This is helping providing confirmatory evidence to something that I have suspected for awhile: that my time on social media is changing me, and not always for the better. The more time you spend around people, the more you will act like them, speak like them, incorporating their words and ways into your own practices. I may have justified all that you said there in my head as it being in service to a worthy cause - keeping the very Threadiverse alive as it objectively dies slowly around us (based on subscriber activity numbers, now being at ~35k down from the peak of 55k and now unlike previously, with far less hope that the situation will ever meaningfully change) - but at the end of the day, since when has the end justified the means?

Except here on Lemmy, people say that it does all the time. Outright murder, guillotining someone, Luigi-ing people, bombing AI data centers, theft, and so on - all are only morally reprehensible if done vs. the working class (and even then, are higher wage-earners exempt?), while encouraged and even outright celebrated when happening to OTHER SIDE.

Then again, I think when you plumb deeper you will agree that an act done by a moderator is quite different than an act done by a mere user, and an act done by an instance admin even more different still. Mere users can be blocked and someone can move on, whereas an admin sets the tone for a pattern of behavior that impacts the entire instance - at which point blocking the one user not only causes direct harm but also does not address the wider issues, particularly for new joiners of your own instance. (Edit: I am not dodging the issue of the messaging vs. its content, just isolating the former earlier and now doing the same in turn for the latter.)

At the end of the day: consent SHOULD matter. It seems like people differ solely (edit: primarily?) on what constitutes “informed” consent? Which is why I like some of PieFed’s features to not block but at least label certain matters, e.g. my scenario involving ChapoTrapHouse was significantly less likely to have occurred if I had used PieFed at the time, due to how it puts the entirety of the community sidebar text below each and every post. Caveat: 3rd party apps (e.g. Interstellar, Blorp, even Voyager offers experimental support for PieFed) may of course choose to do differently.

Oh, before I forget (again), I was going to share this link: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed, which gives the perspective of someone who tried installing both Lemmy and PieFed software on their machine, and found the latter significantly easier. I have no direct experience there, but hope that will be enlightening:-).

Though while for someone spinning up their own instance the choice of software (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, etc.) is the top priority, I am coming to realize that otherwise it is the choice of instance admin that impacts and end-user’s experience above all else.

And btw I meant everything that I’ve said genuinely. Also, as you dig deeper, pay attention to the comments in response to that post: people agreed, both commenters and lurkers who signalled assent merely with voting, plus backed up as you see in the comments of this very post now. A lone post from a single person is insufficient to make things happen, unless it merely stated what others already felt was true, and it got the ball rolling. Together, apes strong. We can make the Threadiverse a more pleasant space for people - especially the uninformed to more gently introduce them to what is here. Though as to whether that ends up being a good thing or not, to encourage usage of social media… that is a topic for another time, and one where I am far less prepared to address.

99.99% of the time a murderer is not in the process of actively murdering anyone at all… atm. If you look just prior to any major western election, you may notice a difference in the content. Another point there is that the tankie triad is actually HEAVILY moderated - any comment remotely reminiscent of possibly being negative (or perhaps not supportive enough?) about Russia, China, or North Korea gets removed. I might be slightly hyperbolic on this point - I do not care to find the precise dividing lines between what is allowed there or not - but the fact remains that they are HEAVILY curated echo chambers. So… of course people are going to get along inside of them.

Anyway it is not for any of us to say why people want to defederate from a troll or echo chamber instance - if people desire that, then they should have that right, personally for themselves, right? Even though it makes the network effect harder to describe for the rest of us. Again, this would be a totally different conversation if there was a true instance blocking feature existing in Lemmy, but as it is, there is only defederation vs. no defederation, at which point very many instances choose one of the options made available to them.

And no means no? Or at least, it should. And we should respect that too? It is naive to try to force a victim to put up with bullying tactics, especially when it is always an option for the victim to leave the Threadiverse altogether, rather than stay and be subjected to seeing all of that.

You have not had sufficient time yet to fully inform yourself on the subject, but you will get there, at which point you won’t need to simply believe what I say but you will know for yourself. One great place to start btw is the MeanwhileOnGrad community, which documents a bunch of the reasons for division.

I need to add this though: you said yourself that you ignored political topics, yes? So… if you are looking for your keys, and you remember dropping them somewhere, but you restrict yourself to looking everywhere except there, and then don’t find your keys… do you see where I am going with this? Perhaps that was not even your conscious choice: maybe your admins made that decision for you by blocking certain specific user accounts, which would profoundly affect your “view” as to what Hexbear is. Having personally witnessed mods calling for users to kill themselves, then doubling and even tripling down on that, I for one have no trouble believing any of the thousands of other stories about Hexbear’s toxicity. Here is one post that provides a compilation of links: https://discuss.online/post/13916278. Oftentimes the originals get removed so it may be hard now to verify those historical events, with so much time having passed between then vs. now.

