@Vicinus@piefed.zip - Didn't want to post this twice and figured you might miss it considering how deep this conversation is.

How votes are viewed is a user setting, letting anyone choose if they want combined, separate, or a percentage. Is this something you would also like settable as a global instance default choice?

Such a person should have access to a “connectivity health” monitoring tool yes, but I don’t see why it would need to be on a per-post basis. Not having hosted an instance myself, I would naively hope that such a tool already exists, even if it is not graphical?

We mostly use Grafna

Also I occasionally search for PyLova and I love reading this comment chain when I do, thanks for contributing so many ideas.

Probably would have missed it. Appreciate the tag

How votes are viewed is a user setting, letting anyone choose if they want combined, separate, or a percentage. Is this something you would also like settable as a global instance default choice?

Honestly, as long as I can easily enable it, it doesn't matter to me if everyone has it by default (only viewed your instance without logging in). Might be worth a user poll, but I have no idea how wanted that feature is.

FYI I altered my [FR] on Codeburg to reflect you'd already implementing the feature.

We mostly use Grafna

Link doesn't work, but I think I know what it'll look like.

Given both your responses, it seems I didn't conveyed the idea well to OpenStars. My understanding is that an instance sends to the appropriate "hosting instance" a post or comment. My thought is, if it doesn't already happen, have the "hosting instance" send an 'acknowledgement' back to the sending instance. Then, if the comment has been 'acknowledged', the sending instance would put an indicator on the comment (check mark or something) to show "yes, my user, your activity successfully arrived at it's destination."

In my mind, this wouldn't be every instance checking every other instance's user's activity to make sure it federated properly. This would be an instance confirming things for only its own users.

Hopefully that makes sense. I graphical up-time graph is probably nice to have too. I was going to say those are available on fediverse measurement sites, but with a quick look, it seems like that was a Fediverse-Observer (RIP) only feature.

Also I occasionally search for PyLova and I love reading this comment chain when I do, thanks for contributing so many ideas.

Happy to help and thanks for being so responsive, open-minded, and just all around great

Edit: when making my comment to OpenStars, I checked a post I made to the !servo@programming.dev community yesterday, which did not federate (https://programming.dev/c/Servo is missing my post).

I think the “acknowledgement” feature could also help elevate the issue entirely. I’m not sure how to ‘force’ a re-submission of my post, but if an instance didn’t get an ‘acknowledgement’ the instance could check that the ‘"hosting instance” is still receiving and then try resend the post/comment after a certain time interval.

Oh, do you mean the private voting issue?

If it helps, I had previously responded to some of the more controversial points that users had raised a year ago.

Honestly, you could probably lay out a dozen controversial decisions Rimu has made and I wouldn't be able to pick which one I'm vaguely recalling.

I admit to being very wrong here - I thought, and even said publicly - that surely Rimu would reverse course and walk back that decision, as he had so very many others previously.

I thought so too.

He acts like Huffman, treating people as landed gentry on his platform. Which is… the truth!! Hence people have left it, and even more are choosing to simply go to it. Nonetheless, I truly do wish the best to the project… I just no longer have any hope that it will continue, most certainly not like it had in the past.

It's his, but at the same time, being open source, it could very quickly not be (ex. Pylova). As long as there is a solid conversion path, Rimu could one day wake up and find .social is the only Piefed instance.

GET CREATIVE?!?

Rimu not only took away voting, and did so in a way that breaks the ActivityPub model - leaving users to scratch their heads wondering what error had occurred where the arrow turned green but the count did not change - but in response to why people were not allowed to vote anymore, he said to simply move on and do other things besides voting.

Yeah, his communication skills need significant work, which wouldn't be so bad, if he was open-minded, but it really seems, as you're saying, it has to be his way.

... the hidden, third option is simply to not engage with communities located on piefed instances anymore. And bam, just like that, communities such as !nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social had their contributions drop like a rock (I skewed those stats a bit b/c I seemed to forget for a moment and submitted 6 posts before I remembered, as I tried out different 3rd-party apps to see what those experiences were like).

