Appreciate the feedback :)

The difference between blocking and purging is that a blocked account is still residing on the instance (even more so for user blocks instead of admin blocks). As the data is still there, it opens possibility for legal trouble. Full purges by instance moderation action is different.

The scope of my proposal is not to help curate and filtering content for instances, but to enable widespread coordinated action against content which was already created and is harmful without any room for interpretation.

Makes sense. I suppose my described lists could also be made into purge lists.

That is a whole other issue. Scrapers and request spammers, not content spamming accounts, can be combated with already existing technology at the reverse proxy server. There are big crowdsourced IP banlists which are continuously updated.

Not my knowledge base, so good to know that already exists.

This would be the easiest solution. But I think it will lead away from individualism of instances, as all decisions are automatically applied, instead of only a manually reviewed subset.

Your idea with applying the mod action after a threshold of other instances did it too is something to consider. It will keep individualism but also creates “avalanches” once enough instances in the network agreed on a decision, which might be even better for propagating swift action against general harmful content.

Definitely a balance needs to be struck, between quick action and preventing abuse.

Avoiding burnout is a high priority, and I’ve come close at times, so that’s a factor, too.

Yeah, I think that’s priority one, or should be, for community builders. Glad you’re taking care of yourself and not overdoing it :)

Sometime back I talked about a group ‘pledge-posting’ project that had its challenges in terms of coordinating people on such a venture, but today I realised that a web tool would probably be much preferable.

Better yet if such a mini-service could be integrated in to PieFed or Lemmy, so that one could get ‘the list’ and relevant notifications simply via their regular login. One stop shopping and all that.

I’m not sure if it’s open-source (didn’t quickly find source code searching), but “The Button” has interactions with users’ Fediverse accounts and can send notifications/messages after they sign up. So, it might be worth reaching out to Demigodrick@piefed.zip to see if you could view his code or if he’s interested in collaborating on your idea.

Via integration into the threadiverse, I’ve found Pylova the most responsive to feature requests and Piefed seem to following Pylova’s lead in several features (so perhaps backdoor into adoption by a larger portion of the threadiverse). So, might be worth reaching out to Mia (quokka@quokk.au) to see if she has any interest in working on that feature.

My guess is the easiest and fastest route would be if you could get Demigodrick to put up a service (stripped down features of “The Button”) for you/users.

I think Pylova (a soft-fork of Piefed) is at the forefront of moderation tools in the threadiverse.

I think their recent addition of shareable user-subscribable block-lists is a good direction to go. I think this can be expanded to instance-level subscribable block-lists. There could be a variety of lists (CSAM, scrappers, scammers, agentics, etc.) and each instance chooses what list(s) to subscribe to or build their own for others to subscribe and contribute to. The lists would be easily fork-able so that any instance can take control of their own moderation, if they disagreed with an addition/subtraction to a list.

For some lists (like scrappers), I think automatic addition could be set up to quickly “inoculate” the rest of the threadiverse against them. Perhaps one approach could be any IP that clicks on a non-user clickable link or gets stuck(?) in Anubis could be added.

I think subscribable block-lists for instance admins could be a great way to protect the threadiverse (perhaps expanded to the fediverse as a whole or just any website in general) against any problematic actors quickly and at the first encounter (alternatively: after (x) # or % of instance admins add them to a list).

Apparently some of these lists may already exist in some form (@Christopher@lemmy.grey.fail: “I was able to implement community maintained blocklists.”). So, my thought would be to make sure these lists are a standard format (if they aren’t already) that instances can auto retrieve and contribute to.

Anyone: let me know if you have any thoughts or see any issues with the idea (constructive criticism only, please).

Had to look up what a video game randomizer was. Seems interesting, though I think you’re right, and it’ll be pretty niche.

Regardless, thanks for the idea. I’ll put it in the list, with your instance suggestions :)

A lot of the problems with Lemmy boil down ultimately to overall lack of moderation.

Yeah, I would say we are definitely at a “work-in-progress” level, with a ways to go.

The recent thread in the Fediverse community praising the devs of many Fediverse platforms is a great example: it became highly toxic, ultimately being locked.

