Mama we made it

Interesting to see Lemmy from the perspective of a Mastodon user. I never used Twitter and I have no interest in Mastodon, but it certainly seems like a tremendous advantage to be able to cross pollinate with them, given their sizeable userbase. There is definitely more work to be done on streamlining federation between platforms, but its an inherently tricky problem so I’m not surprised.

Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin are still at the stage where they are trying to complete their own core features, so there hasn’t been as much focus on bridging to the rest of the fediverse. Mastodon is a more mature software so they probably had more time to work on extra features like cross-platform federation.

I was going to edit my previous comment but I’ll just put it here.

I understand your point, but I’m saying that private/public is not a binary concept. It’s a spectrum, and making votes visible on the Lemmy UI shifts the position much closer to the public side. It will have a noticeable effect on people’s behavior.

But I agree that it’s probably possible to correlate the voting profiles in theory. Could potentially be prevented by randomizing the profile for each vote maybe.

You should check out the PieFed concept that I linked. That seems to provide a layer of privacy managed by the local instance admin. I’m curious if you can see any obvious way it might be bypassed or exploited, because I know you have a greater technical acumen than myself.

I just had to type in the URL for your comment in the search bar and click the “Activity” field in the menu.

Believe it or not, that barrier of entry is enough to dissuade 99% of people. People simply don’t have the time or inclination to do this. But if you put a button right in the Lemmy UI, people will check constantly, and it will cause arguments and potentially defederations.

It’s not illegal to get your DNA, which is arguably the most egregious example I gave. They solve cold cases all the time nowadays by surreptitiously collecting DNA samples. You can see how heavy someone is just by looking at them. But that doesn’t mean they want to tell you their actual weight. I’m not sure about income and age, and it would vary by jurisdiction anyhow.

I’m just trying to explain that healthy social interactions and environments are predicated on some degree of privacy, and abolishing that serves no one. If you remove the privacy of voting, you reduce the incentive for people to vote, or indeed to use this platform at all.

I’m well aware that they can be viewed from other platforms and by admins. But I don’t agree that this makes them effectively public.

By that logic, everything is effectively public. Why should I be reluctant to share my age, weight, income, DNA? All of that information can be publicly available for someone who takes the time to sample a piece of my hair, check my birth certificate, etc. It’s not illegal or impossible for someone to obtain that information.

But there’s a whole world of difference between something being theoretically accessible via workarounds, and being displayed prominently for all to see. As a result of human nature, I think that allowing people to easily check votes on any post would cause a great deal of conflict.

Also, there are currently plans underway to build more privacy into the fediverse.

Cool solution. It’s great to have multiple projects in the fediverse that can experiment with different features/formats.

For those who are concerned about possible downsides, I think it’s important to understand that

• PieFed has a small userbase
• Rimu is an active admin, so if you are attempting to combat brigading or other bad behavior and this makes it more difficult, just send them a DM and they will be happy to help out

This is a good environment to test this feature because Rimu can keep a close watch over everything. We can’t become paralyzed by the hypothetical ways that bad actors might abuse new features or systems. The only way forward is through trial and error, and the fact that PieFed exists makes that process significantly faster and less disruptive.

This is an attempt to add more privacy to the fediverse. If the consequences turn out for the worse, then we can either try something else, or live with the lack of privacy. Either way, we’ll be better off than having never tried anything at all.

This would be a catastrophic mistake. Please don’t.

Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t realize that when I made this comment. Feddit.org is the replacement instance because of all the issues with feddit.de

You make a valid point but I just want to push back a bit. These are the largest Lemmy instances in order of monthly users

As far as I know, lemmy.ml and hexbear are the only heavily communist and censorship prone servers out of the top twelve. They were here first, but we really need to stop perpetuating the notion that they represent or dominate Lemmy as a whole, along with the idea that they represent a typical moderation experience on this platform.

I feel like the numerous well-moderated instances don’t get enough credit. The actions of lemmy.ml moderators tend to shape the narrative about Lemmy moderation, which is unfair to other servers and repels new users from the platform. Other instances aren’t perfect with moderation either, but at least they generally try to moderate in good faith and with some degree of neutrality, which is the most you can really ask for.

The primary influence that remains is lemmy.ml still hosts a disproportionate number of major communities, but that’s slowly changing.

I’m confused, I don’t pronounce it fed-uh-verse or fed-eh-verse.

It’s very much fed-ih-verse, where the vowel is pronounced the same as in feddit. I tried to explain this using the International Phonetic Alphabet but that shit is extremely confusing to me.

However you do make a valid point about lazy American pronunciations. They tend to become dominant regardless of whether they are technically correct.

Wow, that’s awesome!

Thanks to everyone who put in the work to make this happen, I know that it’s quite a lot of red tape to get this stuff set up.

I’d just like to point out that most of the complaints referenced in this post are at least partially being addressed with the latest release of Lemmy, 0.19.4

As you can see, there were many improvements to the moderation tools and image hosting UX/storage requirements. There’s obviously still room for improvement, but everything else out there has glaring issues as well. Mbin/PieFed are even less polished than Lemmy at this stage, although they are progressing quickly.

Also worth noting that most of the replies to the first post express a strong user preference for Lemmy over Sharkey.

Huh that is weird.

Thanks for the community though, don’t know how I’ve never seen that one yet. Lemmy is actually bigger than people think sometimes.

Nice one dude. High memories run deep 😤

This is your guy

They basically do the same thing but the interface is better on this one.

You need to take a step back. You can’t see the forest for the trees. Our strength is in our diversity.

Hexbear defederated from us as we were discussing whether to vote on defederating them, which was a foregone conclusion. Our users can’t walk into their communities, because they are scared that we might poke a hole in their bubble. Perhaps these boogeymen that you envision are less interested in taking over the world, and more interested in simply having their own space on the internet.

In short, if a user on that instance were to accidentally walk into chapotraphouse (hexbear.net is also not defederated on that instance) and say something that would anger the trolls and get you brigaded (from their discord server), then that’s not the problem of the instance admin of sh.itjust.works to protect their users from such a mistake.

It’s not nice to put words in someone else’s mouth. I will always protect my users against being brigaded. Hence why we were about to defederate hexbear before they beat us to the punch. But we aren’t being brigaded by lemmy.ml.

You actually believe Dessalines is taking money from the Chinese government? Come on dude, that’s absurd. Occam’s razor: he just doesn’t like when people say shit he doesn’t agree with, and petulantly bans them. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just an internet moderation saga that has played out a million times before.

Like I said, it was a good healthy discussion, you have differing opinions on the topic and you expressed them clearly and respectfully. Nothing wrong with that. I’m also a stubborn mfer

Agreed. But to be fair, there’s never been a forum like the fediverse before. People are still learning how to navigate this complex, multifaceted space. It’s not just one audience, it’s many different ones.

You absolutely nailed it with that comment, 5/7, perfect score.

Honestly it probably would get downvoted if you made it as a separate post, but that’s just because kvetching about lemmy.ml is the flavor of the week and most people are sheep.

Don’t mean to be a dick, but that was genuinely a very satisfying little internet spat. It was like watching a tennis match with you two volleying back and forth, and even the insults were pretty classy.

I think you each made several solid points, and I was brought slightly closer to forming an opinion regarding the public upvote/downvote system. This is likely to become a significant point of contention in the future, when Lemmy competitors will potentially seek to differentiate themselves by obscuring the visibility of votes.

Anyway, just remember that there are other people reading the thread who got something out of your contribution, even if you couldn’t come to a personal understanding with each other.