#piefed — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #piefed, aggregated by home.social.
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Here are some interesting people you might want to follow
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Here are some interesting people you might want to follow
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PieFed v1.7.11 is released - Finding and adding people to follow, posts from RSS feeds and more
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PieFed v1.7.11 is released - Finding and adding people to follow, posts from RSS feeds and more
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PieFed v1.7.11 is released - Finding and adding people to follow, posts from RSS feeds and more
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PieFed v1.7.11 is released - Finding and adding people to follow, posts from RSS feeds and more
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PieFed v1.7.11 is released - Finding and adding people to follow, posts from RSS feeds and more
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Open source runs on good faith
When we talk about free and open source software it’s usually in technical terms – the source is available, anyone can inspect it, fork it, change it or contribute. But all those things only work and make sense in the context of a minimum level of honesty, good faith, reciprocity, patience and mutual recognition of each other’s humanity.
Trust and good faith
Contributors implicitly trust each other to:
- truthfully describe bugs
- not waste maintainer’s time with intentional distractions
- make code submissions intended to improve the project
- Give PRs the review they deserve
- not exploit undisclosed vulnerabilities
- and on and on.
There’s a lot of trust going on. No one assumes everyone is totally trustworthy but there is a baseline of trust that is necessary in order to function at all.
In an ideal world, contributors would also give others the space they need to understand things, appreciate each other’s different backgrounds, abilities, pressures and amount of free time. Ideally we would apologise, reconsider and change our minds sometimes.
But we’re all human – we make mistakes, we have bad days, we rub each other the wrong way. When these inevitable parts of life happen the project’s good vibes bank account needs to be full enough to absorb those shocks. There needs to be a safety margin so that there aren’t too many straws breaking camels’ backs. Phew, three metaphors in one paragraph! This buffer makes ongoing collaboration possible over time. A healthy project allows someone to occasionally be wrong, awkward, inexperienced, tired or ill without immediately turning that event into a judgement about their character. When someone makes a decision and other people jump to conclusions about transphobia, ableism, etc then it becomes a determinant of someone’s moral value. And that’s toxic. We need to recognise one another as human beings deserving of reasonable grace. Grace in the sense of how we interpret mistakes and disagreements – not as an obligation to tolerate behaviour that makes participation impossible for everyone else.
Openness creates opportunities for attack
The same transparency that makes open source so awesome also provides easy ways to attack it and a great source of material that can be selectively presented to build a narrative.
Code, commit messages, issue discussions, moderation decisions, chat conversations and design docs can all be taken out of context and presented as evidence of something. A code snippet can be selected without other code that determines how it functions, a screenshot of a real chat conversation can be cropped, a flaky LLM-generated security finding can be published and treated as if it was a confirmed vulnerability (all of this was done to PieFed). Selection, omissions and framing make all the difference.
Don’t get me wrong here – criticism is good and necessary. But there is good criticism that is an attempt to understand and improve the software and then there is bad criticism that is just an attempt to construct a damaging narrative regardless of the truth. Good criticism is true, contains relevant context, represents uncertainties as uncertainties and presents an opportunity for improvement.
And here’s the rub
Both the friendly culture with its safety margin and the openness are needed for the project to live. So to attack an open source project you don’t need to hack its software or disrupt it on a technical level – when someone makes people distrust the software, its maintainers, moderators, security or the motives of the people involved then that causes lasting damage. When people stop seeing each other as humans and instead start calling each other things like “transphobe” or “zionist” or “fascist” then there is no buffer, no room for compromise or giving each other the time to understand things. When someone is reduced to a subhuman label, any and all attacks on them are justified.
If you can decrease the safety margin of a community and at the same time use its openness against it, you have a really powerful strategy for collapsing it.
This isn’t just about PieFed
Some of a FOSS maintainer’s most valuable assets are their time, reputation, motivation and the willingness to continue doing the work even when it’s not fun. Bad-faith campaigns impose costs on those resources even when the underlying accusations are weak. Remember “Flood the Zone”? It takes waaay more energy and time to debunk a false narrative than it takes to construct and spread a false narrative. For example it’s really easy to claim “PieFed secretly hardcodes a blocklist” but disproving it requires
- finding the relevant code
- explaining it
- showing configuration
- demonstrating the UI
- answering follow-up claims
- dealing with people who never saw the correction, for months after.
Due to our natural love of controversy and negativity a false allegation can reach thousands of people while the boring truth might only reach a fraction of them.
Beyond just PieFed, in general we need software for the fediverse to be FOSS software, in order to perform its power-diffusing function – closed source centralizes power (to the developers and owners of it) which is antithesis to what the fediverse is trying to achieve. But if building and maintaining an open source federated service is socially toxic and every moderation decision or disagreement can become an attack on an administrator’s character, fewer people will be willing to take on that role. Protecting the fediverse means protecting not only the technical infrastructure but also the culture of good faith and grounded humanity that allows people to keep building and running it.
What now?
There will always be trolls and bullies, that’s just the internet. We can’t expect that to change.
I hope that people who want to see the fediverse thrive can show more solidarity when they see someone being attacked. There is a risk the mob will turn on them too but if everyone keeps taking the easy way out, doesn’t ask for receipts when allegations are made and immediately trusts the way those receipts are framed then things aren’t going to get better.
