OpenStars comments on It's been fun, but I don't have another migration left in me.

Dessalines had it, and we all benefitted from him making the Threadiverse, even though his ideology would like nothing more than to see every single person living in a Western civilization to (literally) die. Still, kudos for not simply rolling over and taking it up the ass from Reddit, and instead making something better. Or that one day will become better - even if exceedingly slowly.

And Rimu as well: it takes guts to ignore what people say to simply "accept the status quo", and be the change we'd like to see in the world. That said, I don't agree with every decision made there by far, and I fear that this authoritarian mindset is going to get the project killed off. Like, it's good to stick to your guns when you KNOW that you are CORRECT, but to do it just on a whim... yeah it hits entirely differently then.

There was also Ernst of Kbin, but it basically died off already. Yes Mbin exists but with participant numbers that make it a tiny footnote in the description of the Threadiverse more than a major player.

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[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 7 points 2 months ago* (26 children)

Im having a real hard time understanding and following this whole thing if im honest. Is there a pr/code i can look at tp understand what is actually happening at the moment? Im just not getting it.

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 39 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Now if you try to cast over a certain amount of up/downvotes a day, you will not be allowed to by the code.

The Piefed staff has said that the motivation is in keeping people from voting 'too much' - ie, that users who use Piefed 'too much' should use it 'less' in the interest of 'fairness' to other users.

Even if this is reversed, that attitude - not the first time the Piefed staff has expressed that thought, but the first time they've actually implemented something non-optional along those lines - suggests that issues like this will continue popping up, even if this voting limit ends up being removed by public outcry.

"When people tell you who they are, believe them the first time", and all that jazz.

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[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 6 points 2 months ago* (6 children)

Interesting! Not that i dont believe you but is there a PR or code sample i can see? Id like to see what the actual code is doing. Thank you for the explanation.

I may be able to curtail a pr to address or at least make this instance specific.

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 22 points 2 months ago (5 children)

It is, at present, instance-specific, or at least, opt-out by admins. My issue is that I don't have the morale to migrate all my comms to another Piefed instance. I'm done. The instability in the Fediverse has done me in. I'm not stable enough myself to deal with it.

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[–] Cybersec@piefed.social 8 points 2 months ago

Please don’t go, I love your content.

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[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 3 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

Ah so this is just something on this server. Carry on.

Ive found my own infa is the most stable. Gotosocial is my favorite at the moment. Or at least the most fun.

Almost all of the fedi is volunteer and making negative money. Burning money in big buckets.

GL! Hope your next adventure is a fun one.

Everything is efferial. Even our silly messages on the internet.

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 18 points 2 months ago

No, this affects each and every PieFed instance that upgrades to v1.7 (I sent you in a different reply here the exact lines of code). PugJesus' instance PieFed.social uses the now-default value of 240 as the daily vote quota. Admins may opt-out by setting the quota differently, however this will only impact votes accepted on your current instance. It will not affect votes accepted by other PieFed instances. e.g. if your instance uses 500 rather than 240, then someone looking at the identical content from PieFed.social will not see any of the second half of your daily votes: you will be able to OFFER them, and Lemmy will receive all of them, but each PieFed instance chooses itself how much it will receive or not.

And btw this information is not presented anywhere to show what these values are across each instance. Like the caps on posts and comments, it is silently effective, but not transparent in the least. So like the whole argument about whether defederations destroy the foundational principles of the ActivityPub Protocol-using Threadiverse, this new issue too is going to wreak havoc on the acceptance of PieFed in the wider Threadiverse & Fediverse communities. :-(

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[–] tamal3@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

"migrate all my comms" what does that mean and why would you do it?

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 10 points 2 months ago

Re-creating the comms I run on a different instance.

Most of my activity is in those comms, and there's not a lot in the way of alternatives for most of them, topic-wise.

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 38 points 2 months ago

All votes, up or down, whether from Lemmy or the local or a different PieFed instance, are now restricted by an admin-set quota value. This was quietly reported outside of Matrix channels, buried into part of the 1.7 release of the code - see the exact relevant line at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/commit/7e10e92de2cf271088b76a31d725cad67afe08aa/app/activitypub/routes.py#L2335.

