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.
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.
I don’t know any other site that allows blocked users to reply to the blocking user but deletes the reply on the backend server for everyone on it.
But regardless - that decision was made unilaterally by piefed and corrupts the federation of the rest of the network. Huge holes of mis-matched comment threads are being created everywhere because piefed chose to implement a destructive blocking system rather than a front-end filter, or by working with the other implementations on a solution that doesn’t misalign data across the network.
I understand that you agree with how piefed restricts certain content - my point is that the way piefed has implemented those features corrupts the integrity of the entire network. They’ve made it clear that they have no interest in collaborating with the other developers, even if it means creating incompatibilities between the integrations to the point of functional defederation.
“Move fast and break stuff” isn’t something anyone should be aspiring to.