Fediverse

After kbin.social went defunct the smaller instances I kept moving to (StarTrek.website and discuss.online) had not defederated from those two instances yet at that time. They do now, but a year ago it wasn't as prevalent a choice to protect people from such things happening to their users. The Lemmy community has matured a bit, the word has gotten out, a case built to do so, and admins became receptive to what they had once spurned - e.g. I petitioned discuss.online to defederate hexbear.net after it was revealed that the admins there were caught lying to admins of other instances. But it took a lot of effort and time to get to this point, and still today most instances remain federated with lemmy.ml, which is where a bunch of Hexbear alts (e.g. Cowbee) decided to continue their trolling efforts after so many other places defederated from Hexbear itself.

I hear what you are saying about PieFed, especially from just what is mentioned on that page regarding tools that community mods would have access to, but in practice what I'm seeing so far really is tons better. For one thing, mods on Lemmy right now have to choose between the binary options of removing content vs. allowing it to remain (similarly at the instance level it can either defederate from another instance vs. not do so), whereas PieFed offers additional options that will allow the content to remain and then place the choice of what to do into the hands of the end users. Some users may e.g. want to avoid controversial content, and so like a spam filter automatically collapse content with a certain ratio of downvotes to upvotes - which preserves the ability to see it, but putting it one step away exactly like a spoiler feature for the post. Or maybe the user will instead choose to have the content removed altogether, with the auto-hide feature? Some of my own content would have gotten removed this way, and I definitely see how things can get misunderstood by downvoters, but at the end of the day, it still gives choices to the user that otherwise would have rested solely in the hands of a moderator. Personally I have both the auto-collapse and especially auto-hide options turned off, but it's worth noting that they are there if people want them.

There are also other niceties such as keyword filtering - so e.g. if the user wants to remove all posts with the keyword "Musk", then they could. Perhaps they shouldn't, but they can, if they wanted.

I find that user labelling really is different though, than any of the filtering options above. Examples include new users with accounts newer than let's say a couple of weeks, a user who almost exclusively posts but never comments (likely an unregistered bot?), someone who downvotes 20x more often than upvotes, or receives 50x more downvotes than upvotes - again, their comments aren't removed (currently I am not aware of a method to even make that happen), just labelled with an icon next to their name. These icons can help someone decide whether or not to respond, or how much detail to put into it if so. Essentially these are just measures of a user's "reputation", so this is the numeric version of the type of info that people use anyway? But at each moment the choice lies with the user to either pay attention to or ignore those icons. And yeah the precise formulas to determine these icons are constantly tweaked to improve them, so that's a thing, surely.

Ultimately though, whether the end-user makes proper usage of the tools given to them or not, either way, I think it's awesome that these tools are given to the regular users, rather than constraining them to work solely when in the hands of a mod. That's "democracy"! I guess whether democracy itself is a good thing or not is a whole other discussion altogether...🤣

Edit: also the tools are definitely in their infancy - e.g. to avoid karma farming, communities should be able to use community-specific metrics so that actions taken outside of a community do not necessarily affect filtering options inside of one. Which iirc is coming or at least people are aware of this issue. PieFed itself is still mostly in the works:-).