Fediverse maintainers don’t deserve immunity. But when you see an allegation ask yourself whether the claim is verifiable, is there another possible interpretation, what are the motivations of the accuser and has the accused been given a real chance to respond.
Please.
#FOSS #piefed -
Did PieFed 'steal code' from Pylova? Let's look at what happened
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Did PieFed ‘steal code’ from Pylova? Let’s look at what happened
This is my first open source project, apart from tiny bits of code that no one ever paid any attention to. Maybe I don’t know how to do open source properly, maybe I made a mistake here. Let’s find out.
A few months ago, someone made a new fork of PieFed, which they called ‘Pylova‘. In the first few days of it’s existence the developers of the fork were very enthusiastic about it and did a lot of interesting and useful work.
I had a browse of what they’d done and saw something cool that I wanted PieFed to have too – some improvements to cross-posting functionality and two new themes. Thinking “we’re both open source projects here, it’s fine to copy code between AGPL open source projects, right?” I went ahead and did exactly that. I genuinely believed I was exercising the rights that the AGPL grants us.
Here is the cross-posting code I copied, by generating a .patch file from the pylova repo:
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/4020ca1688069adf74c682fc9ca89adfee09e4c9
See how it has quokkau in the top left? That’s the original author there. I guess that was embedded in the .patch somehow. I didn’t give it too much thought as it didn’t seem important at the time.
Then I copied the themes:
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/785b15fde4a439c8a92f16eea5c2ff166fe3b7a5
This time I copied the code using copy and paste, by selecting the text in the browser and pasting it into my IDE. Unlike the complicated code in the first batch, I really just wanted the entire contents of the two styles.css files and it seemed simpler to do it that way. Unlike the first batch, this didn’t put quokka as the author in the git repo. Thinking nothing of it, I deployed the code and got on with other things.
Time passes…
A week later a third party told me that the Pylova developer(s) were very unhappy that I had copied some code. Something about not giving proper attribution and that I stole code. I was very surprised and a bit confused. The header of the theme files I copied didn’t have any attribution/copyright/author statement (and still don’t) so there was no attribution statement to preserve.
Seeking to avoid any problems and angst I immediately removed that code from PieFed. Here are the commits where I did that:
Removed ‘allow cross-posting of images’: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/fcac0f20b65a782c3fe73dd2b6fa985b8a2f152a
Removed quack and groovebox themes: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/616375673795e0fa86fb79bd8ecfb2ff982e4b59
I copied code from an AGPL repository, into my AGPL repository, believing I was permitted to do so. The original files contained no attribution notices. When I learned that the author objected, I removed the code. I still believe that calling that “stealing” gives a very misleading impression of what happened.
Verdict?
Perhaps I was clumsy and ham-handed with my work in this situation? Perhaps I didn’t follow social conventions about how FOSS projects are supposed to work together? I hope my corrective action was enough. What do you think?
Regardless, I am sorry for any problems I caused for the Pylova project and will not be doing that again. I wish them well with their fork.
#agpl #FOSS #piefed -
Did PieFed ‘steal code’ from Pylova? Let’s look at what happened
This is my first open source project, apart from tiny bits of code that no one ever paid any attention to. Maybe I don’t know how to do open source properly, maybe I made a mistake here. Let’s find out.
A few months ago, someone made a new fork of PieFed, which they called ‘Pylova‘. In the first few days of it’s existence the developers of the fork were very enthusiastic about it and did a lot of interesting and useful work.
I had a browse of what they’d done and saw something cool that I wanted PieFed to have too – some improvements to cross-posting functionality and two new themes. Thinking “we’re both open source projects here, it’s fine to copy code between AGPL open source projects, right?” I went ahead and did exactly that. I genuinely believed I was exercising the rights that the AGPL grants us.
Here is the cross-posting code I copied, by generating a .patch file from the pylova repo:
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/4020ca1688069adf74c682fc9ca89adfee09e4c9
See how it has quokkau in the top left? That’s the original author there. I guess that was embedded in the .patch somehow. I didn’t give it too much thought as it didn’t seem important at the time.
Then I copied the themes:
https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/785b15fde4a439c8a92f16eea5c2ff166fe3b7a5
This time I copied the code using copy and paste, by selecting the text in the browser and pasting it into my IDE. Unlike the complicated code in the first batch, I really just wanted the entire contents of the two styles.css files and it seemed simpler to do it that way. Unlike the first batch, this didn’t put quokka as the author in the git repo. Thinking nothing of it, I deployed the code and got on with other things.
Time passes…
A week later a third party told me that the Pylova developer(s) were very unhappy that I had copied some code. Something about not giving proper attribution and that I stole code. I was very surprised and a bit confused. The header of the theme files I copied didn’t have any attribution/copyright/author statement (and still don’t) so there was no attribution statement to preserve.
Seeking to avoid any problems and angst I immediately removed that code from PieFed. Here are the commits where I did that:
Removed ‘allow cross-posting of images’: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/fcac0f20b65a782c3fe73dd2b6fa985b8a2f152a
Removed quack and groovebox themes: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/commit/616375673795e0fa86fb79bd8ecfb2ff982e4b59
I copied code from an AGPL repository, into my AGPL repository, believing I was permitted to do so. The original files contained no attribution notices. When I learned that the author objected, I removed the code. I still believe that calling that “stealing” gives a very misleading impression of what happened.