Absolutely. This is what I love about open source and federation. It may take time, but the 'system' routes around 'damage'. Looks to me like Pylova may be the route around the Piefed/Rimu damage.

REALLY! That’s amazing! I would guess a migration over from Reddit. I hope they feel welcomed.

I guess from Reddit too. It's been pretty consistently 100+ new users a day. Given instance "stickiness", I'd say ~60% stick around.

I've seen a couple posts from newbies, the threads look really positive, there still is the allow/block triad conversation/fighting, but it was very minor from what I saw.

About downvotes, I misrecalled: Mia said that it was added to the to-do list to be added for the next release, although that was 3 months ago, and yet I have not seen it added yet.

If you haven't seen her response, it's appears to be a user toggle-able setting, which may turn into an instance setting.

There are a lot of “unfriendly” aspects such as this to the Fediverse. I see some people fleeing now because their instance went belly-up - off-hand I can think of mander.xyz and slrpnk.net and… at least one more that I cannot now recall the name of (their admin team simply listed a single account beginning with “The “, which at least at one point had not posted for years), all of which are having issues. Of course that is simply par for the course for the Fediverse model!

Yeah, it's unfortunate, but I think it could also be an opportunity to figure out problems/frictions and solutions. I think for the worry instances go down, a few things would inspire confidence, for me. Off-site backup redundancy (data), a set up non-profit with financial transparency (finances), and a "succession plan" (admins: if admin people want to leave they can but there is a plan in place to hand things off and replace them).

But less necessary are those bot spam posts made ostensibly to make the place look more welcoming and active and alive - at first glance, but then those accounts (almost?) never respond to anyone’s comment, which sours people and leaves a negative impression of this place as being a ghost town.

Agreed. I think clearly labeling that this a bot post, could be good to feature. I still like seeing articles, even if I don't want to comment on them. Maybe having them separated out as RSS feeds would be better though. I think something is happening with regards to RSS and Piefed, but I didn't look into the specifics.

But… it is simply not worth the effort, when Reddit and FaceBook and Insta and X and Bluesky have REAL (high amounts of) content, so investing all that effort to learn and block what they do not want will yield significantly greater dividends… they seem to think, and by the mantra that “the customer is always right”, they are correct.

One thing I kept hearing from the new users this week, is how calm it is here. Like there is much less antagonism, insults, and rage bait and much more thoughtful discussion and nice interactions. So, I think, the threadiverse will hold some of the new converts until they learn how to curate their experience better.

Thereby if we want to attrack them more, we need to offer such blocking by default, making unregistered bot accounts either outright illegal or at least opt-in rather than allowing them to be opt-out.

Now I would put my hopes into the shareable blocklists to do such.

Yeah, I think "informed default" (like .zip), where the blocks are setup by default, but new users are informed about them and there is an easy way to disable them, if the new user chooses to, is a good path forward.

About your idea: I disagree. An admin that is hosting their own instance is different than someone who is simply using an existing instance. Such a person should have access to a “connectivity health” monitoring tool yes, but I don’t see why it would need to be on a per-post basis.

I mean as opposed to having every single post do this across the entire Threadiverse, at all times.

Anyway, I feel like an admin tool would be a better fit for that situation than changing the way that all posts federated all of the time - if I understood you correctly there.

It seems I may not have conveyed the idea well. So to try again, my understanding is that an instance sends to the appropriate “hosting instance” a post or comment. My thought is, if it doesn’t already happen, have the “hosting instance” send an ‘acknowledgement’ back to the sending instance. Then, if the comment has been ‘acknowledged’, the sending instance would put an indicator on the comment (check mark or something) to show “yes, my user, your activity successfully arrived at it’s destination.”

In my mind, this wouldn’t be every instance checking every other instance’s user’s activity to make sure it federated properly. This would be an instance confirming things for only its own users.

For instance if I make a post to !Fediverse@lemmy.world, even as a mere user (not an instance admin) I can go over to that instance at https://lemmy.world/c/fediverse/ and look for my post there (similarly for comments). I have routinely done that many times in the past, especially from StarTrek.Website that had such horrible network connectivity at the time that I joined it, prompting me to seek out Discuss.Online that has such fantastic uptime due to spectacularly capable admins (including Jgrim the author of Sublinks).

