactions with you have been great. we may have some political differences on some things (not going into that intellectual masturbation here), but I do mean this sincerely - thank you.
So I always said you lot were just funny words on a screen to me, but I did tear up a little reading your comments. I guess I’ll miss a number of you. It made me feel better about the time I spent here posting, and worse about leaving.
I wish I had it in me to keep going like the last few times.
Thanks. To all (or, rather, the vast majority) of you. It was because of you that I enjoyed my time on the Fediverse so much.
Aww man, I’m sorry. You were always awesome, and boy do I understand not wanting to start over. The Fediverse is great in some ways, but the Roguelike Social Media aspect is… not it’s most endearing feature.
PugJesus, you are completely awesome and your contribution to the success of the fediverse is immense. Thank you so, so much.
I can’t believe anyone can be so stupid as to think that stopping the most engaged people being engaged in the community would be in any way sensible. And limiting voting? When you can only ever vote once on each post or comment? Piefed developers: “this popularity really needs capping”.
Removed by mod
Have you engaged with a mod/admin ever? They’re usually fucking idiots.
NO! Please! Say it ain’t so!
That would be decidedly tragic. Your history posts are basically the most interesting things on here. I think a lot of people will be more mildly disappointed, including myself, to see you go.
If you do leave, thanks for the time you were here. You have been appreciated!
Aw hell naw it’s that guy? Yeah the history posts are the best thing!
Thank you for everything you’ve done, and for your history posts, I always looked forward to seeing them. The fediverse will be a grayer place without your posts.
I’ll be sad to see you go, PugJesus. Despite what a small number of (very) vocal detractors claim, I’ve had nothing but positive interactions with you. Your content was engaging and you were one of the few power users who actually participated in discussions in the comments under your posts.
You are by far the user I have most upvoted, currently sitting at 1846 upvotes and one downvote (no idea when that happened). It’s frequent contributors like you that have kept me sticking around the Fediverse these past few years - it’s a shame you’re now being punished for that very behavior.
I was only subscribed to HistoryMemes and its offshoots to read your detailed explanations in the comments, and you were always willing to follow up with more detail when prompted. I’ll probably drop those subscriptions with you leaving.
Here’s hoping you find your way back here someday. This place won’t be the same without you around.
I’m really sorry to hear this.
If you ever deicde to try again in the future, please give Piefed.zip a shot.
While I don’t use it (I’m on the sister Lemmy instance, Lemmy.zip), I’ve got nothing but praises for the Admins.
To this day I haven’t seen a single thing to even so much make me think about migrating.I concur, piefed.zip has been my home since lemm.ee went down and so far so good!
Wait are you really leaving?
Yeah. Continuing to post on Piefed.social feels futile, and I just… don’t have the energy to migrate and rebuild my comms again.
I’m not happy about it, and I wish I had more to give. But I also learned a long time ago not to press myself beyond my limits.
thank you so much for all that you gave to us. You were one of the cornerstones of the fediverse and I thank you for all the information you gave us. I hope you have a great life. All the best.
Oh nonono, we do not authorize you to leave actually.
Well, I know I can’t convince you, so, good luck on your life out there! :)
I’m sorry if this misses you, but your memes and wonderful breakdowns of history always made me smile. Thank you for everything.
Ah, we’ll miss you. Your content is consistently some of the best out here.
The piefed admins are making a huge mistake with this change, and they’re basing it on bad statistical methods. Every user already only gets one vote per post or comment, so it really doesn’t matter if some users exercise that ability more than others. So framing it the same way as wealth disparity (literally using the same kind of chart) was not very insightful.
And to think I was considering switching to piefed soon… guess not anymore…
I’m OotL, does anyone have a link to whatever is being referenced here?
Thanks for the context. I rarely comment on your posts but seen them a lot. You will be sorely missed.
I’ve batted for piefed.social over in reddit to bring people into the threadiverse as well as here to newcomers that might want all the other good features piefed have. I guess I’ll have to change instances, where I’m on as well as what I recommend.
What do you think you will end up recommending?
Discuss.Online used to be one of the top go-tos, prior to the rise in prominence of PieFed. Very high stability and quite welcoming to anyone who wants friendly discourse.
PieFed.zip is still one option too, as they seem resistant to all the anti-social media bias making its way into the PieFed software as of late. Lemmy.zip was also always one of the top options as well. I’m a bit personally biased against the .zip domains being run by Google but for a Redditor this likely won’t matter in the slightest, and the admin team seems at first glance to be very sensible.