Verdict?
Perhaps I was clumsy and ham-handed with my work in this situation? Perhaps I didn’t follow social conventions about how FOSS projects are supposed to work together? I hope my corrective action was enough. What do you think?
Regardless, I am sorry for any problems I caused for the Pylova project and will not be doing that again. I wish them well with their fork.
#agpl #FOSS #piefed -
What PieFed blocks out of the box - and how to unblock it
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What PieFed blocks out of the box - and how to unblock it
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What PieFed blocks out of the box - and how to unblock it
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What PieFed blocks out of the box – and how to unblock it
PieFed has a dizzying array of settings and options that instance admins can tweak. Most of them have obvious and sensible default values but some of those have been a bit controversial, especially to do with what gets blocked by default. In this post I will explain what those are and how you can set them to your liking.
During initial setup of an instance
Initial defederations
During the initial setup process there is a series of messages printed on the screen: “
Added banned instance xyz, added banned instance abc, etc” followed by “Manage banned instances at /admin/federation.” The list of initially defederated (banned) instances is:‘anonib.al’, ‘lemmygrad.ml’, ‘gab.com’, ‘rqd2.net’, ‘exploding-heads.com’,
‘hexbear.net’, ‘hilariouschaos.com’,
‘threads.com’, ‘noauthority.social’, ‘pieville.net’, ‘links.hackliberty.org’,
‘poa.st’, ‘freespeechextremist.com’, ‘bae.st’, ‘nicecrew.digital’,
‘detroitriotcity.com’, ‘gregtech.eu’,
‘pawoo.net’, ‘shitposter.club’, ‘spinster.xyz’, ‘catgirl.life’, ‘gameliberty.club’,
‘yggdrasil.social’, ‘beefyboys.win’, ‘brighteon.social’, ‘cum.salon’, ‘wizard.casa’,
‘maga.place’, ‘lemmychan.org’View related source code. As the message suggests, admins can go to the Federation part of the Admin area to change which instances you federate with at any time.
The public can see what defederations an instance has by clicking on the ‘Instances’ link in the footer of any page.
Initial domain blocks
In PieFed domain blocks are used to limit what people can link to when doing a link post.
Straight after setting up initial defederations the next message new admins see is “
Added 'No-QAnon' blocklist, see https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon. This can be reversed at /domains/banned using the 'unban all' button.” The No-QAnon list is a big list of fascist and conspiracy theory websites that any self-respecting social network should have banned years ago. View source code.After that new admins will see a message “
Added 'Peertube Isolation' blocklist, see https://peertube_isolation.frama.io/. This can be reversed at /domains/banned using the 'unban all' button.” This is a list of far right PeerTube instances and the list is maintained by Framasoft, the makers of PeerTube. View source code.To unblock one or all of these domains, click on ‘Domains’ in the footer, then on ‘Banned domains’ then the ‘Unban all’ button.
These domain blocks lists are imported once ever, during initial setup and there is no ongoing sync.
Community federation-starter tool
Initially a new PieFed instance is a very quiet place – no other instances know about it and it doesn’t know about any other instances so there’s no federation happening. Federation starts to happen when people join communities and follow other people but that can be a slow process as each community needs to be added one by one. To speed this up PieFed has a couple of different bulk community-adder tools. Here’s one of them:
With this tool you can type in a popular threadiverse instance and then your instance will go and subscribe to all the communities on there. It’s a pretty blunt instrument and using it risks bringing in a lot of weird stuff you didn’t expect so there is a keyword filter to screen out some of the more jarring communities. The keywords are: ‘shit’, ‘piss’, ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’, ‘cocksucker’, ‘motherfucker’, ‘tits’, ‘greentext’, ‘4chan’, ‘fauxbait’. Any community with those words in it cannot be accidentally added while pulling in dozens or hundreds of others. View source code.
You can still manually add any community, including ones with those words in them (like “[email protected]” or “[email protected]”. Do this by going to the main Communities page and clicking on ‘Add remote community’. View source code.
During new user onboarding
There is a small wizard that new people go through while setting up their account and one of the questions is “How tired of Trump and Musk news are you?”. If “Please make it stop” is chosen as an answer then some keyword filters are set up which will hide all posts with the word Trump or Musk in the title. View source code.
I think this is pretty funny. But also, vital for sanity.
Instance admins can turn this off by going to Admin -> Misc and unticking the “Filter setup during onboarding” checkbox. Also after onboarding people can change the keyword filters in their settings – there’s a “Blocks & filters” area for this.
That’s all folks
As you can see, these defaults are not permanent restrictions and they are configurable. Some of the defaults are opinionated but admins can override them easily.
Software that creates a social environment inevitably makes choices about what kinds of communities it considers acceptable to expose people to. I don’t think it is responsible to make software that leaves newbie instance admins without support in making those choices and PieFed tries to provide that in a visible and configurable way.
#piefed -
What PieFed blocks out of the box – and how to unblock it
PieFed has a dizzying array of settings and options that instance admins can tweak. Most of them have obvious and sensible default values but some of those have been a bit controversial, especially to do with what gets blocked by default. In this post I will explain what those are and how you can set them to your liking.
