Draconic NEO

Oh thanks, I think that’s the first time someone’s said it to me on Lemmy. Which is weird since I’ve had multiple others before. This account is two years old, and I have other accounts too.

Yes I don’t think that demolishing whole ecosystems is a good thing. I think that it’s a shitty mentality of wanting shiny and new shit and fixing what isn’t broken. I am a believer in legacy support and I find it weird and concerning to see and hear people complain about it. You do realize that if Python had been the Web’s scripting engine instead of JS, a lot of Websites would’ve been, and still would be trashed and unusable due to said breaking changes with zero regard for legacy support. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, but it does go to show that legacy support and backwards compatibility is important.

Are you denying the problem of Backwards compatibility with python versions? It was and still is a big problem today. I’m still seeing the affects of that though many communities. I don’t really think it’s only good for tinkering but I know its developers clearly do, otherwise they wouldn’t have subjected us to the transition from python 2.7 to python 3 and the fallout that followed, and people wouldn’t have been so eager to comply with them dropping python 2.7 support in all their python integrated envionments before you could say bitrot.

Yeah somehow that doesn’t give me much confidence for the future.

Admins can turn it on/off, I’ve turned it on for my instance. https://quokk.au/modlog

That’s still not really much better. It should be on by default, the whole reason there’s a modlog is for liability. Hiding the modlog isn’t doing anyone any favors, don’t try to tell me that there’s merit to that. Obfuscation of mod actions is hiding them from accountability.

So what you’re saying is that they have a Social Credit Karma system like Reddit does? I already hate it.

Not that I’m aware of, members can see what percentage others vote (i.e. do you vote 100% downvotes?) but that’s about it. Mods and admins can see a reputation metric, but that’s not forward facing to the public and simply a way for bad faith actors to be flagged.

Piefed puts weight on votes, the software punishes for being downvoted a lot. Therefore this is in a sense a social credit system. And it’s made worse by the fact that you can exclude upvotes from counting but downvotes still count in there, so you can make it very difficult to earn social credit reputation but easy to lose it. That’s not acceptable to me, that’s worse than the environment on Reddit. This isn’t a good thing.

Yeah I’m not going to move to piefed for that reason either, I hate Reddit’s Karma system, which is basically an ass kissing requirement to maintain social credit, though piefed takes it to the extreme by trying to exclude meme communities, to favor downvoters extra hard.

Also private votes seems like it’ll be a nightmare. Good luck combating all but the most obvious vote manipulation.

Dude there’s a built in social credit system that aims to embarrass or discredit people for having been downvoted too much, that’s very different than an admin building their own tools to create that kind of echo chamber, they hand these tools out to everyone on a silver platter. They’re on by default, literally every piefed server started with the default settings will have these. It’s very different than specific admins choosing to create a platform like that with integrations. This type of social credit system is built right in and on by default, do you not see how this is a problem?

It is reactionary to want to cancel an open source project or codebase based on grievances with a particular person or their opinions.

Some people for some reason want to cancel or boycott lemmy as a software because they think it’ll hurt the Devs, which is stupid because this is open source software. Not only do the Devs get nothing from people using it without donating but they can’t stop people from using it either, and since it’s opensource, they can’t stop people from modding/forking it either. This whole movement to cancel Lemmy is just reactionary garbage.

• Image-heavy communities can have a tiled/masonry view, like https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]

So what you’re saying is that they have a Social Credit Karma system like Reddit does? I already hate it.

• Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.

Oh a really strict social credit system. Yeah fuck piefed for sure. It’s already bad enough that people maliciously downvote comments on lemmy with alts, giving power to their votes will just make that shit worse.

As much as people give the Lemmy Devs shit they work hard to prevent this from happening on Lemmy, they removed the score API so people couldn’t use Karma bots like Reddit does, they have a publicly exposed modlog so mod actions can be called out and critiqued (piefed has no modlog as far as I can tell). They may have their problems but Lemmy is a far better platform in terms of freedom and open-ness. Piefed is the real Reddit 2.0 complete with it’s own social credit system, designed to make people with less popular opinions (or people at the mercy of downvote brigading) be ostracized.