Previously though, I would likewise post something and then getting zero up- (or down-) votes, go seek out why, and discover that my post had not federated. Worse, when it eventually did get federated, it did not appear to others as “new”, and instead looked like it had been submitted several days in the past, at which point people were not alerted to it, and it became buried amidst all the flood of prior posts that had already been engaged with, even though those had not been. It was quite sad, how bad the connectivity of the Threadiverse was 3-4 years ago:-(. These days it is a LOT better!

I'm think the feature I'm suggesting would do away with this "federation uncertainty friction". I rarely go to check other instances to see if my comment or post has federated or not. I'm usually on mobile and this is not an easy maneuver, so I often have a question if my post/comment federated or if I'm only talking to myself. Not a great feeling and definitely reduces the urge to contribute, for me.

I just checked the post I made to the !servo@programming.dev community yesterday, did not federate (https://programming.dev/c/Servo is missing my post). Glad I spent time on that post...

I think the "acknowledgement" feature could also help elevate the issue entirely. I'm not sure how to 'force' a re-submission of my post, but if an instance didn't get an 'acknowledgement' the instance could check that the '"hosting instance" is still receiving and then try resend the post/comment after a certain time interval.

All the credit goes to you who actually bothered to implement them, that's so great to see!!!

I don't know if such an admin tool as you describe already exists - perhaps the grafana one meets that need? - so I will leave it to those who choose to install the code and become admins (even of just a personal instance) to comment further and give feedback.

That said, the community that you pointed to might be in a weird lockdown state, since I noticed that it has zero active mods. See the sidebar on the home instance and then the modlog offers the further knowledge that the only prior mod has been banned from that instance. If you want to revive it, you could appeal to the instance owner and become the new kid of it?

And that situation illustrates the difficulties that people face when coming here: this place isn't quite a ghost town, but it is more empty than it is full. The people that have thrived here so far are those who approach it from an IT hobbiest standpoint and are willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work building it. But most people are not willing or capable to do likewise, which turns many away. The tools are still being built, and definitely lack polish atm.

But we are building them nonetheless (well, Mia is:-P, though we can help with suggestions!), steadily over time. So I am less concerned about current number of MAUs than in seeing the challenges be overcome, such as building these tools. Although that requires funding which in turn requires some level of MAUs, thus I am ecstatic about these subscribable blocklists to help keep people from fleeing this place!! 🤩

That said, the community that you pointed to might be in a weird lockdown state, since I noticed that it has zero active mods. See the sidebar on the home instance and then the modlog offers the further knowledge that the only prior mod has been banned from that instance. If you want to revive it, you could appeal to the instance owner and become the new kid of it?

I was going to take your suggestion, because I doubt it is much mod responsibility, but it looks like programming.dev was having federation issues when I tried to post and the post never made it. Remade it just now and it went through, no issues.

The people that have thrived here so far are those who approach it from an IT hobbiest standpoint and are willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work building it. But most people are not willing or capable to do likewise, which turns many away. The tools are still being built, and definitely lack polish atm.

Agreed. I feel it's currently very much a make your own space and if people come by great, but don't expect or rely on it happening.

But we are building them nonetheless (well, Mia is:-P, though we can help with suggestions!), steadily over time. So I am less concerned about current number of MAUs than in seeing the challenges be overcome, such as building these tools. Although that requires funding which in turn requires some level of MAUs, thus I am ecstatic about these subscribable blocklists to help keep people from fleeing this place!! 🤩

Agreed

I do need to find better language though, so that I don't annoy people when I say that it is sometimes hard to have hope that this place will grow.

Bc really, growth isn't the point?

Though it is necessary, even to remain afloat.

I do need to find better language though, so that I don’t annoy people when I say that it is sometimes hard to have hope that this place will grow.

You may want to try using "feeling language". I've found it helps a lot online and IRL.

Ex: "I feel like that ...", "My understanding of the situation is ...", "To me that ...", etc.

