Compassion >~ Thought

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Joined 27 days ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2024

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  • Fwiw, LW seems ready to defederate from Threads at a moment’s notice (post), but atm it doesn’t matter since Threads isn’t federating with Lemmy anyway.

    Though it’s still an excellent point to wonder why they haven’t done it preemptively, like pretty much every other instance I’ve heard of (even lemm.ee’s [blocked instance list[(https://lemm.ee/instances) that is shockingly short has that one). Perhaps bc the decision to defederate from any instance, and especially that one, has generated such negative feedback (as the post linked above mentions), they are hesitant to do anything at all, especially again while it does not matter right now.




  • You are most welcome:-).

    An app? Apparently an API is in development for it, but it’s still in alpha stage. Even so, there’s a bunch of new features in PieFed that Lemmy does not have, such as Categories of Communities, so in some ways it would be a downgrade to use an app.

    I just use Firefox to access https://PieFed.social, and it works fine. Well, mostly, bc even though PieFed has things that Lemmy lacks, it lacks some polish compared to the Lemmy web UI that has had more development work put into it. This is where an app would come in handy - if you didn’t need all the new features that PieFed offers and just want Lemmy without the “Lemmy” part:-). (And didn’t want to use Mbin, which iirc also lacks an API and thus ability to access via an app.)

    Edit: One cool thing is that PieFed is written in Python rather than Rust, so the development process should move forward more quickly since more people know the former language while the latter is reportedly quite difficult. And another cool thing is that the developers are SUPER responsive:-).







  • The reason my first example wasn’t a good one was that this meme community (!tech_memes@lemmy.world) wasn’t part of the organized hierarchy of Home -> Topics -> Chilling -> Memes, but rather the generic Home -> Communities (as in, all of them in aggregate) -> Technology Memes@lemmy.world. So yeah, it’s a very new community, although !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca is older but the same happens with it too. Therefore I assume that it requires an admin approval to bundle these “Topics” together, and it definitely doesn’t strike me as something that an individual user could put together.

    Then again, someone (perhaps you? or me?) could send requests to the admin to add communities to topic areas, or perhaps modify the codebase directly if it were placed into a file and people granted access (whereupon once again, the admin would have to approve - although in this case a mechanism would also be needed to assess the differences and apply them).

    Anyway, there’s a LOT of polish that PieFed lacks, and this doesn’t even crack the top half imho, next to things like user mentions (@openstars@piefed.social) and Notifications properly taking you to the actual thing that you are being notified about (a goodly fraction of the time it does not, right now.

    On the other hand, Lemmy has no such thing as “Categories” or “Topics” of any kind so… anything that PieFed has along these lines is surely better than the nothing that exists in that regard there, right?




  • Also note that “blocking” it doesn’t actually “block” much of anything at all - it stops you from seeing the communities located on that instance, but the users will still appear in posts all across the Fediverse, sending their harassing messages to you, pinging your Notifications every time they reply to you, downvoting your own comments, etc. The instance block function is horribly misnamed.

    If you want to avoid this kind of thing, I second that recommendation to try Lemmy.cafe - it is the only Lemmy instance that defederates from the Big 3: hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and Lemmy.ml. The latter one is like 1000x easier to deal with than hexbear, yet still nearly all of the most batshit insane comments I’ve received on Lemmy after defederating from the other two have come from it - and for similar reasons that they get used to how things work inside their echo chamber, and then behave the same way when they venture outside of it - so I consider having defederated from it too worthwhile overall. Although you will miss out on some content such as !Firefox@lemmy.ml that way.








  • I really like the approach taken by PieFed to provide greater transparency in the decision-making process, and enable the users to make their own determinations rather than solely the binary yes-no to removing vs. retaining content.

    As one example, allowing people to block users, communities, or even whole entire instances, in a true way rather than Lemmy’s way that calls itself an “instance block” but then acts as a mere “community mute”.

    And then further to turn off notifications for individual items, which allows people to cool off rather than have to resort to jumping straight to the ban-hammer (I am trying to be funny there, but really an individual cannot “ban” anyone, so I mean block:-).

    And a big one: auto-collapsing and even auto-hiding comments based on the content’s number of downvotes. If someone wants to click to expand it, then they are free to do so - and I’ve completely disabled the auto-hide feature for myself, by putting in a number of 10000 for the threshold - or not as they please. I would hope that the UI tools will get better in that regard, e.g. right now if you reply to someone and then receive a notification, it won’t auto-expand back out the auto-collapsed entries, so you really have to hunt around for what the notification was trying to direct you to (though not as bad as the more deeply embedded “Continue thread” where the notification tries to take you to something that isn’t even on the same page!). But even moderate implementation issues aside (of a very recently-added feature ofc), the theory is wonderful!:-)

    And potentially even bigger: placing a label next to a person based on their “reputation” score, or even for a whole entire instance (e.g. Beehaw), so that someone does not walk into a conversation with them unawares. They still have every right and ability to, just… hey, they were warned, you know?:-P

    A democratization of moderation, yeah it sure sounds nice:-) - ofc it still needs some “hard” limits such as spam and NSFL content that needs to flat be REMOVED as quickly as possible, but providing automated tools that allow for an entire spectrum of ability to engage or not engage with content is… just wow. So exciting, and futuristic, especially compared to the likes of the hard-nosed Reddit mods (and I say this as someone who was one of them, for two small communities - there really were only the 2 choices, and it sure would have been nice to have had more options to be able to choose from, between “allow” vs. “remove”!:-).