And yes, I’ve personally experienced those interactions my very own self. I walked right into a community like ChapoTrapHouse (though perhaps it was one of their ancillary ones?), accessed via browsing All - CRUCIAL NOTE here: therefore I lacked the context of having read the sidebar text first (btw some 3rd party apps seem to go out of their way to hide that even, requiring like 5+ clicks plus moderate scrolling, i.e. buried quite deep) - and I made the mistake of saying something to the effect that Biden was at least working towards lowering the price of gasoline in the USA. I would have been up for a well-grounded discussion, replete with factual information and having cited source material, but instead people relentlessly continued to send me Notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS after I stopped responding, and not messages like “I believe you may be incorrect and here is my reasoning”, but mere emotional vomit, venting their frustrations with the world onto me who dared speak again the trends that prevailed inside of their echo chamber, where beyond a certain level of dissent is no longer allowed. It may help to know that that is the entire point of ChapoTrapHouse, but how would I have known that, browsing by All and not even making a post, just replying to a comment inside of it?

And then either just before or just after that, I made the same mistake again, this time for lemmygrad.ml. Afaik, I am banned from neither space (unless it was done retroactively), but I almost left Lemmy altogether when I realized that it truly was not fun to be here. I continually received notifications for again WEEKS and WEEKS as people continued to dogpile onto that comment. There is no way in Lemmy to disable notifications on a comment btw (this this capability exists in PieFed). Presumably I could have deleted it but I’ve never backed out of my opinion before and that thought literally never occurred to me - I want to be told that I am wrong, when I legitimately am. However, these people were offering idiotic takes, and it therefore became my problem for continuing to entertain those communications.

Another point to note is that nobody is saying that ALL users on the triad, including Hexbear, are bad. Though conversely, if a majority of problematic content is coming from that source, and the mods+admins refuse to do anything about it from their side, then defederation becomes a tool of last resort to try to protect your own users from such harassment - which again, obviously is not coming from literally 100% of the users on those instances. Rather, defederation is reflective of a breakdown in communication between instance admins, with irreconcilable differences that cannot be… reconciled, any other way.

the Threadiverse will slowly but surely turn into a net of isolated echo chambers.

Yes, but (1) this has already happened long ago, much of it predating the existence of the Threadiverse even, like Hexbear is very old and only later switched to using Lemmy, also Lemmy was an echo chamber even before federation with other instances (lemmygrad.ml) was implemented; (2) this theoretical FOMO about “discoverability” should not in practice trump my own personal rights to not have to listen to anything that I do not wish to see - e.g. I do not find it enjoyable to see mods tell users to kill themselves, literally, with a gun; and (3) please DO actually read about The Paradox of Intolerance. Defederation is bad, yes, amputation of a human limb is also bad yes, but sometimes it is preferable to an even worse alternative.

I think we do not differ on ideological grounds though - you concede that IF members of an instance are caught relentlessly trolling and otherwise harassing those of other instances, then in theory defederation is an acceptable outcome? Not an ideal one but… if the software allows for zero other alternatives, as has been the case now for many, MANY years? In that case all that remains is to read some of the examples of this actually happening, which you had not encountered before. The links I included above should be a good place to start at least, but there are just tons and tons and tons more where that came from.

Hypothetically, imagine someone saying “death to America”… okay, perhaps they should have the right to think it, perhaps even say it, but why should I have to be forced to hear it, constantly, and not be allowed to do anything at all to stop it? Defederations are decisions that instance admins have made regarding what content they will allow to be platformed on their machines or not. They NEED to have the right to make this decision for themselves.

This in turn places the burden of deciding which instance to join or not onto the end-users. You will want to pick one that matches your values. Here too it gets difficult, especially when instances are not forthcoming about what or particularly why they do what they do. Very little to almost no progress has been made on this front IMHO, at least on the Lemmy side, except to offer the generic advice to join Lemmy.zip or perhaps better yet PieFed.zip and use its significantly enhanced (yet still very imperfect and in fact quite problematic in other, just different ways) instance blocking tools of PieFed.

Okay but… have you ever tried to force your group to get together despite those two being unable to get along? e.g. Russia vs. Ukraine? China vs. Taiwan? Israel vs. Palestine? USA vs. a neighbor with oil?