Bc really, growth isn’t the point?

Though it is necessary, even to remain afloat.

Agreed, for all the reasons you mentioned earlier, plus I think it would be nicer if the activity, administrative, and development load was spread out a bit wider (makes it easier on everyone/less burnout, and provides redundancies).

A lot of the problems with Lemmy boil down ultimately to overall lack of moderation. Many people were banned from Reddit for many reasons, among them including an extreme level of toxicity, so the need for such is dire - that is, assuming that our goal is not to provide a safe space for everyone to vent their feelings, and instead to offer a space welcoming to newcomers. The recent thread in the Fediverse community praising the devs of many Fediverse platforms is a great example: it became highly toxic, ultimately being locked.

So (1) we need to identify what we are. Some places, like dbzero and anarchist nexus will choose to become more like 4chan, with the admins themselves literally flinging actual death threats against admins of other instances. Others, like PieFed.Social, will become more actively hostile against such trolling and tankie (and tankie-supporting) behaviors. So there will never be a solution to this step that involves all of us getting onto the same page.

The problem here comes from lack of transparency. Hexbear's Chapotraphouse is fairly open about what it is... though many 3rd-party apps bury the sidebar quote deep into their menus, especially if you encounter a post on All and so you will basically never see it. I do decry the right of places such as Chapotraphouse to exist, but I do think that they need to be labeled properly, with a warning label, so that non-extremist mainstream normal folks do not encounter them unawares, and by virtue of their inclusion and lack of distinction from any other content here, think that the entire Threadiverse is a tankie haven, full of extremists who support genocide and the violent, bloody overthrow of the entire Western civilization.

PieFed made huge strides towards this regard. Most 3rd-party apps barely support any PieFed features that differ from base Lemmy, but at least the browser UX is somewhat better, in some ways.

However, PieFed advancement in this regard seems to have ground to a halt before picking up speed in the opposite direction. But to focus on the former for a moment, e.g. the instance picker (the last time I checked) was very confusing and came nowhere close to explaining what individual users could expect when signing up to an instance. Fortunately PyLova has picked up the slack here and advanced that cause significantly forward. Unfortunately, PieFed seems to be continually actively working against this goal now, making the options more opaque rather than transparent - e.g. any PieFed community on an instance that does not explicitly disable the downvote feature (and which ones have done that? how is anyone supposed to know!?) is shadow-censoring contributions offered from many different software platforms (Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Friendica, Mastodon, etc.), without disclosure of that fact. However, I see no acknowledgement of that fact at e.g. https://feddit.online/auth/instance_chooser, where for PieFed.Social the closest item of explanation offered seems to be "Newbie friendly: yes".

Only after someone has been guided into picking an instance does the futher steps matter, like (2) picking a 3rd-party app (sigh... I guess to most Redditors, this is mandatory?), and (3) helping them sign up to discover new content (this PieFed excels at, at least at the software level even though many instances like PieFed.World do not take full advantage by fleshing out the Topic Areas). Though then comes (4) retaining people, which is where most of our exceedingly poor reputation seems to stem from, as people who jumped through all of the prior hurdles flee this toxic shithole, which simultaneously barely has any content and yet what content it does offer to people unfortunately turns people away due to how toxic it all is. I do think that Rimu had the right idea behind a lot of his social credit features - e.g. if someone is extremely often downvoted, by let's say "like-minded" instances (however that might be defined - e.g. it could be anti-genocide, or it could even be the opposite of pro-genocide, or neutral, or whatever), then their account name begins to come with a warning ️ label, so that people do not stumble into a conversation completely unawares. Not everyone wants this space to be even more like 4chan than it already is - some do, but mainstream normal folks have spoken, and they refuse to come here because it is already too much like it for their tastes.

People demand freedom. Which ultimately means some restrictions must be placed, so as to protect others, e.g. people must not be free to say whatever they want, even against the wishes of the recipients, or else we have no freedom here at all. Voat & nostr already proved that: even the spaces that reputedly values "free speech" the most ended up as wastelands where nobody wanted to venture into, due to having no freedom to not listen to such vitriol literally 100% of the time (without any recourse to block it even for a moment, except to flee entirely).

