Draconic NEO

As much as public modlogs are required, the lack of accountability of some mods repeatedly reported for power tripping makes me question sometimes if all of this is not in vain.

Maybe it seems that way since mods don’t always or often yield to pressure on YPTB, but if there wasn’t a modlog or if they could hide it and not announce actions publicly. We wouldn’t even know. People would still complain about their bans but there would be no public evidence. No one could make a critical assessment based on the public evidence it would be the banned person’s word against the mods. That’s what a life without the modlog is, that’s what it is on Reddit. I do not believe that real people want to go back to that. Server admins and mods maybe but not people.

On the other hand, there are several features that Lemmy always ignored, and that exist on Piefed

I believe the second, third, and possibly the fourth one are coming in later Lemmy versions.

That’s not what it says in the building healthy communities section. It said that upvotes in “low quality communities” aren’t counted but downvotes are.

I don’t really agree that it’s an attempt to centralize the fediverse but I do think that the push and praise for it feels extremely unnatural, especially how people are bragging about liking and wanting the reputational features of it, and being able to hide the modlog. Like dude those are the biggest reasons people left Reddit, and now suddenly “people” are just going gaga for those same anti-features. That seems more than fishy to me…

I think votes in general should not be private, because this is like a public plaza what you say is public, and attaching a reputation because of down votes is dangerously bullying and a slippery slope, so piefed doesn’t actually feel like my pie at the moment.

I agree with this, both of these things are bad on their own but together they are extremely bad. Like it encourages the same groupthink as there is on Reddit while also allowing easy vote manipulation to help yourself and hurt others. Really bad combination.

Don’t forget that admins can literally turn the modlog off on their instance to hide mod actions from others and who did them. How can anyone think that accountability limiting features is a good thing, especially coming from Reddit.

Yeah this is like the worst feature of Reddit taken to the extreme by the ability to filter out upvotes from communities, but still allowing downvotes from those communities to hurt your score. I can’t support a platform like that.

I agree, canceling a software over that is just purely reactionary, an opensource software no less.

I mean it’s my first account, and also the only one I use on Lemmy.world communities.

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.