I would not recommend PieFed.ca though, bc while it is a very fine instance, when the USA invades Canada or otherwise increases tensions that’s going to be more problematic in the future.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts as well.:-)
I recommended piefed.social just because it’s the flagship piefed instance. What I really love is the software. Namely the on boarding where piefed asks you of topics one might be interested in, subscribe to those topics and their comms, upfront saying one can block certain terms and the user capability to make multicomms. Because what I struggled with the last 2 times trying Lemmy is the content, of the lack of “helping hand” and tips to control a new user’s experience having All firehose of content. My third time I tried again starting with Lemmy, then mbin asi read around, then right around the birth of this account, piefed showed up. Instantly clicked, and I stayed.
So probably other piefed based instance, but I’ve yet to decide which one. I’m leaning towards piefed.zip just because they block the least instances I’ve seen. But that will be for my own next home, not necessarily for all strangers that I might recommend
Edit: also it must be some degree of irony someone is accusing others of vote manipulation, yet their own comms only allow upvotes. Hmm
Yes it’s fantastic how PieFed has absolutely solved the problem of onboarding. I even recommend it to people who are adamant about not switching from their existing Lemmy accounts - just taking a look at the PieFed onboarding can help inform things on their existing account, plus there’s always the chance that they may fall in love and stay… :-)
Although now that PieFed is outright censoring votes, that’s not going to play well with people trying to escape The Algorithm, which decides for them what they are allowed to see or not. An opt-in new sorting function would have been entirely different but as it stands the only way to opt-out is to avoid every instance that implements the vote quota, which is not easily or authoritatively even possible to find out before joining (and could get changed upon each subsequent update).
Maybe you can try to convey the controversy - like PieFed is great in some ways but others may not like it for “reasons”, but ofc that increases the complexity of the recommendation. And it’s not like Lemmy has zero controversy to its name as well. So perhaps just include one of each, without any explanation?
Also, use of a 3rd-party app negates most of PieFed’s onboarding utility also, which is a further complication.
PieFed.zip is a fine recommendation - maybe no need to go into any of the above and just recommend checking it out? If 3rd-party apps don’t support the onboarding, that’s kinda on them and isn’t PieFed’s fault.
Edit: oops I seem to have misunderstood what you meant in your edit paragraph. Well, I’ll leave this here in case it is interesting but it is not so precisely relevant (although it does kinda touch on the subject somewhat in general?), I see that and apologize.
I disagree about labeling downvotes being disabled as “manipulation” bc anything that is done TRANSPARENTLY is not nefarious. While if stated plainly and clearly in the rules (I haven’t checked that for this community, so take the following with a grain of salt), then it seems fine? Users can simply choose to use another community if they don’t like this one - or even make their own. When you are in someone else’s house, you follow their rules.In reality, this shit is complicated, yo. Like PugJesus did not “manipulate” so much as he “affected” the visibility of content, using traditional means of using votes for the exact purpose they were designed for. But then is Rimu the one now “manipulating” the votes…? In one sense yes but perhaps in the greater sense no, bc it isn’t a nefarious underhanded changing of them so much as an unclearly-stated alteration of the literal rules of how votes work. So manipulation of the rules rather than of votes themselves directly, and ostensibly for some kind of a purpose, albeit a very very bad one that rather than providing an opt-in new scoring scheme to not allow highly active voters as much influence as previously, instead altering the vote counts themselves directly.
In short, Rimu has just implemented an “Algorithm” that now controls what we see on the Threadiverse, deciding for everyone using it (even people on Lemmy! if they are federating with a community located on PieFed) what we are allowed to know or not. Which brings PieFed instances closer to acting more like Reddit, Threads, and X(hitter), at a time when people are desperately trying to get AWAY from such.
So while I disagree that disabilng downvotes is similar in degree (quantity of impact), yes I see the connection that it is similar in kind (quality).
Basically every PieFed community would now need a warning message attached about how it does not “fully” federate and has various caveats attached, which even that would be insufficient since iirc this change also affects votes sent to communities located on Lemmy instances as well.
Honestly this change is SO BAD that I expect it will be rolled back soon. Even then though… it will still have ripple effects for years to come.
I even recommend it to people who are adamant about not switching from their existing Lemmy accounts
indeed. that’s what I do as well.
Maybe you can try to convey the controversy
I most probably will not if I’m recommending it for people new to the threadiverse. If they ask, then I may explain. Although I might forget honestly. Same with the lemmy controversy. I only remembered because you and others reminded me of it in replies of this post.
3rd-party app negates most of PieFed’s onboarding utility also, which is a further complication.
It does indeed. I recently tried a few apps again. I am still using Summit but want to see how the others handle it, but for piefed. None of them, including Summit, does onboarding as well as piefed on a web browser.
I seem to have misunderstood what you meant in your edit paragraph
Yeah, it’s a tongue in cheek comment. I agree with you that if an instance stating they are disabling whatever votes upfront isn’t being manipulative. It’s transparent and honest, so people can make their own informed decision.
