Hello m@teys,
I’ve been waiting for this a long time (half a year), personally. After seeing the surge in piefed instances, i.e. blahaj, .ca, .zip, quokk.au, and .world creating their own instances, and clients guaranteeing future piefed support, we’ve been thinking about potentially opening an instance in the future. Not a guarantee, just an idea. This isn’t a voting thread, just a discussion. Later on we’ll actually vote on this.
Do note that this thread will not guarantee an instance; we are discussing a hypothetical. Suggestions? Ideas? Criticisms? make your voice heard.
Have a good week!
pie picture comes from here
governance type: sense check
Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/fxomt
This is a non-voting post. Known users should leave comments with your thoughts on the subject.
I mean, unless you’re closing here I don’t mind what you do. I think this is the best instance. I think the leadership is top notch.
I’m a happy guy
I think that, for most dbzer0 users (and quite a few landlubbers like me), being able to choose between a Lemmy and a PieFed instances is only positive. What you need to take into account is the additional work this incurs towards you guys, the admins; you’ll be maintaining two instances instead of just one.
Maintaining the instance isn’t too big of a problem, but thank you for your input!
I don’t trust Piefed at all - they’re far too eager to curate my experience, and they’ve reintroduced all of the reputation anti-features (plus more) that were part of what drove me away from Reddit and the absence of which is part of what I like about Lemmy and Mbin.
If you’re contemplating a second instance, I don’t much care, because I can simply not use it. If you’re contemplating a move, I think it’s an awful idea.
iirc Piefed started as a small personal project, so it was quite opinionated. Now that there’s more users rimu has said he’ll make it more neutral, and give more power to instance admins.
And yep, it’s a second, separate instance
rimu has said he’ll make it more neutral
I’ll believe it when I see it.
It’s an odd thing - the Lemmy devs are notoriously opinionated and intolerant, and are constantly castigated for it, but I don’t recall ever seeing even a single hint of their opinions or even their intolerance baked into the Lemmy software.
Piefed, meanwhile, is a direct reflection of the dev’s biases right from the start, and with everything from the curated subscription lists to the karma and private voting, seems designed explicitly for the purpose of empowering bias.
Say what you will about Dessalines and Nutomic - at least they keep their biases to their own instance and out of the Lemmy software. And further, they appear to have gone to some lengths to make the software as neutral as possible - not only not reflecting any specific bias but limited in ways that make it difficult for it to even be used to impose bias.
And the same can NOT be said for Rimu and Piefed.
Perfectly put, .world is already turning into a new Reddit and Piefed is perfectly made to encourage turning into a new Reddit once all the .world’ers move there
That’s exactly my concern. It’s gotten too much exposure too quickly recently, so it doesn’t feel organic, and between subscription gatekeeping, software level censorship snd the reputation anti-features, it just feels like it’s been cynically designed specifically to undermine the benefits of the fediverse and turn it into another place where narratives can and will be shaped and controlled.
Lemmy jumped to 60k users during the Reddit API fiasco, this time it was the Lemm.ee shutdown that gave people an incentive to look for options to migrate their communities
private voting
After having discussed with a few people, Rimu agreed to drop the private voting. The system will switch to two votes button
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a local one that will stay local
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a federated one that will be sent to other instances
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https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/5-admins/topic/Private.20voting/near/332
This provides better transparency than Lemmy, as users are now complaining about tool like lemvotes: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/48233901/19876557
Wait for real? Damn that sucks that was by far the best killer feature.
Well, Rimu listened to the feedback, both on https://piefed.social/post/956572?sort=new#post_replies and Matrix
Seems like maybe that was premature considering a lot of people are still surprised by this. I’m on here pretty much daily and hadn’t heard of it. Also it’s incredibly shitty to stovepipe that conversation on matrix. It’s the same shit reddit mods do with discord.
The discussion was open on both Matrix and Piefed, as shows the link above
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Fwiw he repealed most of the karma system, and made it completely optional; so it’s gotten better. But i see where you’re going at, thanks for your input
Great points that I never thought of. Great post!
I don’t know much about Piefed. What anti-features are you talking about?
It tracks karma, automatically collapses replies and hides threads based on downvote thresholds and attaches icons to usernames to tell other users in advance that they have been downvoted in the past. And alongside that, votes are hidden. So a few determined users (or even one determined user and a few bots) can easily silence other users or even effectively censor content just by mass downvoting.
Just like Reddit, and notably NOT like the rest of the threadiverse which has done away with karma, doesn’t auto-hide downvoted users or content snd makes votes public.
votes are hidden.
After having discussed with a few people, Rimu agreed to drop the private voting. The system will switch to two votes button
-
a local one that will stay local
-
a federated one that will be sent to other instances
-
https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/5-admins/topic/Private.20voting/near/332
This provides better transparency than Lemmy, as users are now complaining about tool like lemvotes: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/48233901/19876557
It’s crazy to see Rodneyck come up in this. I banned that account when it showed up to one of the communities I’m moderating 18 days ago and dropped five downvotes in quick succession. Something lemvotes helped me identify quickly.