Whether one side (e.g. Ukraine) can “get along with” the other side there (e.g. Russia) depends a LOT on whether they are able to agree to follow some shared rules (e.g. to not murder the other side). These are not mere political differences in the sense of left vs. right, but rather those who are proud to remain ungovernable (while seemingly not understanding what that phrase originally was intended to mean) vs. those who would rather nope out entirely than exist side-by-side with them.

Please also note that Lemmy’s block tools are so misleadingly misnamed as to be almost worthy of the moniker of calling it disinformation. What “blocking an instance” does is to:

• Mute communities on that instance from the user, preventing discoverability and blocking that content from showing in your personal feed, including when browsing All

What that so-called “blocking” does NOT do:

• Hide content from those users submitted to communities on remote instances
• Prevent those users from being able to reply to, famously including vote brigading on, your own content
• Prevent those users from sending you DMs, which at first were not allowed to trigger notifications, but the Lemmy devs reversed that decision and now these “blocked users” can trigger notifications - which bc of the “style” preferred by people on those instances, can continue for WEEKS and WEEKS after you so much as reply to a post that you encountered on All, without having read the sidebar and so not knowing that this style differs from what you are used to

Besides, even if insurance blocking actually worked, it would still do nothing to not showcase the content for an anonymous guest account or a newly created account, i.e. it does nothing to help others deal with “the situation”, only yourself. Which is especially notable when people access Lemmy’s content from apps like Voyager that by default does not show the instance name, thereby treating all content from all instances as being equal. However, I would argue that e.g. Poland does not fear attack from all nations equally - does Poland want to be on guard against Taiwan? Or North or South Korea? What about Russia?

Defederation is a blunt tool, but is virtually the only one offered by the Lemmy devs. When the software is made more robust to offer some other alternative… then this issue can be revisited at that time.

Also, you are free at any to self-host your own instance. But to tell Ukraine and Russia that they must get along… or else what? I am saying that I reject the underlying premise of your argument. “People getting along” should not be the ultimate goal of the Threadiverse. A better goal IMHO would be “People enjoying their experiences while here”. Which for many, means blocking Hexbear - and yes, for some it means NOT blocking it - and therefore since the answer is neither a clear yay or nay, we are forced into preaching the controversy for every new potential member, even though that very complexity itself is often what drives others away.

Though PieFed.zip offers an intriguing and innovative compromise: upon joining the instance a user block is placed upon the Hexbear and lemmygrad instances, and a message sent to the new user about how to remove or place such blocks. This makes federation with those highly controversial instances as opt-in, as opposed to opt-out or impossible to block or not block. That’s really neat! However, that delves into a whole other can of worms on how PieFed instance blocks have problems - namely that people on the receiving end can still reply to them, though only people on the same originating instance will see those replies (or perhaps it’s worse and everyone using Lemmy will see them while everyone using PieFed will not? or perhaps something else altogether?). Also this in turn opens up an entirely new rabbit hole on top of that, where Lemmy and PieFed (and Mbin, and nodeBB, etc.) would need to agree on a set of shared practices…

In short, the technology of the Threadiverse is still quite primitive in so very many ways, despite the upcoming release of Lemmy vs. 1.0. Yes defederation is a very blunt instrument, but it’s all that we have been given to wield for the most part. But the alternative IMHO would be far worse, being forced into allowing bullies to thrive. The Paradox of Intolerance is ironic, but very real: allowing the intolerant to exist in your space, worse yet platforming and even promoting them, means that you yourself are intolerant. Fences between neighbors is the only hope the Threadiverse even has of surviving. Yes you are allowed to be sad at that fact, but it remains true nonetheless. Move past your sadness, to get to what must be done to thrive and move forward in a positive direction?

e.g. learn Rust and contribute to the code development of Lemmy!? Unfortunately, merely donating money is unlikely to help, as much of those funds go into the moderation and instance maintenance costs of the “highly controversial” Lemmy.ml, and the devs have refused to open a way to provide funding for the former independently of the latter. Or learn Python and contribute to development of PieFed? It likely won’t help with interoperability between PieFed vs. Lemmy, and both require investments of several years, but if you want to help then there is no better way. So long as the technology remains as primitive as it is now, these kinds of blunt instruments are all that are available to us - someone would need to invest the effort to provide better.

TLDR: there are extremely good reasons why things are as they are now.

Many fantastic instances do exactly that.

