I suppose those instance admins are the ones who should have the most say about what they do or do not allow on their instance. But then yeah, we each also have our own choices to make in response, like whether to block or not. I don’t, but then again I’m effectively doing it by another means where I browse by Subscribed and simply never subscribe to those coms:-).

So long as they are labeled as such, I have no issues with it. The intent seems more than clearly to aid rather than deceive.

PW has nearly 900 users total of which 200 are active as of this past month - it’s small but solid.

There’s a ton of communities, which have like no or next to no posts - e.g. https://piefed.world/c/wednesday, https://piefed.world/c/snl.

A lot of the content there seems populated exclusively by bots - e.g. https://piefed.world/c/tech, https://piefed.world/c/shit, https://piefed.world/c/scientificarticles, etc.

TenForward is an excellent example: compare the PW version at https://piefed.world/c/tenforward to the LW version and there simply is no comparison at all.

It just overall looks like a test that was never finished. Perhaps Rimu scared the LW admin team away. If so, maybe the PyLova development could be an option?

PieFed/PyLova definitely looks ready to be used to make a new instance - if you take the plunge, then I wish you good fortune in that endeavor! :-)

I think what you are referring to is not content so much as that new communities needed - in the past - to have been added by someone before others could find them in the community listing. This was not restricted to admins though & people like Blaze had an army of alts and did much of that, as did I on my own instances as well. This was necessary before the first post could come in from each new community, needing to be performed on a per-community basis.

However, PieFed made an improvement to not need to do this anymore, and then Lemmy followed suit as well, and now the whole process is much easier. Although it gives Lemmy.ml specifically veto power in that if a community is banned or the instance it is on is defederated from Lemmy.ml, then the automatic pulling in of the community name is no longer done. Technically admins - or again, I think anyone - can always add it the old way, but only if you know that it exists and how to make that happen (which isn’t hard but requires crafting a URL rather than mere clicking on links). Also, the admins can designate a different instance than Lemmy.ml, though Lemmy.ml is set as the default, so this procedure is opt-out.

Those PyLova devs are hella impressive!!! Rimu seems less interested in the Threadiverse these days and more in interoperability with Mastodon, despite how most of us seem to not even want that, and Mbin already exists. It’s okay for him to work on whatever he wants, but it makes it all the more impressive to see how responsive the PyLova is to the needs of the people on the Threadiverse.

I don’t think that most instances do delete old content. Lemmy.world self-reportedly has content from decades in the past from nodeBB but I think their database got corrupted and I don’t trust that. However, here is an example on my own instance https://discuss.online/post/5497584 showing the retaining of a post to a community on Lemmy.ml from 8 years ago.

The PieFed thing was once again another of Rimu’s rants against “unserious” meme content. He is obviously entitled to not feel forced into providing unlimited hosting for images, but I am saying that the limitation built into the PieFed software and enacted on e.g. PieFed.social may not be universally applied. I could well see e.g. lemmynsfw.app choosing differently to retain every image forever. Unfortunately there’s almost no way to know short of directly asking the admin team, who may not even be aware themselves what settings are in place on their own machines.

This is a limitation of all Fediverse software that I’ve seen, including Lemmy and Mbin, so not just PieFed. Though PyLova does have the most transparency of all of them… and yet I haven’t seen even PyLova expose whatever these settings are to the public. Even though someone might make a choice as to which instance they want to make an account on (or even start up their own) if they could find the answer.

I think even subscribable blocklists would only be the first part of an overall answer. Like UBlock Origin, it’s going to require people to manufacture and maintain those lists. But… at least the software will support that now, so yes indeed this is the very important, crucial first step!!

PieFed is in general superior to Lemmy imho, though your choice of admin team is far more important than platform software, I believe.

That said, PieFed.World in particular always struck me as an unfinished test project - probably bc the Topic Feeds at https://piefed.world/topics are so bare-bones. That is one of the most-requested features that PieFed offers but PW seems to basically ignore them?

Anyway from Voyager you’ll never see them in any case:-).

PieFed interoperates pretty much seamlessly with Lemmy - some post types Lemmy does not support (like user polls) so occasionally you’ll see something in PieFed but not Lemmy, though never the other way around.

