I am not saying that you should switch to use or even like PieFed, but afaik there is no feature that is "trying to trick users into thinking there's a technical issue with servers", or at least not one that Lemmy and Mbin do not identically share. I would be happy to read about one though if someone wants to point me to it?
e.g. just a few hours ago I recall reading a report where someone was confused why a post did not show up for them on PieFed but it did on Lemmy. The reason turned out to be that the user has been banned on PieFed.social. The key here is that the latter is an instance (a server machine) whereas PieFed is software.
Lemmy instances also ban people too btw. Some Lemmy instances are in fact quite (in)famous for this.
But that is not "trickery", that is simply PieFed (or Lemmy, or Mbin, whatever) working as designed, someone's lack of understanding notwithstanding, and likewise for people who want to cast aspersions onto their tribal "opponent".
All that said, PieFed does have a weird way of blocking all users on an instance. If the devs of Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin could get together an agree on a protocol whereby a signal could be sent that all software platforms would understand and know how to handle... then such maneuvers would not be necessary. Instead, legacy software like Lemmy are not always going to be able to keep up with PieFed's rapid pace of development - e.g. PieFed offers numerous things that Lemmy simply has to shadow-block (with no report of having done so), including polls, user and post flairs, various special features of communities (e.g. automatic deletion of submitted images after a certain time period, usually one year), etc. To be clear this is not "nefarious" activity on behalf of the Lemmy devs, it's just that the software doesn't know how to handle such content, nor do the devs make it a priority to make it do so (why should they?)
And likewise, the ability of Lemmy uses to reply to PieFed users that have instance "blocked" them is one such source of friction between the two software offerings.
If you are thinking of creating a community, it matters far more what instance admins you choose to interact with than what software that instance is running. Especially as some (like quokka, and reportedly soon-ish sh.itjust.works) switch around, while others (like .zip and .world) offer literally both options (Lemmy & PieFed).
I have been known to be a little hyperbolic myself - it does get in the way of clarity, unfortunately. The social media style of communication lends itself more readily towards "slamming" one's "opponent", as opposed to calm rational dialogue to arrive at a truth.
No, Tesseract is a Lemmy alternative front-end UI, it has nothing to do with the OCR, besides sharing the same name.
Also, Tesseract does not actually use a hard-coded list - that turned out to be misinformation by the LLM-written OOP. In actuality, there is a "toxicity filter" that admins can toggle on or off as they please - the polar opposite of a hard-coded feature. (Edit: there seems to be two lists, and while at least one is definitely not hard-coded, the status of the other is less clear, at least to me, and might be hard-coded.)
Don't believe everything that you read on the Internet - it is not all true.
That said, Tesseract is quite opinionated in its views, and instance admins who hold different ideologies than its author might want to actually read about which settings they want to have toggled or not, rather than merely accept the defaults.
It does not help that for that issue, as too for this OP, a lot of misinformation is spread, which obfuscates the truth.
e.g. in both situations, people claimed that something was hard-coded when in fact it was not. (Edit: this situation is terribly unclear, and one of Tesseract's two main sources of blocking actually is reported to be hard-coded, even though another source turned out not to be hard-coded.)
That doesn't mean that PieFed isn't actively censoring content (it is, and misleadingly so too), or that you should use it (use whatever software you want), but it does mean that the people criticizing it, having cited that specific "alternative fact", were spreading lies. Probably without realizing it, yet they certainly don't seem all that concerned about actually reading sources in order to find the truth. Which, yeah, complicates people's decisions about what services to use.
Edit: this situation is terribly muddy but it seems that while one of the blocklists (the hidden, larger one) is not hard-coded, the other (smaller, instance-only?) actually seems to be.
Actually... it is toggleable, though not customizable, and for @theacharnian@lemmy.ca I will also add that it is separated into a different file, not hard-coded.
from src/lib/policies/system.ts:
export async function updateSystemFilterPolicy() {
if (SBDisabled && get(userSettings).enableToxicMode) {
SYSTEM_POLICY.set(BLANK_SYSTEM_FILTER_POLICY)
return
}
// auto-update of blocklist continues below
This feature definitely needs greater transparency, and people can debate whether and how offering a "toxicity filter" at all offends them (especially if they are caught up in it), or the way it was implemented, but the reporting on this issue could also definitely stand to be more rooted in facts as opposed to tribal politicking. The fact that the OOP gives extremely strong indications that it was written by an LLM also does not help matters any.
I am not saying that this is a nothing-burger, but I am saying that I see an awful lot of posturing and opinions shared vehemently but exceedingly few people (including those cross-posting widely across the entire Threadiverse) actually opening up and reading the code to look at the facts.
I would think that people would be in a better position to judge, after first-hand reading an actual source of knowledge rather than merely the title and enormously biased summary? (Which has turned out to be incorrect in several places, notably in CRUCIAL details that it has left out - which wouldn't you know it, sounds just like an LLM to me... - not everyone that I see on the internet is a bot, but then again some text undoubtedly is directly written by a bot.)
"it being forced on all users" and it being "HARD-CODED" are one and the same thing, that's what hard-coding means.
