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3 yr. ago

  • It sounds like you might enjoy TikTok. Those Algorithms exist for a reason - they give people what they want. Sometimes they can be overzealous, like you watch just ONE video in YouTube and it starts showing you more like it... but overall people use those platforms because they enjoy what they offer to them.

    And as you say, PieFed takes giant leaps towards offering a user power to find what they want, e.g. in providing hashtags, which of course so few people use since even if they submit a post to a community on PieFed that would support them, if you do that from a Lemmy account, or via a 3rd-party app that does not provide (easy) support for hashtags, then the post will have none.

    The entire Threadiverse is an experiment. To see what people will build, and to see what the community overall will use. It's sad to see it struggling so much but... writing code it turns out is so much easier than engendering consensus among people.

    In the meantime, I now suggest to people that they not rely upon the Threadiverse and especially Lemmy as their sole source of social media. The tools are still being built, and even then something like 99% of what is already available is simply not being used, and the primary thing is Content - or you might argue rather interactions with people - both of which are fairly lacking here. e.g. so many major events happening irl that I don't even hear about the tiniest bit about here, and many times I have even searched the Threadiverse for keywords after I've learned about the topic elsewhere in case it was here but I simply missed it, only to find that as far as the Threadiverse is concerned the topic simply does not exist. Our low number of content creators is simply insufficient to fully replace Reddit or other sources, unless one's goal is simply masturbatory dopamine hits from exclusively looking at memes, or arguing about which facts exist or not (were there any fatalities in the Tiannamen Square Massacre or not?).

  • The Lemmy way: yay!

    The second half: yes I understand and agree - it's a rather complicated issue, which can go both ways. Perhaps it can be something left to the admin to decide whether to enable vs. not? They can see all votes themselves in any case. In general I am not a fan of restricting people's abilities "for their own good", which seems in line with the spirit of PyLova, but in any case I definitely understand that it needs thinking about first bc it does run against the grain of what PieFed has done so far.

    Thanks for talking about it with me.:-)

  • What would be more ideal? The tighter focus that e.g. subreddits provided? More niche communities here keep dying off, so that we cannot have e.g. a community based on a single game, so much as a community like just "gaming".

    PieFed has a bunch of features that may help - post flairs (e.g. see posts about the Threadiverse but not Mastodon-style Fediverse posts), user flairs (e.g. see posts by senior "enthusiasts" in a community while excluding all those "hey all I am new and I love the Threadiverse so far"), or do direct keyword filtering. There are also user icons that you can place next to people's account names to help you visually spot posts from people that you might want to either specifically read or perhaps avoid, but whom you did not want to simply block. You can also "follow" users too, receiving notifications whenever they post.

    Also, since you can always find content in those categories of communities / Topic Feeds, you can fine-tune your actual subscriptions more so that you make it tighter in the general sense. i.e. I'm saying that you can both have your cake and eat it too! e.g. I unsubscribed from the most popular politics communities, which keeps it out of my Subscribed feed and allows other posts - even low-interaction stuff (with <10 upvotes) like poetry - to come through, but then whenever I want more I can always view those posts from a politics Feed, so nothing is "lost" that way.

    PieFed offers a significantly more robust set of tools than Lemmy. Though in general the entire Threadiverse is niche, and cannot replace what Reddit had - like better post organization (across communities) is great and all, but when the actual content creators choose to submit to Reddit but not here, then there is only so much that can be done about that.

    The Threadiverse isn't like "dying" or anything, but it's definitely not thriving either, when we used to have 65k active users while now we have 35k - people are leaving us in droves and not coming back.

  • Yes that - the second one, as shown in your image - is what I mean. Lemmy offers the option to show upvotes separately from (& adjacent to) downvotes. PieFed's tooltip approach fails to work for me something like a fifth of the time, at least on PieFed.social. At least a third of the time it will not work even if I click the number >10 times at varying cadence, although most of the time then if I zoom in and carefully hit precisely the number rather than the general area it is in it will work. Ofc that could be coincidence like a server connection issue that manages to work upon subsequent clicks regardless of how I approached hitting the number.

    Regarding showing who delivers the downvotes - that can be quite useful sometimes as well. I just had a serial downvoter go through every comment that I had made recently, across a wide swath of communities from memes to Fediverse matters and news and politics etc. - ironically they had never once posted and only made 3 comments in I think it was 3 years, yet they had downvoted people sth like 20k times and only upvoted iirc <3k total, so I seriously doubt that I was the only one that happened to. I want negative feedback the same as I want positive ones, but like... delivered as an adult, using words (at which point others piling them on only adds assent & therefore weight to that spoken position), not this childish "I don't like your politics so I am going to downvote everything you've said for days, without even telling you why".