During initial setup of an instance
Initial defederations
During the initial setup process there is a series of messages printed on the screen: “
Added banned instance xyz, added banned instance abc, etc” followed by “Manage banned instances at /admin/federation.” The list of initially defederated (banned) instances is:‘anonib.al’, ‘lemmygrad.ml’, ‘gab.com’, ‘rqd2.net’, ‘exploding-heads.com’,
‘hexbear.net’, ‘hilariouschaos.com’,
‘threads.com’, ‘noauthority.social’, ‘pieville.net’, ‘links.hackliberty.org’,
‘poa.st’, ‘freespeechextremist.com’, ‘bae.st’, ‘nicecrew.digital’,
‘detroitriotcity.com’, ‘gregtech.eu’,
‘pawoo.net’, ‘shitposter.club’, ‘spinster.xyz’, ‘catgirl.life’, ‘gameliberty.club’,
‘yggdrasil.social’, ‘beefyboys.win’, ‘brighteon.social’, ‘cum.salon’, ‘wizard.casa’,
‘maga.place’, ‘lemmychan.org’View related source code. As the message suggests, admins can go to the Federation part of the Admin area to change which instances you federate with at any time.
The public can see what defederations an instance has by clicking on the ‘Instances’ link in the footer of any page.
Initial domain blocks
In PieFed domain blocks are used to limit what people can link to when doing a link post.
Straight after setting up initial defederations the next message new admins see is “
Added 'No-QAnon' blocklist, see https://github.com/rimu/no-qanon. This can be reversed at /domains/banned using the 'unban all' button.” The No-QAnon list is a big list of fascist and conspiracy theory websites that any self-respecting social network should have banned years ago. View source code.After that new admins will see a message “
Added 'Peertube Isolation' blocklist, see https://peertube_isolation.frama.io/. This can be reversed at /domains/banned using the 'unban all' button.” This is a list of far right PeerTube instances and the list is maintained by Framasoft, the makers of PeerTube. View source code.To unblock one or all of these domains, click on ‘Domains’ in the footer, then on ‘Banned domains’ then the ‘Unban all’ button.
These domain blocks lists are imported once ever, during initial setup and there is no ongoing sync.
Community federation-starter tool
Initially a new PieFed instance is a very quiet place – no other instances know about it and it doesn’t know about any other instances so there’s no federation happening. Federation starts to happen when people join communities and follow other people but that can be a slow process as each community needs to be added one by one. To speed this up PieFed has a couple of different bulk community-adder tools. Here’s one of them:
With this tool you can type in a popular threadiverse instance and then your instance will go and subscribe to all the communities on there. It’s a pretty blunt instrument and using it risks bringing in a lot of weird stuff you didn’t expect so there is a keyword filter to screen out some of the more jarring communities. The keywords are: ‘shit’, ‘piss’, ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’, ‘cocksucker’, ‘motherfucker’, ‘tits’, ‘greentext’, ‘4chan’, ‘fauxbait’. Any community with those words in it cannot be accidentally added while pulling in dozens or hundreds of others. View source code.
You can still manually add any community, including ones with those words in them (like “[email protected]” or “[email protected]”. Do this by going to the main Communities page and clicking on ‘Add remote community’. View source code.
During new user onboarding
There is a small wizard that new people go through while setting up their account and one of the questions is “How tired of Trump and Musk news are you?”. If “Please make it stop” is chosen as an answer then some keyword filters are set up which will hide all posts with the word Trump or Musk in the title. View source code.
I think this is pretty funny. But also, vital for sanity.
Instance admins can turn this off by going to Admin -> Misc and unticking the “Filter setup during onboarding” checkbox. Also after onboarding people can change the keyword filters in their settings – there’s a “Blocks & filters” area for this.
That’s all folks
As you can see, these defaults are not permanent restrictions and they are configurable. Some of the defaults are opinionated but admins can override them easily.
Software that creates a social environment inevitably makes choices about what kinds of communities it considers acceptable to expose people to. I don’t think it is responsible to make software that leaves newbie instance admins without support in making those choices and PieFed tries to provide that in a visible and configurable way.
#piefed -
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RE: https://mstdn.social/@KentNavalesi/117065820340579018
#Mastodon is full of smart, creative people posting about all kinds of interesting things, while #lemmy and #piefed can't seem to get anything off the ground but news and politics.
This is sad, because Mastodonians can easily "cross-post" to lem/pie subs. If you post about a niche hobby or topic, take just a few minutes to see if there are any dead subs you can help revive. It will only expand your reach and make the #fediverse more robust.
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RE: https://mstdn.social/@KentNavalesi/117065820340579018
#Mastodon is full of smart, creative people posting about all kinds of interesting things, while #lemmy and #piefed can't seem to get anything off the ground but news and politics.
This is sad, because Mastodonians can easily "cross-post" to lem/pie subs. If you post about a niche hobby or topic, take just a few minutes to see if there are any dead subs you can help revive. It will only expand your reach and make the #fediverse more robust.
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What PieFed's "social credit system" actually does
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What PieFed's "social credit system" actually does
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What PieFed's "social credit system" actually does
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What PieFed’s “social credit system” actually does
Just like Reddit, PieFed keeps track of how many upvotes and downvotes your posts receive and the net value of all the votes received is called your “reputation” (Reddit calls it “karma”). This is not shown in the UI anywhere (except to administrators), to dissuade the karma-farming behavior common on Reddit. Reputation is not a game or status symbol, it is a mechanic for enhancing trust and safety on PieFed.
