I’m not new to link aggregators/communities, but new to those outside of Reddit. About a month ago I joined Lemmy and today my curiosity led me to Piefed, although I’ve come across the name before.
My research told me Piefed is developing at a much faster pace than Lemmy, is that true? I like the onboarding of Piefed better, because it allows you to select things you might be interested in as part of the process, which is helpful. Overall, it’s a much more guided approach.
I’ve also gotten to know it doesn’t really matter for the average user which of the platforms one joins. So I’m specifically posting this question on a community on Lemmy through my Piefed account.
I’m based in Europe if that makes a difference, which I believe it doesn’t. Nonetheless I’m happy to read your thoughts. Thanks
RE: Dessalines vs. Nutomic
Interesting, and noted. Though when they send out the calls for funding I thought they included both. I do think that Nutomic became more the public-facing side. I don’t know what Dessalines has been doing lately.
Yes and surely PieFed provides this functionality as well? I don’t know that with 100% certainty or even really at all but it stands to reason? So it’s not that PieFed does it while Lemmy does not do it - they both do it, though PieFed provides a means to do it a lot more often.
Then again, have you read the comments in pretty much any Reddit post where people complain about Lemmy’s tankies and/or toxicity? It makes sense to me: tankies freely state that they wish death to all Western civilization, including and especially not only those on the Right side of the political compass but also those not far enough on the Left… and what is Reddit full of if not primarily American and secondarily European centrists, i.e. those very people marked for death and destruction? I am talking about people that did not feel that we were too confusing - they passed the first hurdle of checking us out, passed the second of choosing an instance on which to make an account, and many (the ones I pay attention to most) report having remained here for literally several years. They adamantly state that they will never, under any conditions, return to the Threadiverse.
But I wonder… especially since 3rd-party apps do not show instance names by default, how many of such people had a run-in with Hexbear trolls and did not know how to block them all - i.e. might return if they could be assured that no hexbears would be here to harass them any longer? Or maybe it wasn’t the hexbear trolls, perhaps it was the tankie debate-bros - MANY of those are among the most respectful people to dialogue with and I can somewhat to even really enjoy the discourse despite differences in opinion - however many MORE are not respectful, and seem to relish aggravating people. Though moderation is hellish here, with most people willing to do so having either quit entirely or at least stepped back from moderating.
Hence PieFed is stepping up to offer a safe space where people can play and be more free of that toxicity. It’s different than the Tesseract dev situation for the plain & simple fact that the features are opt-in, not even opt-out or particularly mandatory i.e. hard-coded as people have so often claimed.
i.e., PieFed itself merely facilitates but does not push forward the censorship issues. Lemmy also has censorship of its own - e.g. the slur word filter. Or it would be better to say that Lemmy facilitates the decisions of individual instances, supporting them if they wish to have a slur word filter running on their machines. Though on the spectrum where they both do that, PieFed does offer more features - both overall, and with respect to this specific, like it does for pretty much all issues actually. If an instance wants to avoid them though, then simply leave them turned off, as they are default anyway.
Sorry I got off a bit ranting - I 100% agree that the key is transparency. PieFed can do whatever it wants, as too can Lemmy, but when things are done in secret then people start to get pissy. Both Lemmy and PieFed have a long way to go to increase transparency in their respective codebases, particularly about these censorship matters. e.g. why not offer a page that lists communities currently being shadow-banned? It already does this for instances being federated/defederated with. Except if it did this, then it would no longer be "shadow-"banned and would instead merely be called “banned”:-).
And in the matter of the modlog too, PieFed is ahead of Lemmy, in offering greater transparency in bothering to send a notification upon a moderation event. Lemmy would do well to add such - but notifications have been around for several years, as too has the modlog, but connecting the two is apparently not a priority. Though if you look at the number of moderation events occuring on Lemmy.ml, apparently a great deal of time is spent curating the content and userbase on that instance. Also, Dessalines refuses to allow donations that are sent to enhance Lemmy to be used solely in enhancing the Lemmy codebase (the only way would be to send donations directly to Nutomic), so many of those funds (we also are not told now much) are being used to spread the political ideology of the dev.
Whereas for PieFed, at least at the moment, most of the donations are seen to be creating changes to the PieFed software.
Anyway it’s not like PieFed is authoritarian while Lemmy is not authoritarian - both are, just in different ways. Though the trajectory of PieFed is increasingly leaning towards that end, more so than it did previously, and also like Lemmy in its earlier days, not doing so great a job at keeping those beliefs out of the software itself. Both are somewhat political (these days, PieFed more so, at least within the software itself), PieFed offers more features overall but also is more problematic to someone valuing freedom of speech, even while simultaneously offering more “rights” to the end-users than Lemmy, in some ways but less so in others.
Clear as mud now, right!? 😜 My TLDR is that the PieFed software itself is fine, either for someone installing their own instance or if you trust the instance admin team to resist Rimu’s trending towards authoritarianism - like PieFed.zip looks really impressive, and quokka is even running the PyLova fork that straight-up hard-coded removed most of the more controversial features.
PieFed (at least, piefed.zip that I tried) already has the answer - present the user opt-in global filters upon first sign-in. Allow people to block certain places, radical ideologies, or whatever - just make it a user’s choice. When that’s the case, even tankies themselves usually don’t complain.
The whole conflict is about having a blocklist that exists without users or even instance admins opting in.
Yes the .zip admin team - for both PieFed.zip and Lemmy.zip - are highly worthy of respect in that regard (plus all other regards that I have seen as well).
About the hidden blocklist aspect though: that’s the thing - Lemmy hides the communities that an instance admin team has blocked, and PieFed does too, so in that respect they are identically opaque.
So moving on, people have claimed that PieFed also has a series of “hidden blocklist features”, but everything that I have seen about that claim demonstrates that is untrue. It’s been months now but iirc there was even direct links provided to the actual portions of the codebase. These blocklists are NOT “hard-coded” as claimed - they are opt-in, just like the PieFed.zip situation offering that choice to the users, except in this case it is a decision offered to the instance admins. Opt-in is the polar opposite of hard-coded, the latter being worse than opt-out? Opt-in is the most friendly an option could possibly be?
Although those options are fairly opaque iirc rather than transparent, that much seems true. At least with PyLova you know what you are getting, while with PieFed the experience could in theory vary greatly all the way to the more authoritarian, walked garden style PieFed.social to the more free and open and choice-providing PieFed.zip. Which to me seems analogous to the spectrum between Lemmy.ml (an instance that falsely claims to be merely one for discussions about FOSS, with next to zero mention of its more political leanings) and Lemmy.zip.
Again, yes PieFed allows more censorship features, but against the backdrop of it just plain offering more features overall. All of which an admin is free to either turn on or leave off. The two software platforms truly look equivalent to me then, in terms of offering free speech.
With the exception of the vote quota that is, which low-key changes everything. The trajectory of PieFed edits is trending ever more towards authoritarianism and opacity rather than transparency - again, not that Lemmy is a bastion of transparency either, so they both get rather poor marks there, plus PieFed at least bothers to notify someone when they are banned from a community, so overall it might even be ahead… although with a trajectory that looks like eventually it could leave it behind, regardless of whether it currently is now or not. Does that make sense? Lemmy does a lot worse than people admit to knowing, and even if PieFed is not as bad as certain specific claims have made it out to be, it is not perfect either.
Which puts an exceedingly large burden on each and every instance admin team to try to pick up the slack left by the gaps in the software, and thus the .zip team should get all the more credit for rather successfully navigating this whole minefield even as it provides services for both platforms.