AI decision: pay the workers a fair wage.

Investors: a-a-ah, how do we reboot and reinstall this thing?

Edit: ah, finally found it. Bonus addition:

This is the official syntax and should always work.

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t:-P. There’s a bunch of old apps that never bothered to implement it, yet people still continue to use them anyway.

Sometimes you’ll see NSFW tags to accomplish the spoiler effect, on posts anyway (doesn’t work on comments beneath a post).

It’s always a tension between the things that move forward quickly vs. those that remain glacially slow or even half altogether. Like PieFed even has a separate NSFL (gore) tag to distinguish it from NSFW, and numerous options to either hide, blur, show as semi-transparent, etc., and you can pick a different rendering for each (one for NSFW but a different one for NSFL). And this on top of a plethora of features like polls, user and post flairs, hashtags, keyword filtering, user-customizable and shareable Feeds, and so much more. All of Lemmy remains behind in comparison. But even for Piefed, the vast majority of these features are not offered by the vast majority of apps available for the Threadiverse.

I suppose it’s good to have choices. But that entails people making different ones. 😁

Then keep using what you enjoy! 😁

Fair warning that I’ve heard people say that Lemmy 1.0 will break compatibility with old apps. I don’t use 3rd party apps but wanted to offer you that heads-up so you won’t be taken entirely by surprise if it happens.

Your instance also looks increasingly likely to defederate from Lemmy.world too, which even though it now has “only” 50% of all the active people present on the Threadiverse (compared to the 80% that it used to have), nonetheless it also still has sth like 90% of the most popular communities. Your instance would also thereby block the top posters too, like ThePicardManeuver and Sunshine’s PieFed accounts. Even if you aren’t into all the political leftist in-fighting drama, you nonetheless will be affected by it when Lemmy starts looking a lot more empty after that. So you may want to start looking into making an alt, for multiple reasons.

And if you need a recommendation as a place to start, I suggest checking out slrpnk.net. You would still be able to access all the same communities from there, since it’s neutral territory. Please note I have no pony in this race - obviously feel entirely free to ignore, I just offered this as a thought to consider:-).

Wow, that’s an app that I haven’t heard mentioned for like… years. Is it still being actively developed?

@mindfulmaverick@piefed.zip, I assumed that you did but in case you did not know, also check out https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser as a great place to compare Piefed instances (although @blaze@quokk.au, I noticed that Piefed.zip neither appears in any of the multiple Piefed instance pickers that I looked at, nor does any other instance appear in its own listing at https://piefed.zip/auth/instance_chooser - so something seems wrong there?).

There is no real equivalent to that Piefed instance picker for Lemmy or Mbin although https://join-lemmy.org/instances comes closest in spirit - except that the “random” sorting will show either lemmy.ml or hexbear.net something like 90% of the time, despite them being the #4 and #6 highest MAU instances with <2k MAUs each, and if it lies about even what a “random instance” is then I don’t put much trust in what else it may attempt to convey as well. Those descriptions also seem… incomplete as well, in terms of characterizing what goes on at each instance.

Your spoiler tag syntax seems to render properly only on PieFed but not Lemmy web UI, e.g. on programming.dev. Just letting you know!

The Fediverse Observer would be one place to start, for MAUs and whether currently accepting sign-ups or not. I don’t know how to find upvotes enabled or open registrations without checking each one individually.

It almost seems like the majority of content injects news and politics into itself - e.g. memes, comics, and the like - or at least it does happen super frequently.

One of the most active posts this week, in !Technology@lemmy.world, is https://futurology.today/post/10493000 - and just look at how little moderation it has received, with one of its higher comments (10 upvotes, zero downvotes that I saw) being:

Fuck off u little bitch, u won’t be able to build prisons fast enuff for all of us

And here’s one with 81 upvotes that I won’t even repeat here but just offer a link to, as it calls for murder (Luigi-ing): https://lemmy.world/comment/24053139, among many many others with tens of upvotes that call for the guillotine.

Or another post is https://futurology.today/post/10503178, ostensibly about memes and from a science-oriented instance, with comments such as:

He’ll die evnetually. Hopefully it’s slow and painful.

This one about the sitting USA president.