This value can be adjusted however the admins desire (e.g. the PieFed.zip admins say they have set it to a ridiculously high value to essentially disable it, and other PieFed instances are coming out strongly against it), but by default is set at 240 (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/config.py#L191, thanks to flamingos@feddit.uk for reporting these lines of code). As in you can vote 240 times per day before you are blocked from doing so further. Logged-in PieFed users can see how much of their local instance quota they've used so far, but (i) no numeric values are presented, only a visual bar where you have to guess at where you are (e.g. do I have 10 votes left now? 100? 2?), (b) this will only show you the LOCAL instance quota - not the quotas of OTHER instances, and in particular the vote quota seems applied to incoming votes from Lemmy, Mbin, Mastodon, nodeBB, etc. platforms as well as PieFed instances, and (c) none of this is explained anywhere, on any page, e.g. there is currently no way to tell which instances use those quotas, nor what values they are currently set at.

And I thought I recalled hearing that there are caps already on posts and comments too, but I haven't studied the code and I think this is not well known, if it is even true rather than me misremembering or misunderstanding something. PieFed seems to be going to some effort to limit its users ability to interact with the Threadiverse. Which obviously for some admins is going to be a big plus, to keep costs down by silencing all the "noise" from messy human interactions (although I don't fully understand this: if that is what you want then why not just stop pulling in votes altogether, and simply sort by New?) but the manner in which this implementation has been rolled out... leaves PieFed open to an immense amount of criticism.

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[+] rimu@piefed.social -25 points 2 months ago (16 children)

The short version - 10 people (0.02% of us) were casting 60% of all votes. I stopped it.

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[–] Eldritch@piefed.world 31 points 2 months ago (2 children)

You say that like it needed to happen. Sure some people may be too liberal with their votes. Perhaps though those little stray upvotes to people who otherwise wouldn't have gotten much of anything might mean something. Might even mean a lot. Some people are always going to have an outsized influence in communities. And you cannot have a flourishing community by trying to eliminate that.

I'm all for eliminating coordinated Mass voting. But I think limiting your most active participants is a shooting yourself in the foot sort of move.

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[–] Rose@lemmy.zip 13 points 2 months ago (1 child)

It's probably true that the Threadiverse is run mostly by power users, but that's not a flaw that should be addressed with technical limitations. It's just a matter of general inactivity.

I set up my Epic Games community years ago, but it has attracted less than a handful posters. MeanwhileOnGrad gets a lot of engagement but many posts are from cm, and most are probably from just a few users, while goat was the only moderator until becoming inactive recently. Again, just a matter of the Threadiverse barely growing (as evidence by the total MAU number being the same as 3 years ago) and consisting mainly of lurkers rather than something to pin on the ones who are actually active.

There's no question that PugJesus is not a bot, so if the limit hinders them, I'd have no reason to doubt that or want to tell them to just use the platform differently. If we are to talk disparity, people from Hexbear and the like tend to use alts, so they're the ones to benefit from the change.

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[–] Eldritch@piefed.world 17 points 2 months ago

It's just kind of bad policy in general. As someone who moderates a community or two. I tend to upvote most engagement. It's just really a basic way to encourage engagement. It hasn't traditionally cost you anything. And when people see other people responding to their posts it makes them want to post more. Etc. If you have a number of communities and you do this. It will quickly blow through your limit in this case.

To be clear. I think rimu has good intentions. But to be further clear. I think they also rush into things like this. Looking at things from a purely numbers perspective while neglecting the human perspective. Programming and numbers are very logical. People are anything but.

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[+] lvxferre@mander.xyz 25 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 15 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Or, it would be fine to discard people's votes in the sense of a new scoring algorithm that discounts them. That would be opt-in to a new feature that those of us who don't want it could simply ignore.

But to arbitrarily simply THROW VOTES AWAY? Damn that's unfriendly. Especially when the culture on the Threadiverse has been absolutely begging for activity since before the Rexodus even, while now all of a sudden in less than a week that virtue turned sour and actively became a vice?

Tbf there may be stuff that I am unaware of - like a coordinated campaign to make Russia look good at Ukraine's expense? THAT I think most people could agree with deserves shutting down. But upvotes of cat pictures? LET THE CAT-VOTES COMMENCE! i.e. a signal, conveying that...

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[+] lvxferre@mander.xyz 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

If votes were made public, then people could make informed decisions on whether to block the top voters - up or down. Votes are inherently public data anyway, just hidden from view by most interfaces.

