Vicinus

Topic Feeds are already user-customizable and shareable, so why not block lists?

I never made that connection, but yeah, this could be much easier to implement than I was thinking.

Admiral Patrick’s toxicity filter went behind people’s backs and did such opaquely, but when handled transparently and with full informed consent that would be an entirely different story. And then people could choose like no filter, minimal or maximal filtering, or perhaps some intermediary steps between those.

Yeah, I could see this being a few easy setting/feature addition.

It’s been like 3 years. I for one have lost hope …

Understandable.

Some issues remain, like instance blocking does so without informing the recipient, who gets essentially shadow-blocked by the recipient. But that is not something fixable by PieFed alone, and would require cooperation with Lemmy to receive the signal and pass it on to the affected users in whatever way they chose.

My understanding is that this was set up that way to prevent harassment. I’m not knowledge on the subject so could be wrong.

No actually there is - Rimu converted many Lemm.ee communities over to PieFed.social (I forget if they lost access to modify their older content, or perhaps if they messaged him before lemm.ee went fully down from their old account then he could take that as proof of ownership and grant such access), and Quokka has converted fully from Lemmy to PieFed and then from PieFed to PyLova, so aside from Rimu are the preeminent experts in such conversions. With Rimu’s community migration tools and Quokka’s experience, communities on Lemmy are not held hostage, anymore.

My understanding was that it “worked”. As in it was haphazard and a very manual effort to get what did happen to work.

Not the same thing, but die4ever@retrolemmy.com and I tried to save the past posts of ecospheres@mander.xyz to piefed.zip after mander.xyz went down. It didn’t work, I (on piefed.zip) could see the old mander.xyz posts, but no one else on any other instances could. I also had a problem with adding mods to the new piefed.zip community (lemmy mods couldn’t be added, non-piefed.zip mods couldn’t be made owner).

So, while I expect it can be done, I don’t think it’s an easy, straightforward, or automated process to move software or even communities. I know my example was not a 1-to-1 typical move, so if you have any counter-examples please let me know (I can utilize them for the !fedigrow@lemmy.zip wiki).

Otoh, Rimu himself is personally quite opinionated on certain matters, and rarely but decidedly goes against community push-back to enact his own agendas.

I am quite aware of Rimu’s nature (he and I had discussions in the past).

Rimu lost a lot of trust in his handling of that situation.

Agreed and I would say he’s lost a lot of trust many times at this point (I used to be one of his biggest cheerleaders).

Of course there is the PyLova fork, but it is extremely new, so I would wager that people are taking stock of it and seeing how it will shake out.

I suspect so. I mentioned it to the piefed.zip admins, so they are at least aware of it. But I suspect there won’t be any piefed -> pylova conversions anytime soon, unless Rimu screws up big (again).

… all the more so since most 3rd-party apps only nominally support PieFed much less PyLova.

I believe their is an official Piefed app coming (https://fedidb.com/software/compare?software=lemmy%2Cmbin%2Cpiefed). Assuming it’s open source, presumably the other partially Piefed compatible apps could utilize the “Piefed Official App” 's code to improve compatibility within their own apps. I’m certainly going to suggest it to the voyager Dev when the “official app” comes out.

The technology has to get better if we want to bring people here. Which I suppose it is, but at a pace that is exceedingly frustrating.

Agreed, but not sure we should expect more. FOSS is generally slow moving, due to it being small, part-time teams. I’m in a place where I can help support FOSS financially, but I know that is not an option for everyone, plus it’s a new consideration/viewpoint for people coming from corporate/proprietary software (where they are the product).

Edit: okay, done - https://discuss.online/post/46939614.

Awesome! Upvoted :)

I would hope that PieFed.zip would automatically apply a user-level block to new joiners for Lemmy.ml, the same way that it already does for hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml.

While I agree that would likely help new comers, I suspect the .zip admins have a similar thought process to Rimu (not antagonizing the Lemmy Devs, and keeping the lines of communication open in case there is an software issue).

i.e., being kind to and/or having empathy with people who enjoy trolling behaviors is not the same thing as offering them a platform.

I agree and block trolls immediately (“Don’t Feed Trolls!” is my motto online).

Especially one where their messages are presented identically alongside with all other messages, such that new joiners cannot distinguish between them. A warning label, an icon, a different color highlighting etc. would go a long way. But that’s a ton of effort, which anyone using a 3rd-party app won’t be able to access anyway, hence blocking is all that is left, short of full defederation.