    Voting really is an imbalance of power if someone can do things like that, but the recipients have no power to block it. It has a chilling effect upon social media bc people will either speak less often, knowing they will receive those, or else grow such a thick skin that even a veritable flood of downvotes affects them not in the slightest. I don't like either of those options.

    Though I suppose there is an argument that people could too casually block others for offering downvotes... or something? Honestly I don't quite understand that - anyone can find out who it is, with just a little bit of effort (e.g. I could make a post in a community that I moderate, so then when my serial downvoter strikes then as a mod I can see who they are, even if not as a user; or ultimately if I installed my own server then I could casually inspect the votes of everyone on every post or comment everywhere), this information is not "private" and there seems little reason to not place tools into people's hands to balance out this otherwise inequitable relationship?

    But anyway I'm not pushing for it - I just hate to see how like powerful people (e.g. jordanlund) have all this ability to see and do things (e.g. see people who downvote and block them), but what can the common person do? Although some of this seems to be based on the misunderstanding that accounts that you have specifically blocked cannot still vote on your content, whereas now I think that they can. There seems nothing that can be done about that.

    Btw Mbin shows who offers (links given for a randomly chosen example post): upvotes aka favorites, separately also Increases, now seemingly called Boosts, but will only show the total count but not who offered them for Reduces (I don't know if a mod can see these, obviously an admin could but I don't know whether via this same interface).

  • Impressive!

    I did get excited thinking that it might show downvotes, but now I see that's only for admins.

    Do you plan to expose downvotes received on each post/comment to the user? I've been through every single theme and setting on PieFed.social and could never find a way to display those - although I don't know whether other PieFed instances can already do differently or not (they definitely don't show by default in places like PieFed.zip).

    Fwiw I think people would be very happy to see their downvotes separately from upvotes, since e.g. +10/-9 is quite a bit different scenario than simply =1 overall (controversial vs. total lack of engagement). Technically this is already possible but the tooltip display is exceedingly janky and does not work at all a good fraction of the time, when when zoomed in like 10x (which helps at least sometimes).

    Anyway it's always neat to see a "new project", even if as a fork this is only kind-of half of one, it still counts in terms of offering new opportunities to users, which is always a good thing.

  • As complete as you will believe it to be!

  • In this case they are. "Real

    ...

    ...

    ...-ly drones"! 📸

  • We are destined to forever see one another yet never to touch again... wow, shit got dark quick!

  • It was from 3 weeks ago, thus high time to bring it back - dozens of times, maybe hundreds!?

  • Bonus meme:

  • Or alternatively: It shows that handle on one specified instance, e.g. always from your Mastodon home instance.

    Fwiw, PieFed already translates URLs on the backend so that visiting content from a foreign source will take you instead to the local copy.

    Also this post might be tangentially interesting: https://piefed.social/post/1285215.

  • I feel like I've seen this meme before... perhaps dozens, maybe hundreds of times, it's impossible to tell?

  • Funnier but not quite the vibe I wanted to go for, so this one just for the lolz 😂

  • It makes sense! Even though the result is even sadder as it means that literally all websites will be exposed to the same form of attack - the web is truly an unfriendly place these days:-(.

  • Tbf it is every male's fantasy to be a hero:-)

  • Ah that makes perfect sense. LW also gets a ton of hate, as too does PieFed, so I can well imagine trolls going so far as attacking it (obviously that's my conspiracy theory hat on, but who knows - although "death to the infidels" does seem to me like it may include some light hacking of infidel-owned machines if they can get away with it... - yet it being purely due to AI scraping is unfortunately equally plausible)

    What gives me pause about the instance is that the list of Categories I thought was empty for many months, and now is still quite light. Like, whether I would use any of those or not, it seems a signal that the instance admins have other priorities than to get around to such minor matters. Now I begin to see a bit of why. That earlier exceedingly unfriendly disclosure of code vulnerabilities - with zero advanced notice - may have also caused a lot of stress too.

  • You forgot the most important question of all: in this scenario, am I also a doorknob? It turns out that solves a lot of the other issues...

  • Is PieFed.world unstable or something? I am genuinely interested in hearing more about that as I had considered making an account there.

  • oh no, not again.