Settings Export & Import should work perfectly as well, definitely from Lemmy to PieFed though I never tried that in reverse.

You should really enjoy it!! Anyway, you always have your Lemmy to fall back onto… like during maintenance or whatever.

It is what that event revealed about the site owners. When someone tells you who they are, it’s best to believe them the first time.

Adblock exists, and niche subs (too small to be worth being targeted by bots) actually exist too, unlike here - like a sub dedicated to someone’s local area. Oh, also bots are here on the Threadiverse too.

I’m not advocating for Reddit, just trying to help you understand that you are not seeing their actual experience. Many people avoid r/all (actually r/popular) like the plague, and use old-reddit with RES (I’ve never touched that one personally but supposedly it’s nice or sth?), which they are comfortable and familiar with.

Yes, they might be banned and if so then perhaps they’ll come here, or possibly just as likely leave social media behind altogether. Reading books, touching grass, there are better ways to spend one’s time, and for news perhaps an RSS reader could be preferable anyway.

The PieFed UI is strange but more or workable, aside from some things like trying to view a downvote count being incredibly difficult and sometimes impossible. Try writing a long comment in a Lemmy browser interface - it jumps and skips wildly every time you make another key press, it’s horrible. Though it looks beautiful when you use it read-only.

Voyager offers a much nicer UX. Though then 90% of PieFed extra features aren’t workable, with 100% of them being inaccessible from within the app.

This place is hella confusing to non-technical normies.

Btw PieFed has more or less solved the onboarding problem. Seriously, pick one and make an account even if solely to go through the onboarding wizard and you will be amazed.

Those categories of communities, which are user-customizable and shareable Topic Feeds, are also hella useful, even if only to help you discover communities that you want to subscribe to in your existing account.

Realistically, PieFed is running circles around Lemmy in terms of features. And now PyLova is moving even faster than it (but they mostly tend to share).

A lot of these Reddit comments are from people that seemed to put zero effort into understanding anything. Or perhaps they simply aren’t expressing their thoughts well: like those organized Topic Feeds are not difficult to use at all, making one wonder if they didn’t bother poking around to click on menus enough to know that they are there, or realize that by subscribing to communities that they like, their main Subscribed Feed would be affected. Such people not coming here may be no great loss?

Probably not 90%? This post seems to be receiving an unusually high amount of push-back, less than a day after its posting, which honestly we all probably should have predicted would happen to any such post - at the very least all of eicker’s alts are going to be on the warpath against it?

Maybe people are downvoting bc it’s so much detail but only about a single account, I dunno.

So very many of us around the Threadiverse have been preemptively banned from communities located on dbzer0 that barely exist - e.g. no posts or even subscribers other than the creator at the time - and called slurs (like “troll”) in the modlog by pro-AI account holders who iirc are also admins of that instance (or were at the time).

So yes, dbzer0 is unquestionably the single most rabidly pro-AI instance we have, and I would even go so far as to say vehemently anti-anti-AI. If half the Threadiverse defederates from dbzer0, that will be the main reason why - especially since there is currently no other defense against modlog spam.

Although at this point dbzer0 seems more likely to itself initiate defederation from the rest of the Threadiverse, or at least Lemmy.World where sth like 90% of the most active communities are located, for following the laws of the nations the server machines are located in, and not allowing literal death threats levied against the LW admin team.

Oh, and also dbzer0 is pro-tankie now. Look up the Flotilla if you want more info. I know, shocking right? It used to be one of the more respected instances across the Threadiverse, but now… it’s one step removed from the tankie triad in terms of antagonistic behaviors against everyone else. Now you are caught up on all the drama.

I often think about that exact, particular, specific comic lately… for some reason! 🤔 😞

That said, OP said elsewhere:

The third screenshot is me asking if it was written by AI and not receiving a reply. The user pretty much does not reply to people, just obviously-LLM summaries to his own posts. Almost all such comments are the same amount of lines.

So if the account in question mimics a human exclusively in order to spread spam about particular websites that they are paid to promote as “authentically”-looking as possible, then I would argue that the mission is not “fucking accomplished”. Or rather, at least not our mission of being able to converse with fellow humans, possibly with the assistance of the occasional bot so long as they are properly labeled as such and not trying to manipulate and scam us.