It’s just that I don’t remember downvoting being disabled on piefed.social because I can downvote just fine. Maybe those are all posts in comms that are not in piefed.social and I just never encountered piefed.social posts in my subscribed feed much. Can a comms mod set votes turned on or off on piefed instances?
I just am still gobsmacked that Rimu decided to put on brakes by default and opt-out function to the threadiverse growth. We are having trouble as it is getting just users, and retaining them, not to mention getting and retaining quality active posters and lurkers. The worst thing about it is that they didn’t discuss it in a more public manner before the decision. What a weird opinionated action.
this seems to be the original post: https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2190040/who-decides-what-you-see-on-the-fediverse-a-look-at-voting-patterns
i really don’t see the issue. are they worried about vote manipulation? if so, that is the most naive approach to it: you hurt the most active users, which hurts overall content, which the threadyverse does not have too much of anyway. all the while the problem does not get solved.
i am not sure whether it would work on piefed the exact same as on lemmy, but they rely on the same technology. so i guess yes. if i wanted to manipulate votes, i would spinn up a couple of instances, generate users and let them automatically vote. wanted to write a POC to raise any comment/post into the sky or condemm them to oblivion using this approach. that was a long time ago and never got around to do so - probably won’t ever happen. but i don’t think it would be too hard for anyone to use this type of manipulation, while it is relatively hard to defend against…
I know Lemmy has its issues, but I swear the more I hear about Piefed the crazier it sounds.
I will never understand why people want to trade the corporate nannies for some self-elected nanny.
We don’t need any of this weird social engineering junk
Lemmy’s issues are pretty gigantic as well - to the point where many people outright refuse to fund its further development, thus impacting the future of the Threadiverse (one example is the inordinate amount of time spent performing moderation activities rather than actually working on adding features to the codebase).
Anyway, it’s good to have multiple alternative options - having more software implementations of the ActivityPub Protocol is unquestionably a good thing imho.
The social engineering though is NOT a good thing imho - fortunately it’s an option that can be disabled, though unfortunately it is opt-out rather than opt-in, and not transparently handled at all.
Absolutely. My stance is not that Lemmy is not without serious flaw, just that Piefed does not seem to be the solution, to me at least.
PieFed.social is outright censoring votes now, deciding what people are allowed to see or not - and this affects not only people choosing to use PieFed, but also Lemmings (& users of Mbin, Mastodon, Friendica, nodeBB, etc.) as well. The Algorithm has returned to social media, taking away your personal control and instead putting it into the hands of Big Daddy who knows best what’s good for you.
Then again, Lemmy.ml is famous for doing this consistently for literally YEARS. Every single community on there is an echo chamber where certain “undesirable” types of people are not allowed to interact. You could prove me wrong btw by going into any active community and speaking plainly in a negative manner about Russia, China, or North Korea. I’ll wait…? 🤪
Remember that at one time Lemmy devs also implemented a slur word filter, DIRECTLY into the codebase, in a HARD-CODED manner no less, and when the community cried out against that, Nutomic said in response:
If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.
We hoped for better from PieFed. Instead we merely got “different”. Though the pull towards authoritarianism is hard to resist - so often it is the quickest and by far least painful path towards a desirable solution (see e.g. Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars), and I can’t fully judge anyone for considering it. Worse, it might be the height of naïveté to even so much as think that anything else could exist outside of pure theory (aka fantasy)? After all, who is offering a “better” platform - YOU? (me? anyone else stepping up to offer?)
So then what is “the solution”, in your mind? Based on your instance, I am guessing you will say Lemmy? In that case, what about PieFed.zip, running its own version of PieFed with the voting quota anti-feature stripped out? Maybe at the end of the day, the software becomes just a starting point, and it’s the instance admins that are the ones who decide which parts of the software will run or not.
(I still cannot see myself donating to the further development of Lemmy software though - if only for the reason that the enormous amount of time spent moderating the Lemmy.ml instance seems to leave little time leftover to actually work on new code changes, though ngl the genocidal attitude towards actively wishing the deaths of everyone living in a Western civilization does put me off a tad bit as well!)
I feel like we’re having two separate conversations.
What the Lemmy devs do with their instance is separate from what they do with their software, imo.
I’ve said this many times before but as I see it we have two bad choices:
Lemmy, whose devs are arguably questionable with worrysome personal politics and philosophy but who do not bake said philosophy into their software.
Or Piefes, whose devs are arguably much more acceptable and well-meaning, but who bakes their social philosophy into their software.
To me, these are both bad options, but I’ll pick the side that develops agnostically without nannying tendencies. That they chose to enact stricter political bounds within their home territory is irrelevant to me because I don’t spend time there and that feels well within their rights without encroaching on the autonomy of others, to me.