But I, like you, am here. We must have thick skins, or else we block content that we do not want to see - which someone browsing in guest mode won’t be able to do, at least not until AFTER they’ve made an account, and then learned how to do so. You would have to go to Reddit to ask them why “Out of the tens of thousands of people who’ve read our posts about the fediverse site, only a few hundred have signed up.” Surely it won’t be a singular easy to understand reason, but a plethora of them. Among which is how much of a turn-off this place may be specifically to an American centrist or right-wing, possibly even Trump supporting person.

I doubt Lemmy will ever do this - e.g. moderator reports still don’t federate to other instances until the release of v1.0, despite the Rexodus having been several years in the past now. Basically any solution would have to be on top of the software without needing any changes within it. Lemmy puts up full-page advertisements for donations but a lot of that funding goes to running Lemmy.ml and seemingly only very little to actual code development.

Although predictably PieFed already has this functionality, for well over a year now. For one it has hashtags, plus user and post flairs, and for another it has categories of communities where someone can look at e.g. news across all regions, or pick let’s say Europe and then choose from various sub-topics below that. Also, while these Topic areas are defined by the instance admins, the otherwise identical concept of topical Feeds are user-customizeable and even shareable, so someone has likely made what you are looking for already, but if not then you could make it and share with others to benefit from your efforts.

At worst even, say when interacting with existing communities that did not want to actively participate in the process of self-sorting their own content, users have keyword filters that can be used so that you as an end-user can do it entirely on your own. Such community discovery and management concerns are a solved problem on PieFed. I say this full well as someone who had the identical issue you described here when I was on Lemmy, and moving to PieFed solved it for me.

The developers are also extremely receptive to feedback, if you needed still more changes made to the code. I sincerely doubt that you will ever get a solution going using Lemmy - this identical (edit: general) concept has already been asked for many times over the years - but switching to PieFed should easily take care of it, offering multiple possibilities to make finding the content that you want easier.

You could host your own instance (of PieFed, Mbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, etc.) and then you’d simply be sending the user-agent info to yourself.

This issue is discussed a bit in the linked post.

The situation is a bit similar to that for NSFW: if all content is not perfectly labeled, then is the tag worthwhile to exist at all?

And mods will abuse the system regardless - e.g. look at how often Lemmy.ml removes posts citing “rule 1”, despite that rule never anywhere anyway in any language stating that you are not allowed to criticize (or not support strongly enough?) Russia, China, or North Korea (or perhaps soon adding the USA and Israel?). Regardless of platform - Reddit, Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, etc. - mods are gonna mod regardless, and some will be better at that task than others.

Though it is still useful to have “rules”, and use them in communities, even if they aren’t properly implemented in all situations. The alternative being 4chan where anything and everything goes - not everyone is looking for that?

I guarantee you that Lemmy has for multiple years already abused non-AI content in a far worse manner: see e.g. the (non-AI) moderation tool santabot. Even so, Lemmy does not abolish the ability to post things, or to vote on it. i.e. the worst excesses of a thing do not preclude good uses for it. Knowledge that Santabot exists may encourage you to stop participating in the entire Threadiverse, but it does not need to? Systemically, the Threadiverse is fairly good, overall?

And now PieFed offers tools to detect AI content. I guarantee you that it will be abused, somewhere/way/when/how. Though at least now it exists, and can be improved? And we can be a part of that process too, by offering realistic suggestions to the development team, which demonstrably listens to and actively solicits such feedback all the time.

What makes the thoughts strong is that their implementation already exists.

Likewise, PieFed saw a number of opportunities to improve things, and rather than simply wishing that something were so, people expended effort to actually code them up so as to make them REAL, i.e. no longer mere thoughts but actions.

e.g. Lemmy offers a marking/tagging for NSFW, which PieFed expanded so that NSFL (gore) is an entirely separate category. Theoretically I could completely hide all NSFL while blurring the thumbnail of NSFW posts, or vice versa, or make both sets semi-transparent, or whatever. The Lemmy software might offer thoughts and prayers along those lines - e.g. theoretically you could dedicate different communities for each type, or even different entire instances (one for NSFW and a separate instance for NSFL?), or perhaps add standardized keywords (not that Lemmy allows keyword filtering innately, as PieFed does, but in case some 3rd party apps wanted to do so?) to distinguish between NSFW vs. NSFL - but multiple years ago now PieFed birthed that thought into a full-blown solution.