A properly labeled bot - e.g. that posts daily comics - is a great tool (even if some people choose to opt-out of such, which is their right). It’s the deception that people do not like (mainly).

Institutionally at least, anything goes - including the worst CSAM.

Perhaps this is an exceedingly poor way to describe it - I just meant that federation (like with ML, hexbear, lemmygrad, and any new instance) happens by default. Instances that host CSAM - like extremist far-right content - are quickly defederated from by the rest of the Threadiverse, but such requires effort on behalf of the instance admin. I thought, though perhaps I am wrong.

Anyway it could still be misleading even if correct, bc this is at the instance level, whereas someone still has to subscribe at the community level in order for content to begin coming in. So the potential for content - good, bad, or whatever - to spread is baked right into the ActivityPub Protocol from the start, by design. Just like what people keep saying about 4chan (though admittedly I never went there personally).

And people must have subscribed to hexbear and lemmygrad and ML communities on all of the major instances, therefore all of that content was already there for me to stumble upon as a new joiner myself, fresh from KBin where it had been severely curtailed. I - like all other new joiners - then bad a decision whether to flee this place permanently (which I almost did, and continue to revisit that thought every year or so as expectations keep not being met, making it all the harder to hold out much hope for the future) or to begin blocking people, one by one, and even making a (successful) petition to defederate discuss.online from hexbear.net.

All of which is a lot of effort, especially since it must continue to happen with each fresh new alt made to subvert bans. Each new joiner must then be subjected this again and again, like a hazing ritual that we who have been through such already now offer little to no help to new joiners to avoid. Except for your codeberg request that will help to change that - hooray!

Ultimately, it’s arguably fine for places like 4chan and nostr to exist (unless you take the position that the echo chamber then breeds toxic trolls that when they leave it, act to harm others, though keep in mind that in this analogy, the Threadiverse itself is 4chan and nostr, in that we allow anything and everything, especially on ML that we then host on all of our machines too - e.g. if ML were to ever go down, that content would continue to remain, foreve, just like happened with Lemm.ee), but what’s far less fine is to allow people to stumble upon it unawares, particularly when it is labeled oppositely from what it truly is. A place’s reputation should proceed it, not be entirely ignored and force each new joiner to discover it all over again on their own, as what happens with ML.

Encouraging people to contribute only goes so far when this place is simultaneously discouraging people’s contributions. It is systemic, not limited to ML, and needs major efforts including enhanced technical capabilities to try to solve. Note that if ML ever were to be defederated, the absolute most toxic trolls would simply switch to using their alts on some other instance such as Lemmy.World, which they have announced they will do in advance, several years ago. They even indicated that they would make apps that automate the process of trying to send messages to someone, cycling through an array of alts until one is found that is not banned on that instance (or by that recipient?) - no truly does mean to simply push forward all the harder, for some.

But making a more firm stance would also send a signal about what is desired vs. not. Are calls for murder of all people in the Western World acceptable? Apparently, judging from their presence, yes.

Most places are defederated from HB - which was not always the case (I was on both StarTrek.Website and Discuss.Online prior to blocking them), but now that it is I don’t worry about them so much as ML that is still sending out content that turns people away.

I don’t know how to solve this problem, I only showed references in support of the fact that the problem lies there in front of us. Or at this point, behind us, since once a reputation is gained (for e.g. nostr, 4chan, etc.) it is exceedingly difficult to change.

On the whole, I think our reputation is closer to nostr and 4chan than it is to Bluesky. Institutionally at least, anything goes - including the worst CSAM. Something must be specifically blocked in order to filter it out (either that, or a new instance can include only trusted existing instances, but that runs into problems where new ones pop up all the time and will get excluded, so this approach seems not to be used by the vast majority of existing instances, at least the major ones).

I’ll take a stab at looking at decoupling and identifying key instance on-boarding differences that effect retention.

Wonderful!

Looks like Pylova likes the subscribable block list idea

That team is so energetic and helpful, it’s a pleasure to see it! 😁

As an update I added a feature request to Pylova’s Codeburg about the subscribable block lists. We’ll see if they’re interested.