I thought previously a subscribe-able block list would be a great addition, at the user and/or the instance level. Users or instance admins could create a list of problematic users and/or communities and any updates automatically feed to the subscribing instances or users. Obviously issue is who gets authority to amend a list, but I think if the list was in a standard format and “forkable” it wouldn’t be too big of an issue for different groups to easily create and maintain their own lists without much issue.

This could be away to block the worst offenders/trolls without risking antagonizing the Lemmy Devs. Thoughts?

The alternative, which is the current method, is to simply get comfortable being a troll bar. We feature trolls here, we make them feel very comfortable, and offer only confusing methods to people and very little guidance to new joiners to avoid them.

I don’t think we are “comfortable being a troll bar”, I think we are uncomfortable and taking steps, unfortunately slowly, to move past that phase of development. With ~80% of the Threadiverse on Lemmy and the Lemmy.ml admins being the Lemmy Devs, I think things have to move slowly (boil the frog slowly). There’s no way (to my knowledge) to switch instances to an alternative software (Piefed, Pylova, Mbin), so all the Lemmy instances are a little bit held hostage. I don’t currently see a way out from the hostage situation, but perhaps one will present itself in the future.

In the meantime, like you are saying, I don’t think that means things can’t improve with on-boarding or initial blocking for new users, to continue moving away from being a “troll bar”.

… when unedumacashiated people are allowed to vote, chaos is not nearly as likely to result (from such “random” inputs) as the system being taken over by a malicious actor who may then use it for their own nefarious purposes.

I understand that viewpoint, but my understanding is that there is not a “good” solution. If “education” or “knowledge” requirements are implemented, they are, or at least to my knowledge have been, used to disenfranchise the most vulnerable. An example of this could be the Southern States after the American Civil War. They implemented “literacy tests” biased toward the wealthy and whites to restrict the poor, minorities, and immigrants from voting. The “best” solution I’ve heard to stopping an uninformed populace is to educate the masses to develop critical thinking skills. Unfortunately, that “solution” is generally on generational timescales.

… that explanation neither absolves people of their failures in the absolute necessity to remain curious, nor absolves us of our own failure when we allow the system to propagate, and in fact help it along.

How do they know to “remain curious”? How did you learn to? How did I learn to? From my experience in life and learning from others about their lives, I’ve found I’ve had a quite privileged upbringing with regards to education and emotional support. This leads me to be quite generous in my view of people’s “failings”.

Anytime I run across someone “failing” to understand something I consider basic or common, I try to think back to when did I learn that and from whom. In most cases, the person or situation I learned from didn’t exist for the person “failing”. From that point, I try to, with no judgment of them, explain my reasoning and thought process to them (just as someone did for me). If they want to take in and consider my words, great. If not, that’s alright too. I could always be wrong about the topic, they could not be ready to change, or any other reasoning (you don’t need to force every seed to sprout, just keep providing a nurturing environment and you may soon find yourself surrounded by greenery).

Mostly I just try to be open minded myself (like I am truly open to changing my viewpoint to theirs) and provide an open and safe environment for others to consider alternatives. I find it works quite well.

According to this post PieFed.zip uses the same blocking system as Lemmy.zip for new joiners. See also this comment from the admin.

“This means some of the spicier instances are blocked by default, which users can remove themselves in the user settings.”, “… piefed.zip (and lemmy.zip) already blocks hexbear, lemmygrad, and lemmynsfw by default, and sends a PM to the user when they sign up to let them know why we do this, and how to remove it.” Huh, TIL. I was going based on the listed instance de-federations (where they aren’t shown).

… which unfortunately neither the Lemmy nor PieFed UI offers a mechanism to expose that list publicly to the users, making the transparency of this issue rather horrible, where I have to link to messages from the admins but there is no webpage that will simply show an updated status - like does exist for instance federation vs. defederation.

Great point. This might be a time to “weaponize” Pylova. Since Piefed has been “back-porting” Pylova’s work, if Mia implemented this transparency addition, it would probably make its way to Piefed. Maybe Lemmy would follow suit, but no idea. I’m thinking worst-case its implemented in Pylova and the Pylovians all benefit. Thoughts?

Edit: Switched a word for grammar.

changing the slogans doesn’t help because the target isn’t the words, it’s the underlying demand.

