• cabbage@piefed.social
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    7 hours ago

    Piefed is Lemmy with cross-posts collapsed to one thread, and controversial developers (moderation defaults)

    Would love to hear which moderation defaults of PieFed are so controversial. Your phrasing seems to indicate that Lemmy developers’ support for Putin and Xi Jinping is no more controversial than Piefed developers’ preference to silence trolls and fascists.

    The rules for Piefed.social are available here. The software Piefed ships with some default moderation options enabled, which can be disabled should the server admin choose to do so. I think having stricter moderation enabled by default when people set up a new server that they may or may not know how to manage effectively is obviously a better choice than to set the default to “anything goes”.

    • Shifty Eyes@leminal.space
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      4 hours ago

      https://lemmy.world/post/41022485

      https://piefed.social/post/956553

      “Due to feedback from a wider audience than before, some of the idiosyncratic features that I built because of my personal obsessions have been made optional and OFF by default, such as the 4chan meme filter, meme communities being flagged as ‘low quality’ and so on”

      The piefed dev made some biased decisions, owned up to their mistakes, fixed it, but lost the trust of many users.

      This is what drove me off of piefed and back to a lemmy instance.

      One more issue: https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/

      Again, straight from the dev:

      "You can be pretty sure anyone with 1488 or even just 88 in their user name is a nazi, for example.

      Speaking of which, PieFed has an optional approval queue for new registrations. New accounts with “88” in their name are always put in a different /dev/null queue that leads nowhere. The UI tells them they’re waiting for approval but that approval will never come."

      So the dev is shadowbanning people born in 1988 or of asian descent that like the number 888888

      https://sonofchina.com/what-does-888-mean-in-chinese/

      This type of hamfisted moderation turned many people off of the platform.

    • Fushuan [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 hours ago

      The fact that they are implemented in a code level is scary. Even though I disagree with the political views of the Lemmy Devs, the controversial views aren’t reflected in the product they coded, whereas in pie.fed it’s hard coded. Like, why not let instance admins configure those moderation things? Last I read about it there were some filters hard coded in the code that not even admins were able to change if they didn’t change the code itself.

      If the default can be changed now, cool. It’s still pretty scary that it’s an opt out feature that had to be changed from forced to opt out though. Again, as much I disagree with the political views of Lemmy Devs, those views didn’t leak into the code of their product. How they moderate ml and such is another thing, I am talking about the code itself.

      • cabbage@piefed.social
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        7 hours ago

        Again, what exactly are you talking about?

        Which computer software is ever not implemented on a “code level”?

        The lead developer recently started a thread in the Piefed meta community specifically to open for people to ask questions about these things. In full:

        I have received word that there are people combing through the PieFed code looking for anything that might be harmful. This is excellent and can only make PieFed better and less harmful.
          We appreciate their interest in PieFed and look forward to answering any questions and showing people around the code. Please join us at https://chat.piefed.social or https://matrix.to/#/#piefed-developers:matrix.org.

        There’s no need to listen to rumors and amateur speculation when we’re right here and happy to help. Come on in, the water’s fine!

        Nobody in the thread managed to come up with an even remotely critical question. I’m not in the chat so I’m not sure if there were any interesting discussions there, but it’s safe to say it’s hard to find the weird conspiracies floating around reflected in the actual development.

        If you have an issue, ask in !piefed_meta@piefed.social. If the community agrees your concern is valid I can guarantee you it’ll be addressed.

        There’s also the question of what exactly would constitute controversial moderation. If we could hard code out fascists, stalinists, and misogynists, I would be entirely in favour. There’s no need to supply these people with tools for their nonsense. My only issue with it is that it’s not realistic without generating false positives. I don’t speak for Piefed here though, just my personal opinion.