Wonderful!

if people start taking more from Reddit and curating it personally, I think that could be a great exchange.

This sounds horrific to me! The question in my mind is not how many ghosts to allow over here, but how to generate authentic interactions between real humans. We don’t need every single niche covered, we just need people to enjoy their time spent here.

90% of that is easily attainable by defederation from hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml. I was on multiple instances that did neither, prior to the ability for an admin to (shadow-)block certain communities, and I very nearly quit Lemmy entirely after switching here over from Kbin. In fact, I basically did as I switched over to PieFed for my main, before I began my current campaign to test the experiences on several 3rd-party apps.

A further 90% improvement can be attained by blocking Lemmy.ml (except that no major instance provides this by default, and also the Lemmy platform won’t allow it at all, with the instance block being so horribly misnamed as to represent disinformation - in no way does it block users of the instance from harassing people in other communities, thus missing the entire fucking point). In this very conversation thread there was a particular onerous troll who kept following our conversation and downvoting everything I said, finally speaking up with the most inane bullshit. This was not fun for me so I banned them. New joiners, it seems obvious from the comments they leave (usually on other platforms after already leaving), don’t bother to put in the work to curate their experiences and instead simply flee - to Reddit, or Bluesky, or perhaps nowhere and just touch grass from now on, combined with maybe Instagram or Tiktok or something.

I do not want to have to scroll down reading through tens to hundreds to thousands of comments, none of which represent real humans who would respond if I replied to them - that is the precise opposite of what I want. As I browse through New, often I can be the first responder anyway. And people reply to me, and so on it goes. And I don’t want to be asked to do that for 12 hours a day - just one would be fine for me, if that. But GOOD content, not toxic crap like “c’mon comrades let’s murder everyone in sight, eh?” - I want to see stuff that quite possibly I could even enjoy seeing, and maybe interacting with?

But even if I do see it, the endless array of trolls spoils it. I do not think that the overall lack of content is the problem here - it’s the overall lack of content that is worthwhile to read, and the fact that we get constantly slapped in the face in an unconsensual manner. It’s a cost (far too high) to benefit (with next to no OC, very little) trade-off that results in people fleeing here - even those that stuck with us for multiple years before finally giving up. Admiral Patrick had a horrible solution to it, but he was not wrong in the identification of the problem: people don’t enjoy discourse with incels for whom no means simply to push forward all the harder.

That is sad to hear that mander hasn’t come back yet - I guess it’s still waiting to see if something can be resolved, since the backups weren’t recent.

But it is even more sad to hear that Rimu’s community migration tool isn’t working, on other instances without his direct involvement. Some of what you said makes sense to me though, like a community “owner” must be located on the instance where it is housed - if that were not the case then the system would be vulnerable to all sorts of spam where any bot could spin up communities on any instance, so some level of accountability must be maintained.

I suspect the official PieFed app will be Blorp, just from the way that Rimu talked about it iirc. It’s chief competition is Interstellar, although that was designed more for Mbin with PieFed just being thrown into the mix.

The need to support FOSS is partially one reason why we aren’t growing, and I don’t mean the actual funds, but the enormous complexity of figuring out who to send them to. Dessalines & Nutomic? Rimu? PyLova? Voyager? Blorp? Perhaps at the end of the day it does not matter as we had fun in contributing to the development of the Threadiverse overall, but to new joiners it’s definitely very daunting - it’s far easier to pay Reddit and then get Reddit coins back in exchange. Though arguably less profitable when it merely buys you the chance to argue with bots. Yet… an enormous fraction of our own traffic here are reposting bots, often from Reddit, so is this truly “better”, enough to convince some of them to make the switch? That’s the rub - they would be buying into the future, just as Reddit kept telling them, and likely still tells them now (Reddit-trained & integrated AI will be so great…).

I thought previously a subscribe-able block list would be a great addition, at the user and/or the instance level.

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.

I think we are uncomfortable and taking steps, unfortunately slowly, to move past that phase of development.

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.

There’s no way (to my knowledge) to switch instances to an alternative software (Piefed, Pylova, Mbin)

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.

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.