I guess my point is a base/group can’t increase membership/size if no one knows what they stand for, or believe they stand for something else completely (misinformation propaganda).

propagandists will weaponize whatever language you use if the politics behind it threaten them.

Agreed.

the way i see it conceding the rhetorical terrain just means constantly retreating to increasingly watered down language while the actual demand gets no closer to being heard.

I may not have previously conveyed my thought clearly. I never meant that any slogans/idioms should be watered down. More that they should be utilized like guerrilla warfare. By the time the propagandists have a counter to a slogan, the movement would have already moved to the next (the underlying sentiment/demand remains the same, the words relaying the goal are constantly shifting to prevent capture/misinformation propaganda).

Also, if a slogan doesn’t get countered by the time its switched out, the movement could go back to it again later. The slogan’s return could act as a unifier between the groups the different slogans energized, as I suspect different slogans will have different effects on different sub-groups, and returning to a prior slogan could let everyone know they are on the same team, even if they didn’t know that previously.

‘death to america’ is a hyperbolic idiom meaning an end to american imperial dominance …

To your point, I’ve heard this meaning before, although I don’t think it is commonly known to the general populace (which is also to your other point about propogandization).

Potentially against your point, if a slogan/idiom is being intentionally misused for misinformation, it might be time to move to a different phrase, rather than sticking with the corrupted one. Additionally, if multiple phrases could be utilized, it may get the point across better (less likely to successfully propagandize multiple options, than a single option). Although, I suspect propagandists would weaponize the ‘weakest’ commonly utilized option against the cause.

… Firefox is horrible at memory management, even on Android - it legit runs down my battery even when minimized unless I force-kill it.

Haha. I’ve never made that connection, but I also force kill everything after I’m done immediately using it. Hopefully we have a Servo (!servo@programming.dev) option before too long.

… PieFed vs. PyLova are still at odds. If there was attribution this time, I did not dig deep enough to find it, plus I highly doubt it. Although otoh PyLova seems to be included in the PieFed instance picker pages?

Yeah, I had a feeling. While Pylova instances are listed in the Piefed instance picker, piefed.social has “Silencing” quokk.au and anarchist.nexus. So, I doubt Mia/quokka is going to be trusting Rimu in the immediate future.

… https://piefed.social/community/fediverse/wiki/piefed-app …

That’s a useful page I didn’t know about before. Thanks for sharing :)

Really? I’ve heard it said that all someone has to do is figure out who or what they are not allowed to criticize. But I suppose there are layers, and indeed disinformation is a helluva powerful effect.

I agree, to an extent, but I think it takes a significant effort to decide to question things to begin with. If everything and everyone you encounter in your life says the Sun revolves around the Earth, in my view, it takes something extra to not just find or notice a discrepancy, but also take the time/effort to go against everything you know, see, and encounter to pull on that thread and see what it reveals. Pulling on that thread could turn your friends/family/neighbors against you, it could threaten your livelihood or safety. In a non-supportive environment, I expect it’s quite scary and it’s much easier for someone to stick their head in the ground and carry on as if they didn’t notice the discrepancy.

… PieFed.zip is just about as close to ideal as one could want, except for adding a block to Lemmy.ml by default for new users …

If you feel like it, you could petition to add such a block …

For clarity, piefed.zip doesn’t block any of the ‘triad’. I believe the .zip instances marketed/known(?) as being open/non-restrictive. So, I don’t think the admins are interested in blocking any instances, unless they are spam or similarly problematic.

Somehow even Rimu who has such a contentious relationship with the tankies doesn’t even do that?

I suspect this has to do with the .ml admins being the Lemmy Devs, and Rimu needing to have a cordial relationship with them to maintain interoperability in the threadiverse.

We’ve made our choice, collectively: this is a tankie / troll bar.

I understand the feeling. It may help you to know that the ‘triad’ has decreased in total % of the threadiverse in the last 3 months. Also, look at the Threadiverse 3 years ago before the Reddit 3rd-party App Exodus, there was really only a few Lemmy instances to choose from (lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, sopuli.xyz, and a couple others). So, while many instances started during the exodus, most of the established communities and instances were part of the ‘triad’ and many new users would have joined the established instances/communities. I suspect if users could easily switch their accounts between instances, you would see a huge change in the distribution of the Threadiverse.