Alternately, we already have an Attitude score, just add a new Engagement score to highlight people who engage more vs. less? If people want to block users who engage a ton with posts, they can again make an INFORMED DECISION as to whether they want to do so.

As it is now though, PieFed hides downvotes (merging them together with upvotes), blocks lemvotes.org to hide all voting data from PieFed.social, and now full-on throws these additional contributions into the garbage bin. All of which would be fine, if they had been transparently performed. However, I note the language of "Newbie friendly: Yes" for Piefed.social at https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser, which would seem to imply that someone coming in from Reddit could readily adopt this as their social media platform? The truth though is that they need to read a fair bit about the culture and various sub-cultures here, and most importantly read the unwritten rules, like how this is not aimed to be a social media replacement (which is HUGE news to me btw!!!), and instead... I dunno exactly, but maybe it's aiming to become a Mastodon replacement? Or an old-school forum board one, just federated? It can be whatever it wants, but IMHO it needs to actually SAY WHAT THAT IS, or else risk immense disappointment when people find out the hard way.

As PugJesus did, though many others now will be spared that, by avoiding PieFed in the future?

And I need to face facts myself: we are a Linux forum, and we will never be anything else. I've gone back to Reddit over the last couple of days and rediscovered what having CONTENT is like!! Whole swaths of events happening in the world that you never hear so much as a whisper about here. Rarely - I could count on one or two hands - you see someone sharing true OC like a comic artist, but the vast majority of "content" in this place seems to just be circle-jerking. Do you think I am wrong in these musings? The ONE thing that (I thought) it had going for it was it being more open and welcoming. And maybe some instances - like blahaj - still are, but PieFed.social seems to be signaling HARD that it is not interested in "fluff", and now wants to be serious (like Mastodon), despite having next to no actual content to offer in that regard? I desperately wish that I am wrong here...

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[+] lvxferre@mander.xyz 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 4 points 2 months ago*

But frankly, I don't know either what PieFed is "trying" to be.

I no longer feel that I know this either. Maybe it wants to become more like nodeBB and Mastodon? It's definitely a departure from Reddit though, which again is fine but that fact being unannounced is what troubles me. Plus in the past Rimu has marketed it as a replacement for Lemmy, though I suppose that is up to heavy interpretation.

What are its core values and principles? And if not like Reddit, then why Reddit-shaped? Its visualization leads people to have certain EXPECTATIONS, whether it desires that to have occurred or not. Form typically follows function, so if deviating from them... what then?

because people here are a bit more similar in what they want to discuss

Rimu would seem to vehemently disagree. And legitimately people's needs fluctuate - sometimes you just want to unwind by watching some memes, while other times you can be more in the mood for a deeper conversation. Part of what I am saying here is that a more Reddit-esque general purpose solution has worked out well for us all so far. Now it seems like Rimu is wanting to offer additional "specialization", both by building it straight into the code (this recent controversy due to it having been offered as an opt-out rather than opt-in feature!!!), and by - with zero advanced warning & barely having announced it at all - suddenly deploying onto the flagship instance PieFed.social.

As we aim to "specialize", suddenly all these questions begin to become crucial (such as who are we and what do we want out of this platform), which previously when we were still more general-purpose were irrelevant.

On a general-purpose platform, we all got along just fine. But now if some things are "bad" that were previously "good", conflict inevitably arises.

And it's so confusing to people how sudden this all is, as it takes them time to absorb it all - e.g. how much of this specialization is able to be be set aside, like will PieFed.zip and .ca and .world be more welcoming to memes / "low-effort" content? while in contrast is PieFed.social now no longer mere not desiring such but becoming actively hostile to it? and making that the DEFAULT behavior in the code no less!!! We thus now need statements from PieFed.ca, .zip, .world etc. as to whether they support this new trend towards active hostility towards heavy upvoters. But again, this is all so new and sudden, that I would wager that many PieFed admins didn't even know this was coming up, so are unprepared for this.

This sudden deployment is a MAJOR part of the problem. Especially buried as it is in a v1.7 - like this hasn't been treated as the major backwards compatibility breaking change that it is, like I could see something like this in a 2.0, but buried in a 1.7 with hardly any explanation at all?

I would like Rimu to read more Machiavelli. It would help PieFed survive longer.

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