1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
in different social networks I often see a table of fediverse alternatives to centralized social networks like twitter = mastodon and so on, but I noticed that the alternative to reddit is piefed and not lemmy, can someone explain what kind of fediverse project this is, and is it different from lemmy?🤔
I've tried them both along with a few different lemmy instances and found .today on lemmy is my best fit.
Since others have covered the technical angle, I'll say I prefer lemmy from a social perspective. My instance doesn't block other instances, banning users only for extreme cases. I prefer to choose my experience for myself without being ideologically guided by someone else's values.
For all the criticisms of the lemmy developers, their biases don't make it into the code. Instances are run according to the admins and user's wishes, which allows .today to operate as openly as possible. Piefed, on the other hand, suffers from the biases of its developer, who not only blocks users but also instances of admins who don't align with them. They have passed along their ban list to other admins as well, getting users banned for disagreeing with them. That's not the behavior of someone I want running my platform of choice.
Along with that. I, personally, don't like the idea of reputation, low score flags, karma or any system based on the votes of users, since they can be easily manipulated. It feels like Piefed is trying to implement a more intense karma system, which was one of my main problems with reddit. I believe each post and comment should stand on its own merit.
>I prefer to choose my experience for myself without being ideologically guided by someone else's values.
Thank you for expressing my own opinion so succinctly.
Fucking solid take overall, tbh.
I appreciate that, thank you.
Everyone should make up their own minds when it comes to picking an instance, but it's important to know who's holding the reins.
No but I mean, I think this is an important conversation to have, which is hard in this intellectual climate, because everyone seems so entrenched and the only ones who don't seem to be are skeptics (although I fucking hate that term because it too has been usurped by self important douchebags who think being a skeptic means being critical of everything that doesn't happen to suit their personal dogma, kind of like how conservatives who can read and write call themselves libertarians- because it's a cooler subclass to belong to that basically believe the same thing but how the fuck did I get caught up in this tangent, anyway), a dying breed.
(/ Me, an intellectual)
Isn't PieFed's low score tag only triggered for users with 90+% downvotes? That seems okay to me, since it would only affect the absolute worst trolls and downvote farmers.
If someone has nine downvotes to one upvote, they're a troll? Or even just ninety downvotes to ten upvotes? Given how easy it is to make multiple accounts, an enterprising user could easily sway that figure for new users or people who don't post often.
Even if you argue the system isn't that bad, it's built on a factor that's easily manipulated, and therefore can be manipulated. It shouldn't exist in the first place.
It's based on total lifetime votes, isn't it? If so, then I'd say yeah. A 9:1 downvote to upvote ratio is insane. Back when karma was public I never saw a legitimate user with karma that bad, not even on the most argumentative and controversial posters (hell, finding a user with sub-60% upvotes was crazy enough). Anyone who averages a ratio that low across all contributions is almost certainly not someone you want around.
I could see a new user getting hit with the tag if their first post is extra spicy, but it would go away after just a few regular comments and I'd hope the system doesn't kick in until a certain post threshold anyway.
Re: vote manipulation, it should be easy to spot bad actors given that Fediverse votes are public. Admins can see voters directly and users can use a site like lemvotes.org to check if votes are legit. A swarm of bots hitting a single user with nine times their total votes up until that point is the kind of thing that would be obvious to instance admins and grounds for bans/defederation.
That's what banning and blocking are for, those are features already up to the users, admins and moderators. So what's the point of the flag in the first place?
In order to notice a flurry of users downvoting the same person consistently, someone would have to be investigating. I'm a mod and I'm not sure how to begin to tell if they happened to be sockpuppets. This means tools would have to be built to monitor where votes are coming from and flag users who vote together (if they don't already exist.) That increases mod duties to patrol a feature because it can be gamed, when, again, there are already tools for users to decide for themselves who they interact with.
I have a hard time donating to the Lemmy developers knowing that money from it goes to run .ml.
If it went to fund a neutral test instance I’d feel much better about it.