I saw the post originally. Going back it looks like FiniteBanjo went to pick a fight. I’m not trying make any judgement on their comments, just that they appear, to me, to wanted to start an argument (“Well, not all of them. Some of them are a stain on this earth.”). Not surprised it was locked at that point.

… with the admins themselves literally flinging actual death threats against admins of other instances.

My recollection and understanding of that situation was that it was an inferred threat, that, when confronted, was immediately rescinded and that admin stepped down due to their actions. So, I think, it’s a bit disingenuous to use that as a negative against them. To me, they responded appropriately when confronted with how their message was taken (clarification that’s not how it was intended and then stepping down from their position of authority).

I believe soon after the .world admins faked “evidence” that the anarchist admins were really fascists trying to sow discord or something (I don’t recall the exact allegation, but I remember the evidence being shown and confirmed to be fake). My recollection is Rimu backed the .world admins even after their evidence had been shown to be faked. I want to say that is when Rimu introduced the instance “silencing” feature, to reduce anarchist influence after his and the .world admins’ attempts to expel the anarchists with the faked evidence failed.

So there will never be a solution to this step that involves all of us getting onto the same page.

Decentralization. There doesn’t need to be, in my eyes.

I do decry the right of places such as Chapotraphouse to exist, but I do think that they need to be labeled properly, with a warning label …

… the instance picker (the last time I checked) was very confusing and came nowhere close to explaining what individual users could expect when signing up to an instance.

… as people who jumped through all of the prior hurdles flee this toxic shithole …

On-boarding is a huge gap in my mind. From my view, we basically throw everyone in the deep-end and hope they learn to swim and aren’t too concerned with fixing the issue, because we all learned to swim, so why can’t they.

I could see an on-boarding that quickly explains the structure (like 2 sentences about decentralization/email-analogy and identifying a users name and instance. Then go into a quick questionnaire (for determining best host instance for them) about what kind of posts they want to see (one of those could be a quoted .ml account, to see if the new user wants to see “triad” content). From there some, basic filtering/block list yes/nos (block-list for spam accounts: yes/no, agentic accounts: yes/no, bot accounts: yes/no, etc.) and interested topics (software, cats, art, etc.). I think that would go a long way in helping get an easier and more welcoming environment (may only be fully possible via Pylova features at the moment (block-lists)).

Unfortunately, PieFed seems to be continually actively working against this goal now, making the options more opaque rather than transparent - e.g. any PieFed community on an instance that does not explicitly disable the downvote feature (and which ones have done that? how is anyone supposed to know!?) is shadow-censoring contributions offered from many different software platforms (Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Friendica, Mastodon, etc.), without disclosure of that fact.

That’s a good point I hadn’t thought of before. I’m not sure how an instance could keep a user informed without keeping a larger database of community and instance settings. Alternatively, sending that info for each load or interaction the user makes. The larger database sounds much more reasonable, but still daunting and not easily implemented and probably with a significant compute cost.

… whose devs look to me to be tired on working to support new features, especially for PieFed.

This isn’t surprising to me. Piefed has 20% of the users Lemmy has (and that increase to 20% is relatively recent) and developer generally want to get paid for their work (especially if they don’t have a main corporate job).

PyLova might be the single best hope the entire Threadiverse has to grow. We’ll see what happens!

Yeah, definitely looks to be the brightest hope we have right now. Hopefully, they can keep up a sustainable pace and don’t burn out.

I know nothing about the systems in question, but it seems the “hiss” is in time with the flame changing shape. So, perhaps a blower or valve turning on/off, open/closing.

Again, I know nothing, but if it’s a sound from the equipment turning on/off, I don’t think it would be potentially hazardous. Probably very annoying though.

I do need to find better language though, so that I don’t annoy people when I say that it is sometimes hard to have hope that this place will grow.

You may want to try using “feeling language”. I’ve found it helps a lot online and IRL.

Ex: “I feel like that …”, “My understanding of the situation is …”, “To me that …”, etc.

Bc really, growth isn’t the point?

Though it is necessary, even to remain afloat.

Agreed, for all the reasons you mentioned earlier, plus I think it would be nicer if the activity, administrative, and development load was spread out a bit wider (makes it easier on everyone/less burnout, and provides redundancies).