Some people have criticized PieFed for this, calling it a “social credit system” similar to the one in China so I thought it’d be good to explain exactly what it does so people don’t need to guess or rely on hearsay.
Background
Recently I did some analysis of voting patterns and found that people using PieFed upvote posts 33 times more than they downvote. We’re a friendly bunch, we want to encourage good contributions, we upvote all the time. In this environment it should be very very easy to have a reputation above zero.
Despite this supportive environment, some people (around 1%) have a negative reputation balance.
People who get downvoted a lot tend to be posting spam, trolling or being exceedingly negative. Sometimes a well-meaning person with strong and well-supported opinions will go ‘against the herd’ and receive unfair downvotes but if they stick around long enough the upvotes they receive for other activity will easily balance this out.
How reputation is used
Spammers
PieFed uses reputation to spot spammers, producing a report to administrators showing the most downvoted content in the last 3 days. This helps admins take action before people report the posts. Consequently, piefed.social is one of the least spammy places on the fediverse.
Administrators can also sort the user list in the admin area by reputation, to find problematic accounts. Also when viewing a list of new accounts, any account with a negative reputation is worth taking a closer look at because it’s usually a spammer.
Trolls
People who get downvoted a lot have a warning icon next to their name, like this:
This warns others that they might not be worth engaging with. The icons are not shown to the person who earned them, to avoid inflaming the situation.
At -3 reputation it’s one orange triangle, at -12 it’s two red triangles.
Roughly 0.4% of active accounts have two red triangles on them. It is exceedingly rare. Most people like that crash around making a mess everywhere then lose interest and go away or get banned.
Direct / private messages
At -10 reputation or lower the account can’t initiate direct messages (although if someone else starts a conversation with them they can reply). Abusive people, who tend to have a low reputation score, often use direct messages as a tool for harassment so this is a safety mechanism.
Trustworthiness
This builds on reputation a bit.
An account is ‘trustworthy’ if they have +100 reputation or are older than 7 days old.
Only trustworthy accounts can initiate direct message conversations. This stops spammers from sending direct messages and stops abusers from making a burner account to send abuse from.
The bio of untrustworthy accounts is not shown to anonymous viewers, to disincentivize spamming links there.
The way PieFed uses the concept of trustworthiness is quite limited. I see this as the beginning of something like what Discourse does but it is not a priority area of development at this time.
Low quality communities
In some communities, which the instance admin designates as ‘low quality’, upvotes on posts do not increase reputation (upvotes on comments on those posts still do, though). Someone who exclusively posts in low quality communities might have a hard time maintaining a positive reputation as downvotes decrease it while upvotes do nothing.
This feature has not turned out to be very useful (I just ban / delete really bad communities) and it’s not used much in practice.
And that’s it
Ultimately, reputation isn’t some gatekeeping tool for participation. It’s just a simple mechanic to help us filter out spam and harassment, while keeping moderation decisions in the hands of real people. To 99% of us, it’s completely invisible.
In the past there were a few more niche situations which dinged accounts for 1 reputation point here and there but it was ineffective and inconsequential (compared to the flood of upvotes most people receive) so those were removed.
I hope this clears things up for people. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments! 🙂
#fediverse #moderation #piefed -
What PieFed’s “social credit system” actually does
Just like Reddit, PieFed keeps track of how many upvotes and downvotes your posts receive and the net value of all the votes received is called your “reputation” (Reddit calls it “karma”). This is not shown in the UI anywhere (except to administrators), to dissuade the karma-farming behavior common on Reddit. Reputation is not a game or status symbol, it is a mechanic for enhancing trust and safety on PieFed.
Some people have criticized PieFed for this, calling it a “social credit system” similar to the one in China so I thought it’d be good to explain exactly what it does so people don’t need to guess or rely on hearsay.
Background
Recently I did some analysis of voting patterns and found that people using PieFed upvote posts 33 times more than they downvote. We’re a friendly bunch, we want to encourage good contributions, we upvote all the time. In this environment it should be very very easy to have a reputation above zero.
Despite this supportive environment, some people (around 1%) have a negative reputation balance.
People who get downvoted a lot tend to be posting spam, trolling or being exceedingly negative. Sometimes a well-meaning person with strong and well-supported opinions will go ‘against the herd’ and receive unfair downvotes but if they stick around long enough the upvotes they receive for other activity will easily balance this out.
How reputation is used
Spammers
PieFed uses reputation to spot spammers, producing a report to administrators showing the most downvoted content in the last 3 days. This helps admins take action before people report the posts. Consequently, piefed.social is one of the least spammy places on the fediverse.
Administrators can also sort the user list in the admin area by reputation, to find problematic accounts. Also when viewing a list of new accounts, any account with a negative reputation is worth taking a closer look at because it’s usually a spammer.
Trolls
People who get downvoted a lot have a warning icon next to their name, like this:
This warns others that they might not be worth engaging with. The icons are not shown to the person who earned them, to avoid inflaming the situation.
At -3 reputation it’s one orange triangle, at -12 it’s two red triangles.
Roughly 0.4% of active accounts have two red triangles on them. It is exceedingly rare. Most people like that crash around making a mess everywhere then lose interest and go away or get banned.
Direct / private messages
At -10 reputation or lower the account can’t initiate direct messages (although if someone else starts a conversation with them they can reply). Abusive people, who tend to have a low reputation score, often use direct messages as a tool for harassment so this is a safety mechanism.
