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PieFed vs Lemmy. What say you?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
55 points (96.6% liked)
Slop.
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For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
Rule 1: All posts must include links to the subject matter, and no identifying information should be redacted.
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Rule 3: No sectarianism.
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That is so amazingly abusable. You can basically be a one-person defederator with a single account on any instance. The devs of piefed are so smart.
It's only replies to you that don't show up. So you have to be a power poster too.
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
Ahahaha so it's a reward for bots and extreme obsessives
It also makes it easier to coordinate downvoting on specific users and make it so they can't keep contributing
Blocked users still being able to reply to your comments is very abusable too. I don't like how blocks work in Lemmy either.
If we are talking about dealing with interpersonal abuse and not just blocking people who annoy you, I think the Piefed approach is a bit better even if it's borked with federation.
Shouldn't that just be mods' responsibly? Banning someone personally abusive?
Which mods? Seems complicated across communities and instances.
Moderation is federated in Lemmy, when I take a look at communities in other instances I never see content from users that were banned over there. There can be cases where a moderator on an instance that isn't federated with mine bans a user on an instance that is (e.g. lemmy.world mod bans lemmy.ml user) and I would still see that user's posts, but in practice this doesn't happen very much and isn't very abusable.
The big problem with the piefed system is that it gives every user a sliver of mod powers when usually moderators are supposed to be vetted; it's also frowned upon for a moderator to get into an argument then take mod actions against the user they were arguing with, but PieFed gives every user the power to partially ban whoever they're talking with.
I crave this herculean demi-mod status.
I think it's ok if posters get a say in who can see and interact with their posts/comments.
It's so easy to abuse it's not even funny. You can be a power poster who replies to almost everything, block the people who disagree with you, and make it look like everyone on the site is on your side because no one ever disagrees.
Doesn't seem like a huge problem to me.
IMO its subtle but if you look at first post and second post effects studied on sites like reddit, this sort of thing can be used effectively for narrative hacking / consent manufacture etc, or more commonly just for digital marketing.
Probably doesn't matter much at the current scale of federated social networks, but reddit wasn't that big back in the day either and it is worth learning from and designing against these exploits where possible.
You will get de facto banned because a couple of random hyper-obsessed reactionary users blocked you, personally.
And that process can happen on any community that doesn't vigilantly censor bad faith users who abuse the block function. If there's a random community and you want to hijack it you can do so by making bait posts about controversial subjects and blocking anyone that disagrees, which will then create an illusion of concensus. Imagine someone doing this with racist dogwhistles or transphobic content, where they start mildly and figure out where the established community members stand, then they can push that line a little bit, get no pushback, and repeat. You could slowly turn the heat up and avoid ever getting banned because you never actually get into an argument with anybody, and it'd look like no one even really has a problem with you.
at the very least, your mods are able to ban them from your instance. i think it's a lot less abusable to be able to designate people whose comments you personally can't see than it is to designate people whose comments no one can see. at the very low end of what counts as abuse, i keep getting blocked by libs on reddit specifically so they can get the last word. it gives the appearance that they were so correct no one could come up with a response to their epic bacon comeback