OpenStars

@ OpenStars @piefed.social

Posts

50
Comments

3669
Joined

1 yr. ago

Compassion ~ Thought

22h ago

[meta] pls stop banning people
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1

OpenStars @piefed.social 22h ago
What is the story there? I've mostly ignored Stamets lately so it seems I missed some drama?

22h ago

[meta] pls stop banning people

PieFed now both retains deleted posts (not the actual OP content but the discussions beneath it) for those who have the URL and also offers helpful labels rather than simply showing a blank page, like:

The author of this post has been banned/deleted so they might not see your reply.

Example: https://piefed.social/c/comicstrips/p/1660086/taco-tuesday

Hot damn how I love my PieFed!! 😻🍰😋

22h ago

[meta] pls stop banning people

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OpenStars @piefed.social 22h ago

PieFed now allows reading deleted posts, if you have the URL. Example

Though its more for Q&As where if requested the Q would be deleted by the person who offered it while the As would remain visible by those who offered them.

I also am absolutely in love with how it doesn't show just a blank page if you try to access the URL, and instead says the very helpful and informative:

The author of this post has been banned/deleted so they might not see your reply.

Damn I love PieFed!

1d ago

Votes are pointless if they can't be filtered

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OpenStars @piefed.social 1d ago

Thank you for explaining that it was not some oversight and has nothing to do with the software and rather an intentional instance-level decision.

I think what OP is trying to argue is that sometimes users feel powerless against some people who follow them around downvoting their content, which is facilitated by the opaqueness of the voting process.

Some people want to expose themselves to criticism, but only among a more narrow audience. Hopefully the ability of some communities to restrict votes to only subscribed community members will aid with that, by elimination of drive-by downvoters scrolling through All without knowing anything about a community's standards.

I am not sure where I stand myself on the issue, except that the data is public anyway and the chief negative would be for a (new) user to presume that it is not.

1d ago

Votes are pointless if they can't be filtered

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OpenStars @piefed.social 1d ago

On Lemmy, the only way to block both replies and votes (iirc) is to block the user that they come from, or join an instance that has all downvotes disabled (such as https://reddthat.com/). PieFed offers a plethora of additional options for each.

I don't think either platform allows someone to reply but not to vote - the closest thing to it would be to disable all downvotes from everyone, or if you want to do it selectively then that gets back into blocking (or even full defederation from an instance).

Of of PieFed's neat ideas to improve upon the existing options is to allow voting only from Subscribed community members, so that e.g. some random person scrolling All who does not bother to read the community sidebar (in fairness, some apps seem to go to great lengths to almost actively hide these from their users) will not impact the community discussions. I am not sure if it restricts only voting and lets comments through, but it might, and either way may be worth investigating. More details in https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/.

Note how nearly all of the above is optional, able to be configured by the user or at least able to be easily switched off for someone running their own instance. But damn it really is so nice to have options to choose from:-).

1d ago

Votes are pointless if they can't be filtered

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OpenStars @piefed.social 1d ago

Do you know why that defederation occurred? Voting data is already publicly available so I imagine there must have been some other reason(s)?

1d ago

Fediverse Challenge: Prove there's still good in the world

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OpenStars @piefed.social 1d ago

we’re not attracting the best and brightest here but rather the ones who have nowhere else to go. And they bring that behavior here and it just seems like it takes us further away from becoming a real alternative people actually want to go to.

This right here. There's a famous adage that goes "why would I want to be a member of a club that would accept me as a member?", which encourages us to look within, but it's undeniably true as well (however much we may want to deny it) that we are influenced by the actions of those who we choose to spend our time with. Echo chambers that act to funnel misinformation (or worse, active disinformation) are so incredibly dangerous. Yet it seems nearly impossible to escape from such - though we do get to choose our favorite flavoring of it.

I will note that making an account on PieFed does not represent any kind of "commitment" at all, and in fact has ancillary benefits such as reserving your username in advance in case you ever do decide to switch. Simply make an account on PieFed.social and you'll get to see first-hand what all it offers! Do beware though bc most likely one glance at that sign-up wizard will make you fall in love 💕, and then more and more often you'll find yourself using your PieFed rather than STW alt account. But is that a bad thing, to have options to choose from?! 😋

For a new member coming to Lemmy, my advice would be to:

Block instances
Block communities
Subscribe to communities (traditionally by scrolling through All)
Block users
Comment and Post

We need to move past these bare-bones basics. Which I don't see much activity happening there on the Lemmy side to improve any of that, though I do see much happening in PieFed, hence I am placing my hopes for the future into it.

1d ago

Votes are pointless if they can't be filtered

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OpenStars @piefed.social 1d ago

Theoretically downvoting data is entirely public, so it's mainly a choice of each UI to either show it or not. Most do not, but some do.

There is https://lemvotes.org/, although I find that extremely often it has difficulties with content on PieFed, I do not know why. It would indeed be nice to get that limitation resolved, for those who need access to it.

I think some 3rd party apps do show you exactly who has downvoted some item of content - I recall seeing screenshots even - but I don't use any mobile apps right now and don't recall which ones might do it. Also it might be a mod-only view.

The Tesseract alternative UI for Lemmy would also do it, but there too there are some limitations (which I don't recall, except that it is not currently compatible with PieFed).

Also if you started your own instance then you would have full access to that data. I am not sure by what mechanism, like a UI option or a CLI database command or what.

I will add that I have thought along similar lines, but in practice it tends to be far more hassle than it is worth. Like when someone replies with a rather toxic comment, and so I go through their recent history to see if they provide any value at all or if I am better to simply erase their existence from my view of the Threadiverse, and more often than not lately I see them offering helpful posts and replies in other contexts. Everyone has bad / off-days.