That said, the community that you pointed to might be in a weird lockdown state, since I noticed that it has zero active mods. See the sidebar on the home instance and then the modlog offers the further knowledge that the only prior mod has been banned from that instance. If you want to revive it, you could appeal to the instance owner and become the new kid of it?

I was going to take your suggestion, because I doubt it is much mod responsibility, but it looks like programming.dev was having federation issues when I tried to post and the post never made it. Remade it just now and it went through, no issues.

The people that have thrived here so far are those who approach it from an IT hobbiest standpoint and are willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work building it. But most people are not willing or capable to do likewise, which turns many away. The tools are still being built, and definitely lack polish atm.

Agreed. I feel it’s currently very much a make your own space and if people come by great, but don’t expect or rely on it happening.

But we are building them nonetheless (well, Mia is:-P, though we can help with suggestions!), steadily over time. So I am less concerned about current number of MAUs than in seeing the challenges be overcome, such as building these tools. Although that requires funding which in turn requires some level of MAUs, thus I am ecstatic about these subscribable blocklists to help keep people from fleeing this place!! 🤩

Agreed :)

Oh, do you mean the private voting issue?

If it helps, I had previously responded to some of the more controversial points that users had raised a year ago.

Honestly, you could probably lay out a dozen controversial decisions Rimu has made and I wouldn’t be able to pick which one I’m vaguely recalling.

I admit to being very wrong here - I thought, and even said publicly - that surely Rimu would reverse course and walk back that decision, as he had so very many others previously.

I thought so too.

He acts like Huffman, treating people as landed gentry on his platform. Which is… the truth!! Hence people have left it, and even more are choosing to simply go to it. Nonetheless, I truly do wish the best to the project… I just no longer have any hope that it will continue, most certainly not like it had in the past.

It’s his, but at the same time, being open source, it could very quickly not be (ex. Pylova). As long as there is a solid conversion path, Rimu could one day wake up and find .social is the only Piefed instance.

GET CREATIVE?!?

Rimu not only took away voting, and did so in a way that breaks the ActivityPub model - leaving users to scratch their heads wondering what error had occurred where the arrow turned green but the count did not change - but in response to why people were not allowed to vote anymore, he said to simply move on and do other things besides voting.

Yeah, his communication skills need significant work, which wouldn’t be so bad, if he was open-minded, but it really seems, as you’re saying, it has to be his way.

… the hidden, third option is simply to not engage with communities located on piefed instances anymore. And bam, just like that, communities such as !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social had their contributions drop like a rock (I skewed those stats a bit b/c I seemed to forget for a moment and submitted 6 posts before I remembered, as I tried out different 3rd-party apps to see what those experiences were like).

Absolutely. This is what I love about open source and federation. It may take time, but the ‘system’ routes around ‘damage’. Looks to me like Pylova may be the route around the Piefed/Rimu damage.

REALLY! That’s amazing! I would guess a migration over from Reddit. I hope they feel welcomed.

I guess from Reddit too. It’s been pretty consistently 100+ new users a day. Given instance “stickiness”, I’d say ~60% stick around.

I’ve seen a couple posts from newbies, the threads look really positive, there still is the allow/block triad conversation/fighting, but it was very minor from what I saw.

About downvotes, I misrecalled: Mia said that it was added to the to-do list to be added for the next release, although that was 3 months ago, and yet I have not seen it added yet.

If you haven’t seen her response, it’s appears to be a user toggle-able setting, which may turn into an instance setting.

There are a lot of “unfriendly” aspects such as this to the Fediverse. I see some people fleeing now because their instance went belly-up - off-hand I can think of mander.xyz and slrpnk.net and… at least one more that I cannot now recall the name of (their admin team simply listed a single account beginning with “The “, which at least at one point had not posted for years), all of which are having issues. Of course that is simply par for the course for the Fediverse model!

Yeah, it’s unfortunate, but I think it could also be an opportunity to figure out problems/frictions and solutions. I think for the worry instances go down, a few things would inspire confidence, for me. Off-site backup redundancy (data), a set up non-profit with financial transparency (finances), and a “succession plan” (admins: if admin people want to leave they can but there is a plan in place to hand things off and replace them).