Or, in short: I don’t care even a little bit about Lemmy.ml, I only care about Lemmy.
Lemmy, whose devs are arguably questionable with worrysome personal politics and philosophy but who do not bake said philosophy into their software.
But as OpenStars pointed out, the Lemmy devs did just such a thing in a much more egregious (hard-coded) way previously. The slur filter is now optional after considerable time and outcry.
Piefed’s vote restriction is an option that admins of any instance can fiddle with, or, effectively, disable entirely. Like the slur filter currently in Lemmy, and thus less forced than the slur filter as it was initially rolled out on Lemmy. The issue, for me, is that I made a home on Piefed.social, specifically, and now it’s… not home for me.
If you don’t care about what admins do on their own instance, this shouldn’t bother you. I care - both in the abstract and insofar as it affects me, and so am… winding down my participation.
If it sounded like what I was trying to say was “PugJesus should have just picked and stuck with Lemmy!”, then I apologize, because that is enormously not what I’m trying to say.
If anything I’m saying I understand your frustration and was just lamenting a lack of a good solution, and attempting to point to the insufficiency of all available options.
I only targeted towards Piefed because of the kind of “kumbuya” idealists that claim it’s superior while being blind to its flaws.
I don’t disagree with you, your frustrations, or your decision to step away rather than re-invest somewhere with another shaky foundation
I didn’t take you as saying that.
I’m just saying that there isn’t a difference here between the slur filter as is and the vote limiter as is in terms of implementing philosophy into the software. Both are options for admins in the software, not mandatory.
The Lemmy devs, however, initially attempted to make the slur filter mandatory, meaning that their attempt to implement their philosophy into the software was much more heavy-handed, and only walked-back after considerable outcry.
Basically, Rimu’s choice here is immensely shitty, but is fundamentally more a choice of Rimu as an admin than as a dev. As a dev choice, the voting limit is of questionable utility, but not forced on instances - it’s a number that admins can easily (effectively) abolish.
It’s much more a Piefed.social problem than a Piefed (all instances) problem.
I agreed with you up until the slur filter:
If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me
For a Lemmy.world example, I was discussing medieval siege warfare (either I or someone else was quoting a primary source, I think?) when I found out that either ‘fags’ or ‘faggots’ was censored.
Had no clue before that.
Essentially, nearly every slur either has other usages (I’m reminded of overzealous word filters censoring niggardly and snigger, or ‘a chink in the armor’) or may still be relevant in the context of quotation (calling someone ‘cunty’ is being Australian, probably; calling someone ‘chink’ is being racist; knowing which 5-letter profanity starting with ‘c’ was used may be relevant in forming an opinion on someone’s behavior).
Slurs should get the ban hammer, not an autocensor; and bans should be handed out by people who can judge context.
Good points, and also good thing I’m not a moderator
The main problem with the slur filter is that it does neither consider context, nor considers delimiters. For example, when someone were to say the word for the purple fruit used to make wine, they’re not intending to use a word for the non-consensual sexual violation, yet the algorithm can’t see the difference when it detects the UTF-8 sequence 0x72 0x61 0x70 0x65, doing a hard-replace with the substring “removed” regardless of the context. Tom Scott once made a video about this phenomenon: it’s called
String("The Sc" + "unthorpe problem").Also, as you can see through this reply of mine, filters are pointless when there’s a plethora of ways to say the same thing without saying the actual word. Naive filters (e.g. RegExp-based match and replace) will just curb those who aren’t creative and/or knowledgeable enough, while affecting the experience for everyone who aren’t intending to do slurs, leading them to start using coded language and, thus, making it even harder to detect slurs as the slurers will eventually learn, through the non-slurers, that they can express the same thing without triggering the filter, until we get to a point in which the entire platform pivots to AI moderation, and even then there’s so many ways to express the thing without the LLM detecting, it’s called “steganography” and curbing this requires technical approaches known to be a Hard NP problem in computer science.
I mean… I disagree with the vote quotas specifically, but anyone running an instance is gonna have to have some kind of controls, and Rimu’s being open about what’s going on and why and it’s not a big deal for me. The point of the fediverse is that you can pick the particular instance whose policies you’re OK with. With corporate sites you only get one “choice” and they hide their algorithms from you.
I don’t think it’s fine the quota is enabled by default for everybody. You want to have the option, fine - but don’t force it on people. Should be opt in.
I was looking on a couple of posts about it recently and there was an instance when (I think) admin of one instance updated it without realizing this feature is in there. That’s problematic.
I’m sorry to see you go but I understand why you feel you need to leave. We’ll miss you around these parts. Take care PugJesus!
Nooooooo pls noooooo dear Pug, don’t leave us alone in these times :(
That being said, your own mental health is the most important thing you’ve got, so take care <3