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Yeah, I don’t like any of that. Thanks for the explanation.
It tracks karma, automatically collapses replies and hides threads based on downvote thresholds
Not cool at all.
Yes please. I’m in.
I was hoping a dbzer0 piefed instance would happen sometimes in the future! I would totally use it, since it has some pretty cool features that Lemmy has been quite slow in implementing. For example, merged communities that cover one specific topic.
A comment I came across a while ago puts it quite well:
I haven’t used piefed myself but I wouldn’t want to switch to it because I feel like it gives more power to downvotes and karma (or “reputation” as they call it):
- Comments with -10 score are collapsed by default.
- People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
- Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.
Those are three of the twelve points listed as differences to lemmy on their features page.
I also don’t agree with some of the points in their article on “PieFed features for growing healthy communities”.
from: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/17119490
the comments’ thread is also quite interestingPlus it’s written in Python and has only 1,6k MAUs, so we can only guess how well it scales
Slightly edited from an older comment of mine:
EDIT: as such I believe that operating a Piefed instance would be a waste resources and actually harmful considering the fragmentation it would cause for little to no benefit at all (also it seems much better set up for a new Reddit with all the .world’ers flooding over there and the anti-features)
I think rimu has made the karma system to be optional (i.e. in the admin settings, not hardcoded) so we’d just disable it anyway. I think the second feature should only apply to mods/admins, since its a very useful tool. #1 #3 i agree, they are not good.
I’ll address each point in the Piefed Features for growing healthy communities:
Find people who have low karma
This applies to admins, and while not really that effective, its okay to have.
Find people who downvote too much
This is a very useful tool, since this is a big problem on lemmy. Same thing; only for admins
Spot spam easily
Sounds like a good idea; but with feature #3 as you pointed out, this might cause some new-user shitposters to get falsely flagged, but we would disable it anyway.
Don’t award karma in low-quality communities
This is now opt-in, and we would disable it.
https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/5-admins/topic/Low.20reputation.20communities/near/1872
Warnings on unusual communities
We would add nothing to communities, anyway; users are free to do whatever they want, themselves. (maybe to our own instance communities like /0 and governance? But not much honestly.
Icons next to comments by low karma accounts
As i said before, probably should only be seen by admins/mods.
Icon for new accounts
No problem here; most clients do this anyway.
Automatically delete content based on phrases in user name
Sounds very useful, and which is why piefed didn’t struggle at all with nicole.
Report accounts, not just posts
Good idea.
Instance-wide domain block
We have this on lemmy too
Automatic reporting of 4chan content
Not a good idea imo. We’d disable it.
Plus it’s written in Python and has only 1,6k MAUs, so we can only guess how well it scales
We’ll always have this lemmy instance anyway :) but afaik it scales fine, and has some optimizations coming along soon.
Genuine question: Lemmy provides a good, solid backbone and API, right? And a lot of 3rd party tools & clients make up for it’s “deficits”, even in admin tools. So why do we need a big monolith and risk fragmentation, even if the features are “native”?
Clients can only do so much sadly. For example, they can’t make polls, user flairs, implement passkeys, following threads, disabling, proper blocking implementations, and etc.
Even then, the features that clients can somewhat implement (like post tags) rely on others using the same client, and aren’t considered as a standard.
For the karma features, we’ll be sure to disable it if we made our own instance. And as we said; the lemmy instance will always be active and the main instance.
True that, I suppose Piefed has it’s advantages with a faster development pace.
Although I’m still sceptical, especially regarding fragmentationIs fragmentation really a concern when both can interoperate?
Skepticism makes sense, though if we were to make an instance we’d definitely start small at first (maybe invite-only?) and then see how it scales, just in case.
Example
- !schedule@lemmings.world used to be the way to schedule posts on Lemmy.
- However, over time the experience wasn’t always the best, and quite regularly users would have issue getting their posts out
- Piefed now has an built-in scheduler feature, which makes it easier to manage
Don’t award karma in low-quality communities
Bad idea.
This is now opt-in, and configurable by admins
https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/5-admins/topic/Low.20reputation.20communities/near/1872
I know :) just addressing the albeit outdated post she linked.
Instagram is written in a much more heavy python framework, but it scaled fine.
I’d be willing to bet that the backend isn’t
Its the backend. It uses django which is more resource intensive than flask, which piefed uses.
Huh, TIL. Though some websites say they made the performance intensive stuff like image processing in C++
On python those libaries are usually written in C anyway.
I think I’m for it, but I also don’t know if I understand the implications. So, some questions:
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Is there a downside?
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Would this be in addition to lemmy or a replacement?
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If it is in addition to, is that the permanent plan, would this be working toward an eventual switch-over?
I should probably try piefed a bit so I understand it a bit better, but it’s just a different Lemmy basically, right? Does it federate with existing Lemmy?
If it doesn’t federate with what we already have, I’d have to keep up with two things, and two is a big number, so I’d probably just pick one and stay there.
Anyway, exciting nonetheless. I’ll go eat some pie now and see what that’s all about.
Piefed federates with lemmy, it’s basically a clone written in python instead of rust, with advanced moderator tools, and developed by people who aren’t braindead Stalinists.
