Draconic NEO

This sucks, I hope someone forks it before it breaks. Either that or hopefully most of its nice features get ported/added to Photon. So mods don’t have to end up living without them.

Just wish that Photon had the same features as Tesseract. I do think Photon looks better but Tesseract is way more functional. It has Fediseer integration, has MBFC integration, and also has better options for user management.

I mean, maybe? I don’t know, I don’t live in that mirror universe where python supplanted JS. Though considering how hard the push was to abandon and burn down python2, I have a feeling even if it was a web scripting language the same push would’ve happened and it would’ve just broken a lot more stuff since you know “sECuRiTY”.

That’s nice that he did it but the fact that he gives the option to turn it off without forking isn’t good, the reason why Lemmy’s modlog is so great is because it isn’t optional, and while you could modify your own Lemmy instance to hide and disable it, you’d need to break mod action federation to completely remove it. By not being optional it is more resilient. Piefed though makes it easy for corrupt or non-accountable admins to turn it off and hide who did what and when. Just like it is on Reddit.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

That’s kind of sad but also isn’t surprising. They didn’t exactly put in a huge amount of effort to maintain it, nor did they put in much effort to grow it or make it appealing as a server for people to join.

We shall see I guess, though unless they opt to only allow access to logged in users it’ll still be technically possible to do, especially locally in your own browser. Though people do lose interest over time, especially as platforms lose relevance.

I mean web scraping also exists and scraper based Reddit frontends have been and still are a thing. Also using accounts API isn’t ideal since they can figure out that an account is being used to look at stuff like that and either suspend it or worse just make shadowbans visible and not apparent to that account.

Can’t so easily fuck with a web scraper or tool just looking at the raw web page data.

I don’t really get why this solution isn’t used much or even suggested. I mean fetching the data without an account is a foolproof way to detect shadowbanning and silent removals. Frankly I’m surprised no one has simply made an extension or tool to do it automatically.

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected]

This is amazing, it’s nice to have a scoring system to be able to rate how decentralized and also how active the different services are.

Yeah Spinster is generally considered a hate site, and consequently is very widely defederated, even from general purpose instances like lemmy.world. Also it’s less of a Reddit alternative and more of a Twitter alternative but is technically redundant since you can do everything you did on there on the real thing instead.

I think that kind of goes without saying.

And this is why it is especially important that instances upgrade to 0.19.11 ASAP since that version both offers DM removal when banning users with content removal, and also hides images from being rendered in DMs. Unfortunately a vast majority of instances are on 0.19.9 or earlier.

Vast majority of people do, it is the default UI when you use a browser, and by far it is the most fast and lightweight one. For most people accessing on a web browser Lemmy-UI IS Lemmy. Obviously many people use alternative UIs and Apps but the point is a change in the default UI that people use is a majorly impactful change.