A few people in the other thread assumed that it was required to fork the code to disable those filters. That’s not the case, the filters can be configured, and are off by default.
To hide the reputation system, here’s a line of CSS that admins can add in the admin area to hide it for every user
That CSS line can also be used by any user wanting to hide the score at the user level.
The reputation ratings of users are purely based on downvotes received, it’s not really opaque.
The 4chan thing again, can be turned off.
The reputation/attitude system is not concealed at all.
That isn’t true - the comment filters also dock users reputation points, and without any notification to users that it’s happening.
None of this is presented to users - that’s the definition of opaque. They’ve shoehorned these features into their code without any notice to other users or instance admins, and have provided no way of notifying anyone of what is happening on the backside that might effect how content is handled or federated.
All of this irreparably injures the reputation of not just the piefed implementation but of the broader fediverse.
This can be turned off by instance admins who would see this in their settings. I agree maybe a public-facing form here could be of use though.
There’s nothing in the code that I can see that indicates that any of the penalties are undone by turning off the filter - but that’s kind of the point. They’ve introduced a new metric that thumbs the scale of content visibility that’s hard-coded and inscrutable to everyone but those with knowledge of the codebase, and that makes the entire project and the devs who made those choices un-trustable.
Is there a version of their reputation system that’s less objectionable? Sure. But it would need to be exceedingly transparent with clear documentation on how to configure, alter, and revert if there’s a mistake made. But there’s nothing here that indicates the devs of piefed are willing or capable of transparency or even just clear documentation.
Have you or anyone attempted to ask rimu about this? I don’t ever recall any piefed instance owner asking this.
He has already altered or rolled back a ton of functions due to scrutiny.
I’m not collaborating with a developer who has it out for the platform I’m working to improve. If he wants to fix the shit he broke, he can.
Then I don’t know what you expect. He does respond to criticism.
It 100% was! no one outside of the people who coded for piefed even knew this was a thing until the recent posts, if it is such an important part why isn’t it stated clearly and upfront!!!
Rimu literally wrote about it a long time ago. All instance admins would also know about it.
https://join.piefed.social/features/
Also, everyone can see the little exclamation points on accounts that are heavily downvoted from Piefed.
This is like hiding changes in a 500 page TOS - is everyone who is impacted by this code going to know to look at this thread any time a new way of fucking with user reputation calcs is introduced?
Absolutely not.
Every single instance admin will know about it too. The reputation/attitude system did not just get quietly added a week ago.
Is there any indication to users interacting with those instances that their content is being limited by metrics that may or may not be visible to them, and by rules that may or may not be documented anywhere but the piefed codebase?
These are wildly hostile features to anyone not using piefed, and it’s feeling a bit like that’s the point.
The reputation system doesn’t shadowban content. You don’t get comments silently autoremoved for having a low reputation. You don’t get throttled either.
That’s admin and community dependent - an admin or community can take that reputation metric and use it to automate moderation. There is/was an entire community whose whole gimmick was auto-banning users from every instance for activity across the entire federated network. But beyond that, piefed already drops content instance-wide for as little as a single user blocking another.
if parent_comment.author.has_blocked_user(user.id) or parent_comment.author.has_blocked_instance(user.instance_id): log_incoming_ap(id, APLOG_CREATE, APLOG_FAILURE, saved_json, 'Parent comment author blocked replier') return NoneThe codebase is riddled with shit like this.
There’s no inbuilt system to automation moderating out low reputation accounts to my knowledge. Any instance that would do this would have to be using a third-party tool.
The Piefed system of blocking is more aligned with how most other sites do blocking. Lemmy doesn’t prevent blocked users from replying, but Piefed does. So from Piefed, if it’s working properly, you shouldn’t be able to reply to users who have blocked you. Lemmy doesn’t operate like that, so it just throws out replies. It’s due to different blocking philosophies.