Which obviously mainstream non-technical normies nope right out, blocking that content the only way that they know how: by leaving the Threadiverse altogether …

Perhaps some better on-boarding, about curation, could help improve the ‘stickiness’ of instances. It wouldn’t surprise me, if a change like that caused the slight decrease in users (between growth spikes) to even out, stabilize, and perhaps allow a slight increase in users to develop.

… demand usage of a 3rd-party app …

Huh. Wouldn’t have guessed that as the answer.

… I don’t know how PyLova may change the situation still further - it offers even more features than PieFed, though the latter keeps incorporating most of those changes back into its main codebase …

Didn’t know Piefed was still back copying Pylova’s efforts. I recall the first time they removed attribution, in what I feel was a very dishonest way. Hopefully, if they are still integrating Pylova’s work, they are at the very least giving attribution.

… Voyager seems by far the most commonly used one, but it only offers nominal beta-level support for PieFed.

Yes, I strongly wish that Voyager had far better integration of Piefed features (like grouping cross-posts).

Echo chambers do exceedingly bad things to the people trapped inside of them.

Yep. Difficult to know if you’re in one though. In my experience, someone has to put in quite a bit of effort to even determine if they are in one.

… I can see from the devs’ perspective that turning on the display of instance names in Voyager is not a feature that is universally good.

Appreciate the perspective. I can see your point.

… discovered that programming.dev has a number of community-level blocks put into place to help a new user experience a more drama-free version of the Threadiverse. You can see their full listing at https://legal.programming.dev/docs/hidden-communities/ …

Did not know that, thanks for sharing. That was interesting to look through.

… huge bias towards inclusion of political content regardless of the statement in their sidebar - like !memes@lemmy.ml …

That makes sense.

… though with less content advocating for the literal murder of every person currently living inside of a Western civilization).

Not the best for getting people to stick around :(

… I meant here in comparison to like a “reputation” indicator such as PieFed offers, which works regardless of instance affiliation …

Ah, that would be a nice feature to have throughout the threadiverse. Although, I almost never see the indicator (probably too curated at this point becuase, at this point, I block bad faith actors/trolls immediately).

… it is just frustrating to me that 3+ years later things look mostly the same as the original discussions people have …

Yeah, quite frustrating, but I do think we are making progress and things are slowly getting better :)

I’ve been kind of thinking the ideal instance for new users would be something like the programming.dev community hidden list, with a de-federated triad, and run by the .zip admin team. Maybe that’ll be a thing one day.

No problem. Happy to provide insight into my workings :)

So the “Sum” mentioned at the bottom of each section is only for those shown within the section - the top 20 - and not expanded for all of the category? e.g. Lemmy’s MAU went down from 30817 to recently 29683, and every other metric (even for the most part the other post you mentioned for Fediverse Growth) also shows decline, but you are saying that despite that, the numerical amount is not that much, and we are mostly stable?

Yes and yes.

Yeah, the snippets and links you provided match my understanding of the situation. I don’t recall who or where, but I recall someone saying they were having a much easier time recruiting people to Piefed rather than Lemmy, due to Lemmy already having an established reputation. That being said, I expect the Lemmy 1.0 launch will cause a significant bump.

… don’t come here due to too few features in comparison to Reddit …

I found the user saying that, but they didn’t elaborate on what missing features they wanted. It’s been years since I used Reddit, do you have any clue what features they may be wanting?

… Voyager does not - by default - show the instance name of each user account …

I recall running into this issue and being confused, before I found the setting. Do you know if this is still the default? If so, and the Dev hasn’t given a specific reason for the decision (I can’t immediately find a post about it), I don’t mind making a post to ask them to switch the default.

… it would be nice if at least one singular major instance would defederate from lemmy.ml, or in the case of a PieFed instance apply an instance block by default …

Agreed.

… they would simply use their alts to get around any such block …

Probably, but I think it would be an order of magnitude fewer users encountered, than if the block didn’t exist. If they did use alts to get around the block, their alt’s instance’s admin could be contacted. My understanding is that the “troll behavior” on .ml is allowed, may be even encouraged, by their admins/devs. So, different admin may not have a tolerant attitude toward it. Along with this, as more communities spread out from the flagship and most popular instances (.ml, .world, .social), I think things will get less toxic too.

As an aside, over the last 3-months, it looks like most of the “politically” focused instances are the ones on the heavier declining side of the range. The instances declining the least or even growing are on the “unaligned” side of things.