Hard-coding is the least transparent, least friendly, least documented, and least simple-to-understand form of putting something into computer program code. If instead there had been a variable like if(yes_filter_toxic_mode) then (implement these policies) then people would not be upset anywhere remotely close to the same degree, as when that feature is unable to be turned off (readily) due to its having been hard-coded.
Edit: the accuracy of the OP has now been called into question - apparently this issue is NOT hard-coded after all (reportedly, though I have not confirmed this directly myself). People can still be upset that a "toxicity" filter exists, and how it was implemented, but the fact that it is not shadow-filtering without the express consent of the instance admin makes this a much different discussion than if that filter was forced (via hard-coding) upon people unawares. Consent makes all the difference in the world!!! (The jury is still out whether this rose to the level of "informed consent", but at least that is a documentation issue, not like the dev acting with nefarious intentions as people have been claiming.)
The facts truly do matter here, and it seems that unless someone is willing to do a deep dive into the code, everything said about this issue is pure speculation. Which so far I've only seen one person willing to do, which yielded this (from link I mentioned above):
from src/lib/policies/system.ts:
export async function updateSystemFilterPolicy() {
if (SBDisabled && get(userSettings).enableToxicMode) {
SYSTEM_POLICY.set(BLANK_SYSTEM_FILTER_POLICY)
return
}
// auto-update of blocklist continues below
Some front-end access methods push the sidebar heavily - e.g. PieFed's web UI places the whole community sidebar below each and every single post.
Others seem to go heavily out of their way to hide it. I remember using a 3rd-party app one time - maybe I was trying out Jerboa - where it was buried 5 clicks deep in sub-menus.
This kinda thing makes it more difficult to present information, e.g. to direct new users to join new-to-Lemmy communities where they can read and ask for help. Sidebar text in particular often has fantastic links to other communities and resources like wikis.
But that's the rub: full "freedom" includes the possibility of making a "wrong" (or potentially less optimal under whatever conditions) choice.
Oh wait... my bad, that was Nutomic, speaking about Lemmy. Tbf, after a huge outcry, they did later relent.
I guess software having ideology injected right into it is par for the course these days. It takes an ENORMOUS amount of effort to find any workable solutions otherwise. Compromise is an art, and all the purity testing among leftists works against it (which btw is why conservatism and fascism is winning across the globe right now, at least initially, bc they are willing to set aside their differences in order to achieve a common objective).
Fwiw I would suggest removing this particular feature from a front-end UI alternative and leave such matters to the back-end. Being able to personally block instances is superb, and offering a visual guide to which ones that someone might want to block would also be great, but hard-coding a dedicated list is ineffective at best, especially when the instance admins simply remove it from the code as they run the software without it.
This already exists. News media for instance used to have standards as to who they would hire - like you'd have to spelel properely and everyhting. Then most of the major outlets were bought up by the wealthy and... well, they still exist but people don't bother to read them anymore.
Even now, blogs exist (like Mastodon) but people on "social media" (where we are now) prefer to simply scroll and speak rather than listen.
I'm sorry to hear that, but it does make sense - the whole Fediverse is like the wild West, and things are barely being "done", much less properly with an eye to elimination of the technical debt, even while people are actively trying to use it.
Keep doing what's fun for you! Especially if that helps with the irl stress. The latter may get worse, as e.g. it looks like the USA is next preparing to take on Cuba as a target - and then either Greenland and/or Canada?
I am not saying that you should switch to use or even like PieFed, but afaik there is no feature that is "trying to trick users into thinking there's a technical issue with servers", or at least not one that Lemmy and Mbin do not identically share. I would be happy to read about one though if someone wants to point me to it?
e.g. just a few hours ago I recall reading a report where someone was confused why a post did not show up for them on PieFed but it did on Lemmy. The reason turned out to be that the user has been banned on PieFed.social. The key here is that the latter is an instance (a server machine) whereas PieFed is software.
Lemmy instances also ban people too btw. Some Lemmy instances are in fact quite (in)famous for this.
But that is not "trickery", that is simply PieFed (or Lemmy, or Mbin, whatever) working as designed, someone's lack of understanding notwithstanding, and likewise for people who want to cast aspersions onto their tribal "opponent".
All that said, PieFed does have a weird way of blocking all users on an instance. If the devs of Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin could get together an agree on a protocol whereby a signal could be sent that all software platforms would understand and know how to handle... then such maneuvers would not be necessary. Instead, legacy software like Lemmy are not always going to be able to keep up with PieFed's rapid pace of development - e.g. PieFed offers numerous things that Lemmy simply has to shadow-block (with no report of having done so), including polls, user and post flairs, various special features of communities (e.g. automatic deletion of submitted images after a certain time period, usually one year), etc. To be clear this is not "nefarious" activity on behalf of the Lemmy devs, it's just that the software doesn't know how to handle such content, nor do the devs make it a priority to make it do so (why should they?)
And likewise, the ability of Lemmy uses to reply to PieFed users that have instance "blocked" them is one such source of friction between the two software offerings.
If you are thinking of creating a community, it matters far more what instance admins you choose to interact with than what software that instance is running. Especially as some (like quokka, and reportedly soon-ish sh.itjust.works) switch around, while others (like .zip and .world) offer literally both options (Lemmy & PieFed).