But in answer to your question, you may want to research The Intolerance Paradox. In short, when people refuse to follow the rules it kinda becomes spam. Even if you were okay with CSAM or pictures of pigs actively showing the poop falling out of their anuses (sadly, I bet you think I am being hyperbolic here? nope, this is kinda Hexbear’s major schtick), the fact remains that it scares away newcomers.

I will note that if you self-host your own instance then you have perfect control over every aspect of your experience, being able to fine-tune it to perfectly suit your precise needs. Otherwise you will want to choose an instance provider that aligns with whatever your needs are. Some people will choose one of the instances that defederates from almost nothing, while others actually want an experience that is more what they are used to and would expect coming over from the overly bot-modded Reddit, i.e. they want (even outright demand) that censorship be done for them.

This is why the instance pickers need to carefully explain what each instance is about, since there is not just one audience with a single set of needs & expectations.

FYI, in case you ever absolutely NEED it (people still post actual content sometimes only on Reddit that simply does not exist here on the Threadiverse), YSK that Ublock Origin has opt-in “annoyance filters” that definitely takes care of that popup.

Obligatory fuck spez anyway:-P.

Glad I could help by pointing you to it! :-)

Fwiw the original post in the first link was not deleted at the time I wrote my own post here. That may complicate discovery, though it may help to know that the reply definitely was added prior to the post being deleted.

It’s been a couple weeks and I wanted to add another perspective about this.

I noticed a user downvoting posts, https://lemvotes.org/user/FarStare@lemmy.dbzer0.com if it helps to have specifics. In the more than one full year of existing, they have never once contributed via making a post, never once commenting even, just doling out up- and down-votes in roughly equal proportion, and even those nearly exclusively via posts but almost never comments.

I am not concerned about receiving votes from PugJesus - either up or down, as PugJesus has earned the right to speak on behalf of the community. But who is this other person who is influencing how others see my content? Are they male or female? Do they have a degree of some kind? Do they primarily visit meme communities, as the vote pattern might suggest, or other communities as well?

So how do I feel about people who use the Threadiverse more than others? My answer is more complex and nuanced than simply yay or nay. I might prefer the opposite of the implemented feature even - the more someone posts (including comments?), the more upvotes they are allowed to make? Have they not earned such?

Also, if votes were exposed, each individual could decide for themselves how they wanted to make use of voting - perhaps someone would ban PugJesus, or conversely write special code (a 3rd party app / API recipient?) to highlight posts that PugJesus upvoted (isn’t that how “boosting” works? at least re-tweeting does).

It’s really difficult to guess what someone wants, as each person wants different things. Which is why ultimately in an effort to make things more fair & equitable, the solution can end up making it less so.

I like the follow-up suggestion to leave this new option OFF by default, so that an instance admin would have to specifically opt-in, perhaps as part of an overall suite of features limiting things like posts and comments as well. Although really, I think other approaches might work better - e.g. why would someone want to limit themselves to “some” of PugJesus’ content, wouldn’t they rather simply have it all or else ban him from the instance and therefore have none? I am not seeing the benefit realistically of having “some”, especially when the delimiter is not based on community or overall content but simply what time of day (based on an arbitrary threshold for when they starts and ends to restart the next period) the votes are cast?

Lemmy’s issues are pretty gigantic as well - to the point where many people outright refuse to fund its further development, thus impacting the future of the Threadiverse (one example is the inordinate amount of time spent performing moderation activities rather than actually working on adding features to the codebase).

Anyway, it’s good to have multiple alternative options - having more software implementations of the ActivityPub Protocol is unquestionably a good thing imho.

The social engineering though is NOT a good thing imho - fortunately it’s an option that can be disabled, though unfortunately it is opt-out rather than opt-in, and not transparently handled at all.

Sadly, users of PieFed instances that implement this default without actively opting out will not receive your upvotes:-(. But thank you for your service!! You are kind to have offered them regardless!!

No, this affects each and every PieFed instance that upgrades to v1.7 (I sent you in a different reply here the exact lines of code). PugJesus’ instance PieFed.social uses the now-default value of 240 as the daily vote quota. Admins may opt-out by setting the quota differently, however this will only impact votes accepted on your current instance. It will not affect votes accepted by other PieFed instances. e.g. if your instance uses 500 rather than 240, then someone looking at the identical content from PieFed.social will not see any of the second half of your daily votes: you will be able to OFFER them, and Lemmy will receive all of them, but each PieFed instance chooses itself how much it will receive or not.