In the same manner, PieFed is far beyond the stage of merely beginning to have a couple thoughts along the lines of dealing with AI content: as that linked posts indicates, 5 months ago it already offered a full implementation of a solution.

PieFed has rather strong thoughts on the subject: https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/1523426/labelling-or-hiding-ai-generated-content.

In short, just as NSFW/NSFL posts or bot accounts are totally fine so long as labeled, so too AI posts are fine… unless unlabeled as such. And if users refuse to label them, then community mods have tools that help them detect and label them for the users.

PieFed’s options for AI content are:

• Show

• Hide completely

• Label as AI

• Make post semi-transparent

This method democratically puts powerful tools into the hands of end-users to individually choose what approach works best for them, rather than e.g. make an authoritive declaration such as defederation of instances that often allow AI content.

The world is a less friendly place than it used to be… especially the interwebs.

Still needs an instance owner who is legally responsible for all the content on the entire site - this way the police know who to come for if there is illegal content like CSAM. At that point, better make sure that the admins are trustworthy individuals who have been vetted more extensively than simply having applied.

But sounds a great way to engender a sense of ownership among mods (& perhaps those admins who were vetted).

Btw PieFed also has several features that implement democratization of moderation, lessening the work that a mod traditionally is forced to do on Lemmy since the end-users can do the thing on their own, aided with software. e.g. if someone wants to see less content about Musk or Trump, then keyword filters provide that option (All, Some, or None), rather than a moderator having to decide for all of the community members at once. Or if someone wants to avoid contentious content, they can hide or just collapse (requiring an extra click to read) comments below a certain (user-definable) score threshold. Or NSFW content can be blurred, rather than simply allowed vs. removed; also NSFW is distinguished from NSFL (gore). Also fwiw, moderator reports federate, and someone is actually notified if their content is removed or if they are banned, plus much more - PieFed already allows much more democratic processes than the more authoritarian-styled Lemmy provides for (I believe there is even a deeper description of administrative roles built right in). So you may want to read about that. See also this article.

However it is accomplished, it sounds like a grand experiment!

I do… NOW!?!

I mean, they can and are doing that right now, haha! 😂

And sometimes they even have a point, buried incredibly deeply, about how we could improve things across the Threadiverse, but it requires so very much effort to translate past all the BS and outright lies (intentional or otherwise) that 99/100 times it simply is not worth the effort. Plus it leaves you drained, exhausted, and burnt-out, without a clear vision of what needs doing in order to move forward.

Which is presumably the very point of much of this drama seeking - to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, in order to “win” their POV by any means necessary (rather than aim for truth as an end-goal and work towards that collectively).

Tbf all of these tools - and Pixelfed more than most - are so very new, and being developed on a shoestring budget using volunteer efforts that are not seeking capitalistic remuneration. And being able to pull in old posts is a very niche feature that affects an instance pretty much only once, upon its initial creation and then never again, so it might not be a top priority for its dev team to implement. Though a lot of teams for Fediverse tools (like PieFed) tend to be quite responsive, and pinging them may help them realize that it needs to be done sooner, i.e. communication of that may be helpful rather than annoying?

Whereas ATproto’s main downsides lay in it lacking “robustness” for the future - what happens when like pretty much every Internet company that ever existed (Google, Meta, Amazon, etc.), they decide to switch from attempts to attract a wider user base to trying to monetizate its content? Suddenly all those ATproto connections become a liability where someone can access the content held hostage therein without having to watch advertisements that benefit the main branch, thereby switching the collaborative model to a competitive one.

ATproto is strictly better in the short term, and will cause much pain later on, as opposed to the Fediverse that has some onboarding and ongoing pains now but to some people offer better hopes for the future of a more unfettered/unconstrained method of interaction between people, where control is placed more democratically into the hands of the end users rather than centralized authorities.

Check this pinned post in the current community: This is not a complaints forum, which among other things clearly states:

If you have problems with an entire instance: Just leave it.

Other communities, such as YPTB, would be a more appropriate forum for this. As it is, this post is merely drama farming.