Thanks for the explanation!
I did some pierusing and liked what I saw, too.
pierusing
Brilliant pun! 🥧
Is there a downside?
Not really, i think. We have the resources, and being an admin isn’t too time consuming; surely we can make time for an extra instance.
Would this be in addition to lemmy or a replacement?
Addition
If it is in addition to, is that the permanent plan, would this be working toward an eventual switch-over?
Probably not. There would be way too many potential issues and it’s risky.
I should probably try piefed a bit so I understand it a bit better, but it’s just a different Lemmy basically, right? Does it federate with existing Lemmy?
Yep. Try https://quokk.au/ (anarchist instance, too!) which is basically the closest thing we have right now
Also if you do try out quokk.au, you can export your subscriptions and settings to dbzer0 in the future.
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Some of my thoughts:
I value the community that we have and the style of communication that makes Lemmy different from other forum type software.
I very much dislike the political views of its creators.
I have an account on Piefed and while it’s not terrible, it’s still not as nice as here. I think it can get there over time.
Thanks for your input. To clarify we don’t want a 100% switch, just a new instance alongside this one
i like lemmy a lot. i also like that piefed seems to have better mod tools (at least i am told so). as one of the many people who lost their lemm.ee account to mod burnout, i think the important thing is what you like to work on.
if you can only support one plattform, choose the one you like better - i will most likely follow db0 for its governance.
if you can support both platforms and have fun doing so, i don’t see a downside in it.
Thanks for your input! Don’t worry, we’ll keep both instances alive.
I don’t think it’s a good idea, but i don’t care so long as the lemmy instance stays open.
I think people’s concerns over the politics of the developers are overblown and fragmenting into a new project weakens the fediverse - especially when I don’t see anything wrong with the software that is being done differently in piefed.
I think people’s concerns over the politics of the developers are overblown.
It seems a little unnatural because people are trying to hide their racism, xenophobia, western superiority mentality, but the developers also made a lot of political posts to frame them as CCP talking heads. They should have just used alt accounts like rest of the internet platform owners. Rookie mistake.
But, at least they’re honest about what they are and not covertly creating a foss product by hiding some sinister motive to rugpull later, like bluesky.
I missed something I think, what’s wrong with Bluesky?
Bluesky has a protocol, and advertises itself as decentralised.
This is true/false depending on your defintion of decentralised.
The main problem is that almost all users are on bluesky’s servers, and it was originally very expensive to run another node (this has since been fixed).
FWIW, bluesky is run by people who do care about it. The source of enshittification I see happening to them is investors demanding a return on their investment. They seem aware of this, they said they consider the organisation to be a future adversary.
I made two posts about it: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47335289 https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/47394310
Bluesky will with 100% certainty turn to shit once the investors start sinking their claws into it. Every platform that is driven by profit will eventually turn to enshittification just like reddit is doing right now. Its inevitable. I’d rather set my focus on something like Lemmy or piefed which isn’t profit driven and can be forked.
If admins are okay with running both Lemmy and Piefed instances simultaneously then it seems fine IMO.
But otherwise don’t feel strongly about it, I don’t know that I’d actually use the Piefed instance unless something happens within the Lemmyverse side of things or issues with the dbzer0 Lemmy instance itself.
Against this idea as it merely causes significantly more work the instance maintainers with (imo) quite limited benefits. I’d only be in favour if lemmy began crashing and burning for whatever reason.
I dont really care, but I won’t be using piefed. the default UI doesn’t allow me to adjust the size of thumbnails as i see fit: tiny and on the left. that’s a deal breaker for me, even if it’s petty.
I do not like new reddit and i have never liked new reddit and i have tried new reddit and will not be using new reddit. piefed UI is a new reddit ripoff.
or i guess a lot of social media platforms do that layout, Twitter FB insta. thankfully i dont waste my time with that shit either. I waste my time with YOU nerds and I am happy with that
Piefed has a custom CSS section in the settings that allows you to resize the thumbnails as you see fit
interesting! still easier to just not use it than to learn CSS
not to mention, Voyager… like the whole reason I came to Fediverse to begin with was the loss of RIF app
Voyager has PieFed support now.
nice!
I don’t know any CSS, hopefully other people share theirs: https://piefed.social/post/875579
okay, maybe this is becoming doable
Here’s my two cents:
Because there’s no direct integration with Lemmy, and we start with an empty piefed instance. I’ll have to create a user and all that, and I “just” quit Reddit so it’s not very appealing to me, even if piefed has better features.
I would create an account if everyone migrates, or if I can click a “move to piefed” button that copies all my comments and posts.
Wdym no direct integration?
Sadly those two are not possible for us to do now, but the lemmy instance will always be the top priority.
It would be direct integration (maybe I chose the wrong term) if piefed could share the database with Lemmy, then uses only had to start using the new features in piefed.
Because they are two different activitypub implementations I would not expect easy migration to be possible in the near future or ever, most likely only if it becomes a part of activitypub.
Thats not possible, but it is possible to port lemmy -> piefed, but i don’t think its a good idea.