And btw this information is not presented anywhere to show what these values are across each instance. Like the caps on posts and comments, it is silently effective, but not transparent in the least. So like the whole argument about whether defederations destroy the foundational principles of the ActivityPub Protocol-using Threadiverse, this new issue too is going to wreak havoc on the acceptance of PieFed in the wider Threadiverse & Fediverse communities. :-(

All votes, up or down, whether from Lemmy or the local or a different PieFed instance, are now restricted by an admin-set quota value. This was quietly reported outside of Matrix channels, buried into part of the 1.7 release of the code - see the exact relevant line at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/commit/7e10e92de2cf271088b76a31d725cad67afe08aa/app/activitypub/routes.py#L2335.

This value can be adjusted however the admins desire (e.g. the PieFed.zip admins say they have set it to a ridiculously high value to essentially disable it, and other PieFed instances are coming out strongly against it), but by default is set at 240 (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/config.py#L191, thanks to flamingos@feddit.uk for reporting these lines of code). As in you can vote 240 times per day before you are blocked from doing so further. Logged-in PieFed users can see how much of their local instance quota they’ve used so far, but (i) no numeric values are presented, only a visual bar where you have to guess at where you are (e.g. do I have 10 votes left now? 100? 2?), (b) this will only show you the LOCAL instance quota - not the quotas of OTHER instances, and in particular the vote quota seems applied to incoming votes from Lemmy, Mbin, Mastodon, nodeBB, etc. platforms as well as PieFed instances, and © none of this is explained anywhere, on any page, e.g. there is currently no way to tell which instances use those quotas, nor what values they are currently set at.

And I thought I recalled hearing that there are caps already on posts and comments too, but I haven’t studied the code and I think this is not well known, if it is even true rather than me misremembering or misunderstanding something. PieFed seems to be going to some effort to limit its users ability to interact with the Threadiverse. Which obviously for some admins is going to be a big plus, to keep costs down by silencing all the “noise” from messy human interactions (although I don’t fully understand this: if that is what you want then why not just stop pulling in votes altogether, and simply sort by New?) but the manner in which this implementation has been rolled out… leaves PieFed open to an immense amount of criticism.

Many posts about it lately but here’s a good start:

Good summary: https://piefed.zip/c/home@piefed.zip/p/1635935/can-we-remove-the-vote-limiter-implemented-in-v1-7

“main” post: https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2190040/who-decides-what-you-see-on-the-fediverse-a-look-at-voting-patterns

addressing the controversy: https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/2200155/improvement-for-the-vote-quota-implementation

Though with a difference that multiple centers exist, rather than exclusively one.

Also for those of us in the USA there are so many other life-threatening additional considerations to add: e.g. if we join Piefed.ca then what happens when the USA decides to invade Canada, so either communication gets cut off or people who use this social media get rounded up onto a convention camp?

PieFed is another federated threaded forum software like Lemmy, though just within the last week greatly surprised people by switching gears to be less like traditional social media that welcomes lots of engagement. The changes were not announced in advance, not something that can be opted out of (except by migration to another instance, which is what PugJesus is saying he will not consider doing) and are quite unpopular overall.

None of THAT background stuff will affect you on Lemmy.World, except that you’ll see a quieter network overall, especially now that PugJesus is leaving us.

Overall it is perhaps best to use the Threadiverse not as your sole or possibly even primary social media but as one among several, as this one is struggling (post).

Others have calculated and said that this is false. Remember we are not discussing merely votes on posts but also comments. Someone mentioned that the quota could be reached in two hours at a vote every 10 seconds. I cannot even see the numeric value of the vote quota so I am relying on the math of others who have studied this in greater depth.

This OP was not about whether you personally ever vote for content or not, but about how to manage other people who do want to use that feature.

I am in the latter category: mildly disappointed. 😞

Maybe a little more than mildly, tbh 😭.

Fwiw Piefed.zip won’t have a voting limit added right away (source).

Okay but historically, limiting votes does not end well.

So maybe implement ranked choice voting instead? j/k as far as this proposed solution but I hope you see what I mean here in terms of the underlying issue: democracy itself offers both problems and solutions to those who use it, hence why it is failing all across the globe.

Also, at least up until now, people have been offered a full CHOICE as to how much votes affect them, personally. Sorting by New ignores votes entirely, while sorting by Top used to consider all votes, but now will consider only some of them (if half are being discarded, some by the vote quota itself and others by people changing their behavior as a result of needing to constrain their votes, or at least hearing the signal loud and clear that lots and lots of votes are undesirable, hence they stop offering them). I haven’t thought about how this impacts users of Scaled sorting, which I myself never use, personally speaking.