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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Interesting to see Lemmy from the perspective of a Mastodon user. I never used Twitter and I have no interest in Mastodon, but it certainly seems like a tremendous advantage to be able to cross pollinate with them, given their sizeable userbase. There is definitely more work to be done on streamlining federation between platforms, but its an inherently tricky problem so I’m not surprised.

    Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin are still at the stage where they are trying to complete their own core features, so there hasn’t been as much focus on bridging to the rest of the fediverse. Mastodon is a more mature software so they probably had more time to work on extra features like cross-platform federation.



  • I was going to edit my previous comment but I’ll just put it here.

    I understand your point, but I’m saying that private/public is not a binary concept. It’s a spectrum, and making votes visible on the Lemmy UI shifts the position much closer to the public side. It will have a noticeable effect on people’s behavior.

    But I agree that it’s probably possible to correlate the voting profiles in theory. Could potentially be prevented by randomizing the profile for each vote maybe.



  • I just had to type in the URL for your comment in the search bar and click the “Activity” field in the menu.

    Believe it or not, that barrier of entry is enough to dissuade 99% of people. People simply don’t have the time or inclination to do this. But if you put a button right in the Lemmy UI, people will check constantly, and it will cause arguments and potentially defederations.

    It’s not illegal to get your DNA, which is arguably the most egregious example I gave. They solve cold cases all the time nowadays by surreptitiously collecting DNA samples. You can see how heavy someone is just by looking at them. But that doesn’t mean they want to tell you their actual weight. I’m not sure about income and age, and it would vary by jurisdiction anyhow.

    I’m just trying to explain that healthy social interactions and environments are predicated on some degree of privacy, and abolishing that serves no one. If you remove the privacy of voting, you reduce the incentive for people to vote, or indeed to use this platform at all.


  • I’m well aware that they can be viewed from other platforms and by admins. But I don’t agree that this makes them effectively public.

    By that logic, everything is effectively public. Why should I be reluctant to share my age, weight, income, DNA? All of that information can be publicly available for someone who takes the time to sample a piece of my hair, check my birth certificate, etc. It’s not illegal or impossible for someone to obtain that information.

    But there’s a whole world of difference between something being theoretically accessible via workarounds, and being displayed prominently for all to see. As a result of human nature, I think that allowing people to easily check votes on any post would cause a great deal of conflict.

    Also, there are currently plans underway to build more privacy into the fediverse.


  • Cool solution. It’s great to have multiple projects in the fediverse that can experiment with different features/formats.

    For those who are concerned about possible downsides, I think it’s important to understand that

    • PieFed has a small userbase
    • Rimu is an active admin, so if you are attempting to combat brigading or other bad behavior and this makes it more difficult, just send them a DM and they will be happy to help out

    This is a good environment to test this feature because Rimu can keep a close watch over everything. We can’t become paralyzed by the hypothetical ways that bad actors might abuse new features or systems. The only way forward is through trial and error, and the fact that PieFed exists makes that process significantly faster and less disruptive.

    This is an attempt to add more privacy to the fediverse. If the consequences turn out for the worse, then we can either try something else, or live with the lack of privacy. Either way, we’ll be better off than having never tried anything at all.




  • You make a valid point but I just want to push back a bit. These are the largest Lemmy instances in order of monthly users

    large instances

    As far as I know, lemmy.ml and hexbear are the only heavily communist and censorship prone servers out of the top twelve. They were here first, but we really need to stop perpetuating the notion that they represent or dominate Lemmy as a whole, along with the idea that they represent a typical moderation experience on this platform.

    I feel like the numerous well-moderated instances don’t get enough credit. The actions of lemmy.ml moderators tend to shape the narrative about Lemmy moderation, which is unfair to other servers and repels new users from the platform. Other instances aren’t perfect with moderation either, but at least they generally try to moderate in good faith and with some degree of neutrality, which is the most you can really ask for.

    The primary influence that remains is lemmy.ml still hosts a disproportionate number of major communities, but that’s slowly changing.




  • I’d just like to point out that most of the complaints referenced in this post are at least partially being addressed with the latest release of Lemmy, 0.19.4

    From the release announcement

    Image Proxying

    There is a new config option called image_mode which provides a way to proxy external image links through the local instance. This prevents deanonymization attacks where an attacker uploads an image to his own server, embeds it in a Lemmy post and watches the IPs which load the image.

    Instead if image_mode is set to ProxyAllImages, image urls are rewritten to be proxied through /api/v3/image_proxy. This can also improve performance and avoid overloading other websites. The setting works by rewriting links in new posts, comments and other places when they are inserted in the database. This means the setting has no effect on posts created before the setting was activated. And after disabling the setting, existing images will continue to be proxied. It should also be considered experimental.

    Moderation enhancements

    With the URL blocklist admins can prevent users from linking to specific sites.

    Admins and mods can now view the report history and moderation history for a given post or comment.

    The functionality to resolve reports automatically when a post is removed was previously broken and is now fixed. Additionally, reports for already removed items are now ignored.

    The site.content_warning setting lets admins show a message to users before rendering any content. If it is active, nsfw posts can be viewed without login, after consenting.

    Mods and admins can now comment in locked posts.

    Mods and admins can also use external tools such as LemmyAutomod for more advanced cases.

    Media

    There is a new functionality for users to list all images they have previously uploaded, and delete them if desired. It also allows admins to view and delete images hosted on the local instance.

    When uploading a new avatar or banner, the old one is automatically deleted.

    Instance admins should also checkout lemmy-thumbnail-cleaner which can delete thumbnails for old posts, and free significant amounts of storage.


    As you can see, there were many improvements to the moderation tools and image hosting UX/storage requirements. There’s obviously still room for improvement, but everything else out there has glaring issues as well. Mbin/PieFed are even less polished than Lemmy at this stage, although they are progressing quickly.

    Also worth noting that most of the replies to the first post express a strong user preference for Lemmy over Sharkey.