Trustworthiness
This builds on reputation a bit.
An account is ‘trustworthy’ if they have +100 reputation or are older than 7 days old.
Only trustworthy accounts can initiate direct message conversations. This stops spammers from sending direct messages and stops abusers from making a burner account to send abuse from.
The bio of untrustworthy accounts is not shown to anonymous viewers, to disincentivize spamming links there.
The way PieFed uses the concept of trustworthiness is quite limited. I see this as the beginning of something like what Discourse does but it is not a priority area of development at this time.
Low quality communities
In some communities, which the instance admin designates as ‘low quality’, upvotes on posts do not increase reputation (upvotes on comments on those posts still do, though). Someone who exclusively posts in low quality communities might have a hard time maintaining a positive reputation as downvotes decrease it while upvotes do nothing.
This feature has not turned out to be very useful (I just ban / delete really bad communities) and it’s not used much in practice.
And that’s it
Ultimately, reputation isn’t some gatekeeping tool for participation. It’s just a simple mechanic to help us filter out spam and harassment, while keeping moderation decisions in the hands of real people. To 99% of us, it’s completely invisible.
In the past there were a few more niche situations which dinged accounts for 1 reputation point here and there but it was ineffective and inconsequential (compared to the flood of upvotes most people receive) so those were removed.
I hope this clears things up for people.
#fediverse #moderation #piefed -
https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2260099/anti-fascist-piefed-features
Anti-fascist #PieFed features if you're looking for an alternative to #Lemmy or #Reddit
edit: Also #trans friendly features: https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/2260057/trans-friendly-piefed-features -
Anti-fascist PieFed features
https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2260137/anti-fascist-piefed-features
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Trans-friendly PieFed features
https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2260130/trans-friendly-piefed-features
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Trans-friendly PieFed features
https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2260130/trans-friendly-piefed-features
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Anti-fascist PieFed features
Some time ago some fascists took a copy of Mastodon and made Truth Social with it. Arguably the damage caused by Truth Social to the world is greater than the good Mastodon brought to a few of us.
This is my greatest fear, for PieFed. I can’t stop fascists from using software I made but I can make that software so repellent to them that they look elsewhere instead. So far, they have.
Making it repellent requires a pretty good understanding of fascism. Behold, my diagram:
We can see that there are many parts to it and they all inter-depend and support each other. The best interventions will take this holistic picture into account. Some of the rest of this article would seem weak or tenuous without bearing in mind the part it plays in the bigger picture.
Ok, let’s dive into the list of features.
Fascist web site block list
When you install PieFed for the first time it comes with a blocklist of 3000+ fascist, conspiracy theory and fake news websites. Admins are told about this during installation and removing the entire block list can be done with one click.
Before starting work on PieFed I spent years doing disinformation research and that list is the result. Prior to that I was working at the parliament of my country surrounded by the inner workings of politics. All that is to say: this is a high quality block list made by someone who deeply understands the subject matter.
4chan filter
Some people like to take screenshots of funny posts on 4chan and then share those around, perhaps not appreciating how by doing so they are portraying 4chan as a fun and interesting place that people should go to. In reality 4chan is a cesspit of the worst people on the internet and a hotbed of fascism. PieFed detects and reports those screenshots for admin action (usually deletion, but it’s up to you).
This detection is off by default and needs to be enabled in the admin area before it’ll do anything.
Pronouns and more
PieFed includes some trans-friendly features which fascists would find annoying.
- Pronouns
- Transphobia reporting
- Trans flag theme
Refer to the ‘sexual anxiety’ part of the diagram at the top to see why I’m leaning on this so heavily.
Rational Discourse Toolkit
In the sidebar of every page is an ever-changing list of links to resources about deradicalization, fact-checking, fake news, conspiracy theories, media literacy, and more.
I doubt many people click on those links – rather than provide direct utility or benefit to people they mostly serve as examples of the kind of thing that would irritate fascists by their presence and make them feel enough cognitive dissonance that they don’t stay long.
This feature can be turned off in the admin area if its earnestness is too cringy or whatever.
1488 easter egg
The numbers 14 and 88 are of special significance to fascists and are often used together.
Bug reports and discussions in our coding workspace are automatically numbered sequentially so when issue # 1488 came up, I made sure it was used to document how lacking in manhood Hitler was. It’s true, he did have one, look it up.
AI content labeling
It can be argued that AI is a fascist technology being used for fascist ends – decreasing the power of workers, destroying our ability to know truth from fiction, flooding our noosphere with trash. See the ‘Anti-intellectualism’ part of the earlier diagram. Accordingly we need to keep AI-generated content to a minimum or at least let people opt out of it.
Every post can be labelled as having AI content, and people can filter their feeds to exclude it. Just like how NSFW content works.
Community standards
The PieFed project has rules for its flagship instance and contributor guidelines that are anathema to fascism. See https://piefed.social/rules and https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/project_management/contributing.md
Easily find LGBTQ and Activist content
Care has been taken to collate communities which celebrate the diversity and progressive nature of the fediverse. See https://piefed.social/topic/society/lgbtq and https://piefed.social/topic/society/activism. In PieFed topics are presented to new users during onboarding, like Mastodon’s collections feature and are part of the main navigation.