But less necessary are those bot spam posts made ostensibly to make the place look more welcoming and active and alive - at first glance, but then those accounts (almost?) never respond to anyone’s comment, which sours people and leaves a negative impression of this place as being a ghost town.

Agreed. I think clearly labeling that this a bot post, could be good to feature. I still like seeing articles, even if I don’t want to comment on them. Maybe having them separated out as RSS feeds would be better though. I think something is happening with regards to RSS and Piefed, but I didn’t look into the specifics.

But… it is simply not worth the effort, when Reddit and FaceBook and Insta and X and Bluesky have REAL (high amounts of) content, so investing all that effort to learn and block what they do not want will yield significantly greater dividends… they seem to think, and by the mantra that “the customer is always right”, they are correct.

One thing I kept hearing from the new users this week, is how calm it is here. Like there is much less antagonism, insults, and rage bait and much more thoughtful discussion and nice interactions. So, I think, the threadiverse will hold some of the new converts until they learn how to curate their experience better.

Thereby if we want to attrack them more, we need to offer such blocking by default, making unregistered bot accounts either outright illegal or at least opt-in rather than allowing them to be opt-out.

Now I would put my hopes into the shareable blocklists to do such.

Yeah, I think “informed default” (like .zip), where the blocks are setup by default, but new users are informed about them and there is an easy way to disable them, if the new user chooses to, is a good path forward.

About your idea: I disagree. An admin that is hosting their own instance is different than someone who is simply using an existing instance. Such a person should have access to a “connectivity health” monitoring tool yes, but I don’t see why it would need to be on a per-post basis.

I mean as opposed to having every single post do this across the entire Threadiverse, at all times.

Anyway, I feel like an admin tool would be a better fit for that situation than changing the way that all posts federated all of the time - if I understood you correctly there.

It seems I may not have conveyed the idea well. So to try again, my understanding is that an instance sends to the appropriate “hosting instance” a post or comment. My thought is, if it doesn’t already happen, have the “hosting instance” send an ‘acknowledgement’ back to the sending instance. Then, if the comment has been ‘acknowledged’, the sending instance would put an indicator on the comment (check mark or something) to show “yes, my user, your activity successfully arrived at it’s destination.”

In my mind, this wouldn’t be every instance checking every other instance’s user’s activity to make sure it federated properly. This would be an instance confirming things for only its own users.

For instance if I make a post to !Fediverse@lemmy.world, even as a mere user (not an instance admin) I can go over to that instance at https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse/ and look for my post there (similarly for comments). I have routinely done that many times in the past, especially from StarTrek.Website that had such horrible network connectivity at the time that I joined it, prompting me to seek out Discuss.Online that has such fantastic uptime due to spectacularly capable admins (including Jgrim the author of Sublinks).

Previously though, I would likewise post something and then getting zero up- (or down-) votes, go seek out why, and discover that my post had not federated. Worse, when it eventually did get federated, it did not appear to others as “new”, and instead looked like it had been submitted several days in the past, at which point people were not alerted to it, and it became buried amidst all the flood of prior posts that had already been engaged with, even though those had not been. It was quite sad, how bad the connectivity of the Threadiverse was 3-4 years ago:-(. These days it is a LOT better!

I’m think the feature I’m suggesting would do away with this “federation uncertainty friction”. I rarely go to check other instances to see if my comment or post has federated or not. I’m usually on mobile and this is not an easy maneuver, so I often have a question if my post/comment federated or if I’m only talking to myself. Not a great feeling and definitely reduces the urge to contribute, for me.

I just checked the post I made to the !servo@programming.dev community yesterday, did not federate (https://programming.dev/c/Servo is missing my post). Glad I spent time on that post… :(

I think the “acknowledgement” feature could also help elevate the issue entirely. I’m not sure how to ‘force’ a re-submission of my post, but if an instance didn’t get an ‘acknowledgement’ the instance could check that the '“hosting instance” is still receiving and then try resend the post/comment after a certain time interval.

Probably would have missed it. Appreciate the tag :)

How votes are viewed is a user setting, letting anyone choose if they want combined, separate, or a percentage. Is this something you would also like settable as a global instance default choice?