I think I can alleviate some of your worries. The instance post only shows the top 20 instances for a software (Lemmy has 287 active, Piefed: 59, Mbin: 16).

My Fediverse Growth Post is a better indicator for the Threadiverse’s health. From there you can see the Threadiverse is only down 2.1% from a year ago (-847 MAU). From what I’ve seen over the last >6 months, is that the Threadiverse, and most of the fediverse, grow in short spurts and then slowly declines until the next spurt.

So, unfortunately, we aren’t having continuous positive growth, but I’d say we are stable. I think stable is fine as all the fediverse developers are still adding functionality/interconnected-ness (‘this isn’t our final form’).

For HYAU (Half-Year Active Users), I think it’s important to remember that lots of times people move instances, so their old account will eventually stop being counted as active (I personally have 2 old accounts). From the Fediverse post, you can see there were 42889 MAU 6-months ago and 42276 MAU 3-months ago (-613 MAU). So, even though you may see >1000 HYAU drop off in a given week, the total number of active users over that next 3 months stayed relatively the same (-1.4%, not -28% (-1000 MAU x 12 weeks)).

I think the most important information in the instance post is MAU/HYAU (%) (“Stickiness”), which indicates how well an instance holds onto its users (they keep coming back). I think >60% should be the goal of every instance (67% is currently the peak for non-small instances (>30 MAU)).

It might be worth a study to figure out why there is such a discrepancy across instances. For example, is it correlated to UI issues/customizability, reliability/up-time/longevity, admin/mod behavior, instance rules, federation/de-federation, inter-instance activity (communities/posts/comments), etc.

Regarding politics, I can’t really say what an average or new user experiences. I’ve curated/blocked massive amounts of political content. It might be worth having an instance that initially auto-blocks all politics communities for a new user. I don’t recall exactly, but I think Tesseract? was like that, but the dev/admin was sketchy about what they were doing and then melted down when called out for hiding things. So, it seems the idea had some popularity, but needs/ed a better implementation.

So, I can confirm this is happening to me too (Librewolf and Chromium).

I was looking into some analytics, and Lemmy.world data wasn’t being grabbed, so went to the site to see if it was down. The frontend is up, but the nodes (https://lemmy.world/nodeinfo/2.1 , https://lemmy.world/api/v3/site) are down (Error 503) and their “DataDog” shows a number of their services are down.

I don’t ever use lemmy.world, but if the problem just started, I would assume the issue is related to the down services (not a problem for me on lemmy.zip or piefed.zip).

Edit: issue seems to have resolved for me. Their “datadog” shows all, but 1 alert gone (previously like 12 alerts).

I just confirmed the problem still exists and messaged them via mastodon about it.

Probably didn’t let them know originally because I didn’t have a mastodon account at the time and already had a good option (fediverse-observer).

Glad you enjoy them :)

Just need to figure out how to keep them going properly. I have a couple thoughts I’ll look into tomorrow. Hopefully one of them bears fruit.

You’d think it’s straightforward and additive. I added up all their listed instances for a couple different softwares. The math was wrong and overestimated the MAU count. I checked it a few times across a couple weeks. Couldn’t quickly figure out a pattern to how the math was wrong each time.

Maybe they fixed it in the last ~6 months, but I wouldn’t count on it. I believe it’s the same Dev as pixelfed and loops. So, not sure they’ve done any work on fedidb in years (to my knowledge, they’ve focused on Loops and Pixelfed).

Edit: to clarify, adding the MAU of all their listed instances for a particular software was lower than the total MAU they reported for the software.

Edit 2: Just checked their Piefed listings and it’s still wrong. Fedidb states: ~7.0k, actual addition: 6858 MAU.

Yeah. I saw the dead website earlier today and have been trying to figure out how to keep the posts working.

The fediverse software post, I could rewrite some code to gather fedidb daily (to my knowledge, they don’t have all time series data available), but their MAU math is suspect. So, not a great option, but my only other thought is basically remaking fediverse-observer and I do not have a server or potentially relevant server skill set beyond cron jobs.

For the threadiverse instances post, I can keep gathering data from the instances I already have in my database, but don’t really have another way to find new ones. Maybe, I could see if I could scrape it from fedidb (I couldn’t get their API working in the past).

In conclusion, the posts are not in a good place :(