So in the end I simply blocked the largest Lemmy communities - especially News and Politics ones - and that solved a large fraction of my issue with encountering toxicity. And blocking all users from lemmy.ml, who perhaps due to existing inside their repressive echo chamber seemed the most likely category of people to consistently reply with batshit insane logic, which I simply do not need in my life. Anyway, some communities are simply inherently more toxic than others, so find the ones that are worthwhile (uplifting, kind, relevant, etc.) and enjoy those - plus ofc be the change that you want to see in the world (as best you can at any rate).

2d ago

Fediverse Challenge: Prove there's still good in the world

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OpenStars @piefed.social 2d ago

I presume that people already know about the older communities like !wholesome@reddthat.com and all the communities listed in its side-bar, but also check out the newer !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social.

2d ago

Fediverse Challenge: Prove there's still good in the world

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OpenStars @piefed.social 2d ago

(unless there’s just a massive bot problem which I don’t have reason to suspect)

Actually those are known to exist - see e.g. https://lemmy.ca/post/58955248 - though as evidenced by that same post, the admins tend to be pretty on top of shutting them down.

Below that though, at the level of communities, Lemmy has a moderation problem. Reports from one instance to anther do not federate (well, on PieFed they do, but on Lemmy they don't) - although like everything else this is promised to be fixed "soon" (same as last year iirc, and to a lesser degree the year before that too, though probably more in the sense of just having put it onto the roadmap), which allows toxicity to thrive. Ironically it also encourages having toxic mods as well, seeing as they are the only ones willing to put up with the majority of the negative flood pushed at them.

And don't even get me started on the lack of notification to someone that their content was removed by a mod - people tend to find out days/weeks/years later/if at all, meaning that they continue unabated, not even aware at all (or at least, at first) that they have been so censured.

Lemmy also is lacking is so many other ways, e.g. content discovery is often primarily achieved by browsing All, rather than lets say by browsing Topic areas (I am not discouraging the existence of the All Feed, just bemoaning the lack of many alternatives to it). So communities get "stumbled upon" much more readily by people not actively searching for something anywhere close to that content type, who might tend to emotionally vomit upon people rather than be genuinely interested in constructive dialog.

Reddit is a multimillion dollar company and even though the vast majority of the features rolled out over the last decade either ignored or actively went against what the userbase wanted, it nonetheless was a fully feature-complete product. e.g. it triggered notifications upon removal of your content, it had a modmail allowing you to communicate with the team to ask why, and posts removed from a community remained active to anyone possessing the URL, allowing people to continue discussions already begun, which personally as a mod of a small gaming community I used to explain to the OP why I felt their post had to be removed, and we could talk about it back and forth. None of that can be done here (although PieFed now retains deleted posts, rendering them inactive/locked but preserving their content to be read, so that e.g. a Q&A would preserve the A part even if the OP deleted their Q).

The Threadiverse is great for FOSS, not so much great as in overall terms. We make sacrifices to be here, and the benefits tend to be more abstract and harder to explain in few words (at least without needing all kinds of MAJOR caveats about what does not work). Even Linux took decades to arrive at where it is at today, and until then it was primarily a CLI tool for all that time (gfx options often did not work as well or even properly at all, earlier in its development).

2d ago

Fediverse Challenge: Prove there's still good in the world

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OpenStars @piefed.social 2d ago

The amount of Karening aka entitlement that I've seen here (tbf it's probably far worse in the likes of Reddit and Facebook by now) has shocked me. Mainly I mean: why would people downvote things simply for appearing in All... that's literally what you asked to see, by choosing to browse "All", and then you act like it has assaulted your delicate sensibilities? If you do not like it then block it and you'll never have to see it again... or it's even easier simply to scroll down.

2d ago

BLR

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OpenStars @piefed.social 2d ago

Sand do be icky though, that's no lie!

2d ago

check & mate

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OpenStars @piefed.social 2d ago

2d ago

ChatGPT is rolling out YouTube-style age prediction

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OpenStars @piefed.social 2d ago

Nuh-uh, it told ME that I was negative soybean years old, so THERE! :-P

spoiler

uh... /s?

2d ago

Lovely family

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OpenStars @piefed.social 2d ago

I will murder everyone you have ever loved, right MEOW!

2d ago

Go for type 2

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OpenStars @piefed.social 2d ago

I feel like there should be slightly more than just 2.

Like you could flip someone off, so that's at least one more! :-P

2d ago

Just being a battery

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OpenStars @piefed.social 2d ago

I think you may be referring to the "humans are a virus / human beings are a disease" dialogue ... "and we are the cure".

That refers more to human society, but yeah, why refer to yourself as "the cure" if you think of yourself as a superior lifeform who conquered and then even colonized the bodies of the former chief predator on the planet?

All of this getting back to: why not just make a fusion reactor or some such, and not bother with all that (bio-)mechanical machinery needed to harvest human "energy", even if we were a battery, that surely sounds more wasteful and inefficient?

On the other hand, human society went extinct so humans had no collective memory of the past - unless it could be found written somewhere, which we were not told of in the movie series - and also robot society may itself not even be aware of its own motivations. Machines are better at repeating patterns than truly "thinking", especially outside-of-the-box creative stuff (in movies, whereas irl machines don't "think" at all... yet), so it seems more plausible that Mr. Smith is purely spouting BS here to keep Morpheus' mind occupied while it can be hacked, maybe even believing his own crap, but all very minor in relation to fulfilling his programming-mandated mission (seemingly not knowing that a prior instantiation of him has done this before? or more likely not caring even if he did).

Anyway, this may be going too far since it is also highly plausible that even if the machines did want humans for batteries, the offer of a pleasant Ephesian Fields / Heaven type existence was not genuinely for the benefit of the humans (they seem to think at any rate), but rather to keep them docile & complacent.