Admins can create the topics that suit what they’re trying to foster and on piefed.social I’ve made a point of choosing a few areas that fascists won’t like.
Managing conflict
There’s no point having good rules if there’s no way to enforce them and PieFed has a bevy of ways to spot bad actors and excellent moderation tools. See https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
Also if you make a big mistake and the crowd has taught you a hard lesson you can do a public retraction and move on:
This works better than deleting your post because if you delete it people won’t know you’ve learned and changed. A lot of people need to learn and change.
In conclusion, enjoy this Pixelfed post I made 3 years ago about fully automated luxury gay space communism – https://pixelfed.social/p/rimu/549149551792993094
#antifa #fascism #piefed #politics -
Anti-fascist PieFed features
Some time ago some fascists took a copy of Mastodon and made Truth Social with it. Arguably the damage caused by Truth Social to the world is greater than the good Mastodon brought to a few of us.
This is my greatest fear, for PieFed. I can’t stop fascists from using software I made but I can make that software so repellent to them that they look elsewhere instead. So far, they have.
Making it repellent requires a pretty good understanding of fascism. Behold, my diagram:
We can see that there are many parts to it and they all inter-depend and support each other. The best interventions will take this holistic picture into account. Some of the rest of this article would seem weak or tenuous without bearing in mind the part it plays in the bigger picture.
Ok, let’s dive into the list of features.
Fascist web site block list
When you install PieFed for the first time it comes with a blocklist of 3000+ fascist, conspiracy theory and fake news websites. Admins are told about this during the installation and removing the entire block list can be done with one click.
Before starting work on PieFed I spent years doing disinformation research and that list is the result. Prior to that I was working at the parliament of my country surrounded by the inner workings of politics. All that is to say: this is a high quality block list made by someone who deeply understands the subject matter.
4chan filter
Some people like to take screenshots of funny posts on 4chan and then share those around, perhaps not appreciating how by doing so they are portraying 4chan as a fun and interesting place that people should go to. In reality 4chan is a cesspit of the worst people on the internet and a hotbed of fascism. PieFed detects and reports those screenshots for admin action (usually deletion, but it’s up to you).
This detection is off by default and needs to be enabled in the admin area before it’ll do anything.
Pronouns and more
PieFed includes some trans-friendly features which fascists would find annoying.
- Pronouns
- Transphobia reporting
- Trans flag theme
Refer to the ‘sexual anxiety’ part of the diagram at the top to see why I’m leaning on this so heavily.
Rational Discourse Toolkit
In the sidebar of every page is an ever-changing list of links to resources about deradicalization, fact-checking, fake news, conspiracy theories, media literacy, and more.
I doubt many people click on those links – rather than provide direct utility or benefit to people they mostly serve as examples of the kind of thing that would irritate fascists by their presence and make them feel enough cognitive dissonance that they don’t stay long.
This feature can be turned off in the admin area if its earnestness is too cringy or whatever.
1488 easter egg
The numbers 14 and 88 are of special significance to fascists and are often used together.
Bug reports and discussions in our coding workspace are automatically numbered sequentially so when issue # 1488 came up, I made sure it was used to document how lacking in manhood Hitler was. It’s true, he did have one, look it up.
AI content labeling
It can be argued that AI is a fascist technology being used for fascist ends – decreasing the power of workers, destroying our ability to know truth from fiction, flooding our noosphere with trash. See the ‘Anti-intellectualism’ part of the earlier diagram. Accordingly we need to keep AI-generated content to a minimum or at least let people opt out of it.
Every post can be labelled as having AI content, and people can filter their feeds to exclude it. Just like how NSFW content works.
Community standards
The PieFed project has rules for its flagship instance and contributor guidelines that are anathema to fascism. See https://piefed.social/rules and https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/docs/project_management/contributing.md
Easily find LGBTQ and Activist content
Care has been taken to collate communities which celebrate the diversity and progressive nature of the fediverse. See https://piefed.social/topic/society/lgbtq and https://piefed.social/topic/society/activism. In PieFed topics are presented to new users during onboarding, like Mastodon’s collections feature and are part of the main navigation.
Admins can create the topics that suit what they’re trying to foster and on piefed.social I’ve made a point of choosing a few areas that fascists won’t like.
Managing conflict
There’s no point having good rules if there’s no way to enforce them and PieFed has a bevy of ways to spot bad actors and excellent moderation tools. See https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
Also if you make a big mistake and the crowd has taught you a hard lesson you can do a public retraction and move on:
This works better than deleting your post because if you delete it people won’t know you’ve learned and changed. A lot of people need to learn and change.
In conclusion, enjoy this Pixelfed post I made 3 years ago about fully automated luxury gay space communism – https://pixelfed.social/p/rimu/549149551792993094
#antifa #fascism #piefed #politics -
PieFed 1.7.9 includes Anubis-like scraper blocking
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PieFed 1.7.9 includes Anubis-like scraper blocking
-
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Trans-friendly PieFed features
Trans people have a lot to deal with and there’s many of them on the fediverse so I’ve taken special care to ensure their voices influence the development of PieFed and have built some features with them in mind.
Pronouns
PieFed displays each person’s pronouns after their name, if they have provided them. Below is a post I made recently, showing mine.
On other platforms people achieve the same thing by putting their pronouns into their display name which achieves a lot of the same thing but is clunky and often looks out of place. PieFed reads pronouns from the profile’s Custom Fields, which federate with Mastodon.
