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
I'm pretty firmly against this since Piefed has those same Karma and user score systems that made Reddit so toxic but with the bonus of being able to exclude communities from giving you upvotes (but not downvotes). Karma is literally a lighter version of social credit and I don't support it. Also pretty against the fact that piefed literally lets admins turn off modlog sharing which is concerning to say the least and should concern people here considering we've built a whole community around mod accountability.
So yeah I don't support the move to piefed but since "everyone" is going gaga for piefed I'm sure this instance will end up getting a piefed instance to go with the trend and may even abandon Lemmy altogether, I really hope not I do kind of like Lemmy, but this seems the way things are going.
For one , we wont have karma. We will keep the modlog.
No, I've been planning this for more than half a year by now, more than most admins have thought of it. This is just a window of opportunity for us.
No we will not abandon lemmy.
Most of the karma features can be disabled by instance admins iirc.
As much as I dislike karma, the recent lemm.ee shutdown still shows that there is a need for better tools to allow mods and admins to identify toxic users.
Karma shouldn't be the end game, but for now it's acceptable
No, sorry. I don't agree. I don't think that users votes should be given power besides ranking in the feeds, vote manipulation is already a big problem if they think they can get people banned or limited over voting they'll do it even more aggressively. This isn't Reddit and vote fuzzing or throwing out votes won't work the same, federation makes this super messy and unreliable. People voting from remote instances can easily manipulate the score. Especially if they upvote everything else or randomly upvote a larger majority than downvote, while still targeting specific people.
You don't seem to understand. Karma on Lemmy is ripe for abuse in ways not even dreamed on Reddit. There's a reason the Lemmy devs did everything in their power to hinder the ability of weaponizing score.
Also since Piefed puts so much emphasis on voter anonymity so it makes that problem even worse since it makes it harder to catch if they take steps to hide their ratio.
So no, this is not acceptable. Please don't try to use the shutdown of lemm.ee to justify harsher draconian measures, which themselves are flawed and ripe for abuse. The reason they shut down was ultimately because they tried to be something they couldn't with a team that couldn't handle it. They wanted to be THE Lemmy server, the one everyone goes to. Kinda like Lemmy.world but they were not cut out for it and they learned the lesson the hard way.
Vote manipulation is continuously monitored, people like @[email protected] have created tools to identify vote manipulation
Most of the time when I see someone with a reputation warning on Piefed, combined with the "new user" icon, they're a toxic user that usually gets banned a few hours of days later.
The current threshold is perfectible (see the comment below), but it's still something.
As one of the active posters on most of the Lemm.ee communities, I can tell you they were not trying to become THE Lemmy instance, the most active communities were still on LW by a large margin (like 18 out of the 20 most active communities would be LW, one might be on lemm.ee)
Wow it's like you didn't read what I wrote at all. I literally gave an example of how people can squeak by @[email protected] and @[email protected]'s vote manipulation detection by voting in specific ways. Those same tactics can apply to boosting one's own score positively, not just punching down others.
This is absolutely going to be automated by the laziest and most incompetent fediverse admins, and unless you set the threshold very high it will be exploited. I'm never going to support karma requirements like on Reddit, asking the community to vet users with votes (which people misuse anyway already) is already asking for problems, and is by design hostile towards new users.
Now I find the sentiment around piefed to be highly suspicious since a majority of Lemmy users on the Fediverse aren't favorable to the idea of Karma requirements or built-in social credit systems based on user voting. At best they are compliant due to their habits acquired from using Reddit, but they aren't going out of their way to ask for it and want that aspect of Reddit back. So I think this push for Social Credit voting controlled moderation features seems suspicious to say the least.
I don't believe Piefed instances have to run a reputation system though. Piefed.world, I believe, has disabled it.
Of course not, but enough do that it'll become a problem. Something to consider is that for many admins the default options might as well be hardcoded since they are not attentive enough to turn it off, but for others. Karma requirements are enticingly lazy solutions for moderation, and turning modlog off is also enticing because it makes it easier to hide when things are removed and people are banned.
Do they? Piefed.world has turned it off.
To be fair, the system does (or did - rimu has acknowledged this) immediately identify a new user as "toxic" on the back of a single comment ranked at 0. It does need a higher threshold.
Hum, fair point, I edited
To be clear, some of the things you're complaining about are specific aspects of piefed.social and may not necessarily be the settings instance admins roll with on their own hypothetical piefed.
Rimu has decoupled and changed a lot of the functions from being embedded into piefed as optional, and has changed some of his positions.
Honestly I don't think it matters much since what admins can do isn't usually what they will do. Defaults matter, and also it's very tempting for them to disable some features like modlogs that it will be done disproportionately.
But also the problem with the Karma features is that they are present on all of them, turning it off in yours doesn't make the issue go away and doesn't prevent people from abusing it the way subreddits abuse Karma scores right now.
The modlogs have already been made public by Rimu due to popular demand.
What's the issue if most instances don't run with a karma system? So you might get low karma'd in some piefed instances that you don't post from?
That would be the case if most instances operated like that but most don't. Most will ultimately have it enabled, and if most of them have it enabled it will affect users even on ones where it is turned off.
Is this a piefed.social change or a piefed software change. If it's the ladder then that's good and it's not really an issue anymore. If it's the former it's still a big trust issue because it can presumably be turned off and on at will, by making it hardcoded it can still be disabled but it's more work, requires maintaining a fork and basically guarantees that 99% of modlogs will be there and be recording.
I feel like this is speculative. I don't think karma systems across the fediverse are popular enough for that.
Both.
You could say that about a lot of things that Lemmy instance admins could do, but choose not to.