Honestly, as long as I can easily enable it, it doesn’t matter to me if everyone has it by default (only viewed your instance without logging in). Might be worth a user poll, but I have no idea how wanted that feature is.

FYI I altered my [FR] on Codeburg to reflect you’d already implementing the feature.

We mostly use Grafna

Link doesn’t work, but I think I know what it’ll look like.

Given both your responses, it seems I didn’t conveyed the idea well to OpenStars. My understanding is that an instance sends to the appropriate “hosting instance” a post or comment. My thought is, if it doesn’t already happen, have the “hosting instance” send an ‘acknowledgement’ back to the sending instance. Then, if the comment has been ‘acknowledged’, the sending instance would put an indicator on the comment (check mark or something) to show “yes, my user, your activity successfully arrived at it’s destination.”

In my mind, this wouldn’t be every instance checking every other instance’s user’s activity to make sure it federated properly. This would be an instance confirming things for only its own users.

Hopefully that makes sense. I graphical up-time graph is probably nice to have too. I was going to say those are available on fediverse measurement sites, but with a quick look, it seems like that was a Fediverse-Observer (RIP) only feature.

Also I occasionally search for PyLova and I love reading this comment chain when I do, thanks for contributing so many ideas.

Happy to help and thanks for being so responsive, open-minded, and just all around great :)

Edit: when making my comment to OpenStars, I checked a post I made to the !servo@programming.dev community yesterday, which did not federate (https://programming.dev/c/Servo is missing my post).

I think the “acknowledgement” feature could also help elevate the issue entirely. I’m not sure how to ‘force’ a re-submission of my post, but if an instance didn’t get an ‘acknowledgement’ the instance could check that the ‘"hosting instance” is still receiving and then try resend the post/comment after a certain time interval.

I am a bit behind in catching up - thanks for sharing all that, both the topics with the PyLova devs and making sure I was kept in the loop as well:-).

Yeah, no worries :)

I don’t recall the prior issue, unless it was the one with user blocking being silent. On that one I was swayed by the argument that it simply had to be that way due to limitations within Lemmy.

I don’t think that was it but maybe?

… all of which Lemmy will ignore, as is its right and choice to do so.

Agreed.

But the vote quota crosses a line where iirc it doesn’t even tell other PieFed instances - nor Mbin nor nodeBB nor Mastodon etc. - what is going on. It’s horribly designed, or at least it was upon release and if it has changed since then I have not heard of such. Some features take literally years to be implemented, but this one is slammed down everyone’s throats against all objections to the contrary without anyone seeming to have been heard?

Absolutely. I was ready to leave Piefed over it.

Sure, whatever, Rimu can do as he pleases, but it makes it really hard to hold out any hope for the future of this project when people keep losing investment in it (now Snoopy having become the latest casualty, seemingly? at least it appears that way).

Yeah, Snoopy leaving is interesting, in that I’m not sure how much new blood Rimu is going to attract in the future (he’s burned a lot of bridges). The Codeburg commits lists Rimu, Walter Schwenger (wsj018), and wltb as the only developers over the last 3 months. Looks like there were quite a few more other people pushing commits 4 months back. Looks like the Pylova split happened 5 months ago and a couple of the light commiters followed Mia to Pylova.

The Innuendo Studios YouTube series The Alt-Right Playbook does a superb job at explaining how someone can fall into authoritarian thinking.

Sounds interesting, I’ll have to check it out.

Particularly interesting are those in the outer circle of the onion-like layers that are shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED 😲 😳, when they find out that the people who had been screeching all along at the top of their lungs who they are, suddenly start doing the very things that they always said that they were going to do if they only had the power to make it happen.

It would be kind of funny, if the effects weren’t terrible :(

PieFed is still growing despite that though, just not by nearly so much or robustly …

Yeah, looks like there is some significant growth in the Threadiverse this week (~+750 MAU). Roughly 600 for Lemmy, 170 for Piefed, and -10 for Mbin. Edit: looks like I was running the analysis on the same processed data instead of processing each new day’s data before the analysis (only ran two of the scripts to check the daily numbers instead of all 3 :/). So, actually +250 MAU, rather than +750 MAU.

