this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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/0 Governance

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Discussion - Potential piefed instance in the future? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/fxomt GNU: an icon of a wildebeest, in orange-red, black and white colors A book with a loaf of bread in the cover in orange-red, black and white colors First Mate: a pirate ship's steering wheel, orangered color

This is a non-voting post. Known users should leave comments with your thoughts on the subject.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago

Honestly, I am against it. I think we should collectively improve Lemmy and port whatever features make PieFed a worthy alternative. Better mod tools? Get them on lemmy instead. Lemmy's UI is much faster and responsive than PieFed, I have found. I just don't like seeing the community split over and over again. Even if they are federated services, it just splits the community and serves as friction of entry. Choice overload is a really thing, it may lead to decision paralysis and get us fewer and fewer people on these services.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I love the idea, and would be very excited for a db0 piefed instance!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yes.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

Personally I'm for it, I think it has some approaches that are more interesting (topics for example).

So as long as its not a pain to run, I'm into it and would try it out for sure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

For one , we wont have karma. We will keep the modlog.

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

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.

and may even abandon Lemmy altogether,

No we will not abandon lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Most of the karma features can be disabled by instance admins iirc.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Karma is literally a lighter version of social credit and I don’t support it.

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

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.

Vote manipulation is continuously monitored, people like @[email protected] have created tools to identify vote manipulation

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

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.

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.

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)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Vote manipulation is continuously monitored, people like @[email protected] have created tools to identify vote manipulation

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.

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.

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I don't believe Piefed instances have to run a reputation system though. Piefed.world, I believe, has disabled it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Do they? Piefed.world has turned it off.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Every single time. I have yet to see a false positive.

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Hum, fair point, I edited

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

The modlogs have already been made public by Rimu due to popular demand.

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.

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

The modlogs have already been made public by Rimu due to popular demand.

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

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.

I feel like this is speculative. I don't think karma systems across the fediverse are popular enough for that.

Is this a piefed.social change or a piefed software change.

Both.

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.

You could say that about a lot of things that Lemmy instance admins could do, but choose not to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

I like piefed and think it's a great idea.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

I think its a good idea, more choice is almost never bad.
I might not use it too much if it happens because I'm too used to lemmy itself though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

As far as I understood a few days ago, there's no difference between the two for a user since both can interact with each other. To me looks more of an admin thing, so very little opinion from my part.

Just one thing, I will want an account there too.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

I think this may be a good idea. The questionable performance/behavior of the core Lemmy devs does not give me confidence for the long term prospects of Lemmy as a code base and service.
piefed seems to be growing rapidly while Lemmy has stagnated. There's obviously a reason for that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

We need the pie!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

If there is admin bandwidth, why not?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I don't know a ton about piefed , but wouldn't that be more likely to divide the community?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago

No, it's compatible with Lemmy. There are some differences, but they are relatively minor.

Lemmy users can partake in Piefed instances/communities and vice versa.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

No idea what piefed is but I'm not interested in any more "apps" or some such.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Forum just like lemmy, federates and functions very similarly. https://piefed.zip/ to see an example.

We'll be running it alongside the lemmy instance, and the lemmy instance will always be our top priority ofc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

What's the use case for this? Or is this just another similar thing but on a different back end?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Piefed has a lot more tools than Lemmy: feeds, following communities/posts and profiles and getting notifications for them. Flairs, hashtags and many smaller little things and it is getting a lot of updates compared to Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Sounds like more fragmentation of an already fragmented ecosystem.

I guess we'll see what comes of it until the next new shiny comes around lol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

it's not fragmentation. piefed federates with lemmy. some of the comms you use are probably on piefed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I mean Piefed communicates with Lemmy anyway.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

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