So now it's a cache-22 where we won't get more content without more people, who refuse to come here. And also they demand 3rd-party apps, whose devs look to me to be tired on working to support new features, especially for PieFed. PyLova might be the single best hope the entire Threadiverse has to grow. We'll see what happens!

A lot of the problems with Lemmy boil down ultimately to overall lack of moderation.

Yeah, I would say we are definitely at a "work-in-progress" level, with a ways to go.

The recent thread in the Fediverse community praising the devs of many Fediverse platforms is a great example: it became highly toxic, ultimately being locked.

I saw the post originally. Going back it looks like FiniteBanjo went to pick a fight. I'm not trying make any judgement on their comments, just that they appear, to me, to wanted to start an argument ("Well, not all of them. Some of them are a stain on this earth."). Not surprised it was locked at that point.

... with the admins themselves literally flinging actual death threats against admins of other instances.

My recollection and understanding of that situation was that it was an inferred threat, that, when confronted, was immediately rescinded and that admin stepped down due to their actions. So, I think, it's a bit disingenuous to use that as a negative against them. To me, they responded appropriately when confronted with how their message was taken (clarification that's not how it was intended and then stepping down from their position of authority).

I believe soon after the .world admins faked "evidence" that the anarchist admins were really fascists trying to sow discord or something (I don't recall the exact allegation, but I remember the evidence being shown and confirmed to be fake). My recollection is Rimu backed the .world admins even after their evidence had been shown to be faked. I want to say that is when Rimu introduced the instance "silencing" feature, to reduce anarchist influence after his and the .world admins' attempts to expel the anarchists with the faked evidence failed.

So there will never be a solution to this step that involves all of us getting onto the same page.

Decentralization. There doesn't need to be, in my eyes.

I do decry the right of places such as Chapotraphouse to exist, but I do think that they need to be labeled properly, with a warning label ...

... the instance picker (the last time I checked) was very confusing and came nowhere close to explaining what individual users could expect when signing up to an instance.

... as people who jumped through all of the prior hurdles flee this toxic shithole ...

On-boarding is a huge gap in my mind. From my view, we basically throw everyone in the deep-end and hope they learn to swim and aren't too concerned with fixing the issue, because we all learned to swim, so why can't they.

I could see an on-boarding that quickly explains the structure (like 2 sentences about decentralization/email-analogy and identifying a users name and instance. Then go into a quick questionnaire (for determining best host instance for them) about what kind of posts they want to see (one of those could be a quoted .ml account, to see if the new user wants to see "triad" content). From there some, basic filtering/block list yes/nos (block-list for spam accounts: yes/no, agentic accounts: yes/no, bot accounts: yes/no, etc.) and interested topics (software, cats, art, etc.). I think that would go a long way in helping get an easier and more welcoming environment (may only be fully possible via Pylova features at the moment (block-lists)).

Unfortunately, PieFed seems to be continually actively working against this goal now, making the options more opaque rather than transparent - e.g. any PieFed community on an instance that does not explicitly disable the downvote feature (and which ones have done that? how is anyone supposed to know!?) is shadow-censoring contributions offered from many different software platforms (Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Friendica, Mastodon, etc.), without disclosure of that fact.

That's a good point I hadn't thought of before. I'm not sure how an instance could keep a user informed without keeping a larger database of community and instance settings. Alternatively, sending that info for each load or interaction the user makes. The larger database sounds much more reasonable, but still daunting and not easily implemented and probably with a significant compute cost.

... whose devs look to me to be tired on working to support new features, especially for PieFed.

This isn't surprising to me. Piefed has 20% of the users Lemmy has (and that increase to 20% is relatively recent) and developer generally want to get paid for their work (especially if they don't have a main corporate job).

PyLova might be the single best hope the entire Threadiverse has to grow. We’ll see what happens!

Yeah, definitely looks to be the brightest hope we have right now. Hopefully, they can keep up a sustainable pace and don't burn out.