Reporting transphobia
When reporting rule-infringing content one of the preset reasons for reporting is “transphobia”. Every PieFed instance supports and encourages people to report transphobia when they see it – this is not something an admin can opt out of unless they edit the code themselves.
Theme
PieFed comes with a theme that uses the Trans Pride flag colors. I’m not a designer so it’s a bit garish – help wanted!
Logo
piefed.social, the PieFed flagship instance, is currently sporting a Trans Pride flag style logo to support of the trans community on Lemmy which came under attack recently.
At other times the PieFed.social logo has been switched to flags of various oppressed groups or anti-imperialist movements such as Palestine, Ukraine, Tibet and others.
Safety
As a frequently discriminated against minority, trans people really benefit from safety, privacy and effective moderation tools, another strong area for PieFed.
- Abuse often comes through the direct messaging system, so it is possible to turn it off or only allow DMs from people on the same instance, or only from trusted instances.
- Moderation and admin tools on PieFed are far more advanced than similar platforms, enabling the provision of much higher degrees of safety with much less effort and admin burnout.
- Transphobia and fascism are often intertwined so PieFed’s anti-fascist features support and enhance the safety of the trans community on the fediverse.
It feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface
What’s been done so far are all quite obvious things. Any ideas for what comes next?
#lgbtq #piefed -
Trans-friendly PieFed features
Trans people have a lot to deal with and there’s many of them on the fediverse so I’ve taken special care to ensure their voices influence the development of PieFed and have built some features with them in mind.
Pronouns
PieFed displays each person’s pronouns after their name, if they have provided them. Below is a post I made recently, showing mine.
On other platforms people achieve the same thing by putting their pronouns into their display name which achieves a lot of the same thing but is clunky and often looks out of place. PieFed reads pronouns from the profile’s Custom Fields, which federate with Mastodon.
Reporting transphobia
When reporting rule-infringing content one of the preset reasons for reporting is “transphobia”. Every PieFed instance supports and encourages people to report transphobia when they see it – this is not something an admin can opt out of unless they edit the code themselves.
Theme
PieFed comes with a theme that uses the Trans Pride flag colors. I’m not a designer so it’s a bit garish – help wanted!
Logo
piefed.social, the PieFed flagship instance, is currently sporting a Trans Pride flag style logo to support of the trans community on Lemmy which came under attack recently.
At other times the PieFed.social logo has been switched to flags of various oppressed groups or anti-imperialist movements such as Palestine, Ukraine, Tibet and others.
Safety
As a frequently discriminated against minority, trans people really benefit from safety, privacy and effective moderation tools, another strong area for PieFed.
- Abuse often comes through the direct messaging system, so it is possible to turn it off or only allow DMs from people on the same instance, or only from trusted instances.
- Moderation and admin tools on PieFed are far more advanced than similar platforms, enabling the provision of much higher degrees of safety with much less effort and admin burnout.
- Transphobia and fascism are often intertwined so PieFed’s anti-fascist features support and enhance the safety of the trans community on the fediverse. I’ll do another blog post on that facet of things soon.
It feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface
What’s been done so far are all quite obvious things. Any ideas for what comes next?
#lgbtq #piefed -
PieFed is 3 years old today
https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2241694/piefed-is-3-years-old-today
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PieFed is 3 years old today
https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta@piefed.social/p/2241694/piefed-is-3-years-old-today
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Hey #mastodon! Less than 48 hours to sign up for The Button before it goes live!
What is The Button, I hear you ask?
It's a game where you press a button. No, really, that's mostly it.
I made a very silly #webgame that a got a bit out of hand and now we're on to Season 4, with hundreds of players.
You can sign up at https://thebutton.social and sign in with your #fediverse account!
#TheButton #SocialExperiment #InternetCulture #BrowserGame #Gaming #IndieGame #lemmy #piefed #activitypub
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Hey #mastodon! Less than 48 hours to sign up for The Button before it goes live!
What is The Button, I hear you ask?
It's a game where you press a button. No, really, that's mostly it.
I made a very silly #webgame that a got a bit out of hand and now we're on to Season 4, with hundreds of players.
You can sign up at https://thebutton.social and sign in with your #fediverse account!
#TheButton #SocialExperiment #InternetCulture #BrowserGame #Gaming #IndieGame #lemmy #piefed #activitypub
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Less than 4 days until The Button starts!
You can pre-register now at https://thebutton.social for a couple of bonuses when the game starts.
Each season brings with it a new theme and a new way to play!
If you've played before, then I look forward to seeing you again. If you're new... do YOU push the button?
#thebutton #game #fediverse #fedigames #mastodon #lemmy #piefed #social #experiment
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Less than 4 days until The Button starts!
You can pre-register now at https://thebutton.social for a couple of bonuses when the game starts.
Each season brings with it a new theme and a new way to play!
If you've played before, then I look forward to seeing you again. If you're new... do YOU push the button?
#thebutton #game #fediverse #fedigames #mastodon #lemmy #piefed #social #experiment
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You can now block posts based on their flair
You can join /c/technology and then block all the posts in there about Windows, for example. Or join /c/politics and block all the USA news.
In the video I demo this with [email protected]
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You can now block posts based on their flair
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You can now block posts based on their flair