I’ve brought up the topic of separating downvotes from upvotes with Rimu years ago, it seems very unlikely to happen. Mainly because he does not want it himself, therefore does not want to expend much effort to put it into the code (understandable), and also it is legitimately a difficult UI issue that he prefers to leave to others.

I vaguely recall this, so might have seen your post/comment at the time.

PyLova has already done it though …

They did? I just checked their instances and it has the same consolidated total votes UI. It would be great if they already did it, maybe it’s an option and not the default?

On a different note, I ran across a post who deleted there account, because almost no one was voting on their posts. I think it was a federation issue, as in the community hosting instance never received the posts and they only stayed local.

I was thinking maybe a check-mark or something to let a user know their post or comment was successfully received by the target/host instance. I don’t know if hosting instances tell sending instances they successfully retrieved data or not, so could be a significant increase in traffic.

Maybe not that significant though. Piefed only had ~1700 posts and comments over the last week, Lemmy top 20 most populated instances were ~12500 (“Activity” Data). Taking the most “active” instance (lemmy.world), they had ~4700 activities, assume worst case they are all for non-Lemmy.world communities. That would be 670 extra packets per day (28 per hour). That doesn’t seem too terrible. Thoughts?

FYI, on your web-page, in the “Heros” section, the “R” in Warrior is cut off. Same with the “ER” of sorcerer.

In game, Decard Cain’s “Gossip” has an bug. I think it’s supposed to be a new line but is missing the slash so is just being printed as text.

Overall, kind of fun nostalgia. It really needs optimization though, that was rough a rough play through. I’d say the enemies need to be more challenging, but after fixing the low frame-rates. Otherwise, everyone will just die.

Haha. No worries, it happens. Glad you’re up and running again though :)

I never posted my more complicated version (all instances as of August with at least 50 MAU) since people were already having trouble with the first one …

I’d say post for you. That’s what !fedilytics@piefed.zip is for me. If other people like it, great, but I’m doing the analysis because I’m interested in it.

… if you’d like I can send it to you when I get a chance (I think I DM’ed you a work-in-progress version of it at one point?), or post it myself for you to reference.

I believe we chatted briefly about your next version, but I don’t recall ever seeing it. I’d say post it, so I can link to it easier. I’m not sure how I’d host it in the wiki otherwise (not very familiar with that part of Piefed).

One thing I think including more instances demonstrates better is some of the ‘cliques’, mainly the similar defederation patterns between ‘flotilla’ instances. It also helps to show why the .zip instances are better for people who want less top-down defederation applied to them.

Sounds interesting. I look forward to seeing the new version :)

It’s working for piefed.zip (Voyager: 2.49.1, Android: 16). So may be a version issue. Might be worth updating Voyager to see if that fixes the issue.

It must have just federated when I tapped on the link

Yeah, it’s weird like that. I had that happen with one com I subscribed to, nothing for a month and then no issues since.

thanks again for your dedication!

Thanks and by the way, I’m using your defederation post in the fedigrow’s “Community Building Wiki” (“Visualization of Threadiverse Defederation”).

Appreciate the shout out. There was actually a new post yesterday. If you aren’t seeing it, there may be a federation issue.

Regardless, the most up to date number is 41565 MAU (relatively steady year-over-year, but slightly up).

Edit: I don’t post it, but since OP asked about daily users, there were at least 15444 DAU yesterday (Lemmy: 12864, Piefed: 2580, Mbin: ? (doesn’t report DAU)).

Changed some wording for easier reading/clarity.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve added it to the post body list :)

No worries :)

Also, if you didn’t see my edit, !andfinally@feddit.uk might also work for you.

Hmm. How does !offbeat@lemmy.ca look to you? Doesn’t look too active (~1 post per week), but has 1K Users / 6 Months, so decent reach.

There’s a couple others I found, but they are much smaller and less active:
!onion@piefed.world
!offbeat@lemmy.world

Edit: Looks like the mod of !offbeat@lemmy.ca may be MIA (last activity 6 months ago). The sidebar does link to !andfinally@feddit.uk which seems more active 2-4 posts per week and 970 Users / 6 Months.