I agree, this whole idea of canceling Lemmy is weird and just feels reactionary. Also Piefed running on Python doesn’t seem like something that can scale well nor something that can be perpetually worked on for the long haul without running into issues with new python releases and compatibility with them.

I’ve always thought it was really weird and really dumb sentiment to want to cancel Lemmy, as an Open source software. It’s like people think they need to endorse the developers’ views to use Lemmy, or pay them money to use the software. But like that’s really dumb. Lemmy is free and opensource software, the developers have no say in who uses it, it’s also opensource meaning anyone can fork it. So this position just seems weird and reactionary.

One thing that really makes me reluctant about the future of piefed is the fact that it runs on Python. Great for tinkering but it likely won’t scale well, and Python is famous for breaking backwards compatibility. So expect this project to be hosed when Python 4 or 5 comes out and breaks compatibility or syntax with the previous version. I saw this happen with Kodi and other platforms with Python Based plugins, and it’ll most definitely happen again, not to say it can’t happen with something like Rust or Go, but these compiled languages are designed for big projects, python is just one-off scripts, so the ones maintaining languages like Rust, Go, C++ work a bit harder to keep them as functionally compatible as possible so big projects aren’t crippled and trashed by an update.

Anyway that’s my opinion on this whole thing, I don’t believe Piefed is the future, and I do not think Instance Admins should jump at the chance to abandon Lemmy. Maybe for sublinks if it ever comes out, but not for piefed.

Oh awesome, I mean I’ve heard of other platforms like sublinks offering database migration but I didn’t think it would be feasible with piefed since unlike sublinks it’s very different than lemmy.

Yeah me too, I’d wanted to for a while but never got around to it. Now I probably never will (unless they get the servers back up at some point in the future).

Wouldn’t that mean the instance would completely restart? I mean I don’t know much about piefed but logically it seems like the DB structure would be incompatible. Thus “Migrating” to piefed means a complete reboot, all posts, all users, all content just bye bye.

They have stepped in when a lot of people complained, it took their whole instance complaining to do so while a Nazi troll spammed hate across the local feed.

Yeah I agree, that model just isn’t sustainable. Moderation is one of the most challenging aspects of running a Lemmy instance, and deciding to never defederate because of “free speech” and “user choice” just makes the job that much worse. It feels almost inevitable that instances like this will ultimately succumb to this type of burnout.

Really I feel like we should stop talking about “defederation” as an abstract concept without context or reason since it makes it seem like defederation happens for no reason. Which is almost never the case. We don’t talk about other forms of moderation that way, and if someone did it would be clear they’re one of those free speech trolls, so why do we so casually talk about defederation this way? Seriously, defederation, like any other moderation is 100% necessary, because humans are evil pieces of shit. Not all of them, but many are. That’s why we ban people, that’s why we defederate the most rotten places in the fediverse. Saying “just block users” is counterproductive. You know what Lemmy would look like if that’s all we offered here? Probably a more extreme version of 4chan, since those are the people that dominate when moderation isn’t enforced.

I don’t think the people here whining about moderation, defederation, and “Freeze Peach” care about any morality than their perceived right to say whatever they want without consequence.

Yeah moderation is the biggest challenge on Lemmy servers, they ended up making it more challenging for themselves with the decision to never defederate from any instance and lean all the way into the hysteria surrounding defederation. That’s really not a sustainable model for the long term, it increases workload, and drives off portions of the userbase who are sensitive to extreme or aggressive people (the people who run wild if you never defederate troll instances or ban trolls).

This is sad, but also not unexpected. I’d noticed a lack of engagement from their admin team for a while, and very often they wouldn’t respond to reports. Still sad to see them go, and also slightly worrying since there are a lot of active communities on there and many many users.

As great as it would’ve been to have Python on the Web instead of JS I don’t think that would’ve gone well when the Python foundation decided to make Python 3 incompatible with Python 2. That change already broke a lot of shit (Kodi addons never quite recovered from that) and I remember many people excusing it, but if websites ran on it, that wouldn’t have been inconvenient, it would’ve been far more devastating.