FYI only donations via OpenCollective are used for lemmy.ml hosting (see the expenses). Other donation methods are purely to pay for development work.
I never suggested donating to anyone.
I donated to FOSS software that I use and I suggest that every one does too.
Cool.
Good point. If there is a karma system, the main activity for a sizeable (and by definition overrepresented) chunk of the user base will just use the platform to maximize karma, whether for nefarious purposes or just because people treat gamified systems like games. Having real user registrations (so you can block individual users) as opposed to a 4chan like thing, but having no karma system or engagement optimization algorithm in the feed, are the requirements for a healthy forum.
I'd disagree on that:
Slashdot's moderation & metamoderation system was better than any system without metamoderation,
& reddit's idiotic you-can-post-or-comment-to-collect-karma-and-delete-your-post-or-comment-keeping-your-karma .. distortion .. isn't something that's intrinsic to karma-systems: they made it intrinsic to their system by choice, which is different.
I'd have it so that if someone tries karma-farming, the instant they delete the posts/comments, all the karma from those disappears, right then.
( actually, I'd have it so that nothing can be deleted, & revisions are limited to 8 or 16 per post/comment: accountability requires that disappearing-of-history not be permitted )
Also, Slashdot had multiple, not only up/down, kinds of votes..
That's required, too..
Being unable to simultaneously vote that something is wrong & that it needs more eyes on it.. is obstruction.
_ /\ _
It’s not like you can detect “if someone tries karma farming”. If the platform displays a measure of engagement with content that a user posts, users will be driven to post things that get them points. Then if the platform uses said metric to rank content, that unavoidably leads to a setup where users look at content posted for the purpose of getting points. Btw lemmy.world is also not free from this, people repost engagement bait stupid shit from Reddit to asklemmy all the time, and those get many upvotes and comments. But at least the users that post these don’t get any meta-post outcomes.
Absolutely agree that people will always try to game a system that can be gamed.
I would agree with real user registration if it didn't open the ID Verification can of worms. Right now there is no way to make a KYC system airtight, and the risk outweighs the benefit, in my opinion. One user per account (if one could easily switch instances) would make for a healthier social ecosystem, though.
I don’t know about you but I didn’t have to present any form of identification for registering here.
You mentioned real user registrations, which I thought was a hypothetical control you were suggesting. Appologies if I misunderstood, I was explaining my thoughts on it.
The amount of extreme views I've come across made me just leave most of groups and there's very little point opening it up... lemmy simply hasn't got enough people to be blacklisting things. How do you handle it?
You encounter extreme views in your everyday life too, they're just normalized to you. Transphobia is extreme and violent and very prevalent, so is racism. You just perceive as extreme the ones that are very far from the norm, but the norm itself is extremely violent.
Are you blocking instances? You gotta block instances. Also block users aggressively. There aren't that many bad egg users on the respectable instances. It doesn't take too long to really clean up your feed.
Like the one moron that doesn’t use “th” or the other idiot that signed all his posts that they couldn’t be used to train AI.
Straight to the blocklist.
You dont miss much by blocking. If you feel the comments are impacting then 100% block because your experience will be so much better.
So that you can be a base non participatory consumer and never have your opinions challenged or questioned?
People claim they block "extremism" and "hate" but really in most cases they block out anyone who says anything that goes counter to their personal dogma, just like, you know, extremists.
The kind of accounts im talking about aren't the ones that are ever worth engaging with. Its not challenging to my views to have to defend the idea of democracy or explain why authoritarian regimes are bad.
I don't know what you consider extreme views. I don't feel the need to try to handle anything.
If you're wondering how I curate my feed, I only browse by subscribed communities. If I want to find new ones I look at cross-posts, the community promotion coms, or search by interest.
the constant calls for violence towards one's perceived political opponents is pretty extreme.
i see it here on a daily basis, even with several instances blocked.
and i notice the people who have those extremist views... will tell you there are no extremist views here. because well, to them calling for murder and death and dismemberment of people they don't like, is normal. and if you don't agree, they feel they have the right to kill you too.
I don't see these things.