I'm pretty sure the basic appearance is intentional. I love that aspect of it!
Lemmy and Kbin both got money from Nlnet. Mastodon too, plus probably other fediverse projects.
What is the relationship between NGI and Nlnet?
Oops, thank you!
Yeah, it's a real thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deradicalization although Americans would spell it with a z.
I spent years and years researching and documenting fascism, QAnon and MAGA. During that time I created a blocklist of 3000+ website URLs which are automatically imported into the PieFed domain blocklist when a new instance is created. Another one of those political choices that define PieFed.
Yeah, I see that and it does concern me now that it has been brought up.
However. In the last 6 months of being active in the 'Lemmy.world defense hq' matrix room where we coordinate admin actions against bad people, vote manipulation has come up once or twice. The other 99% of the time it's posts that are spam, racist or transphobic. The vote manipulation we found detected using some scripts and spreadsheets, not looking at the admin UI. After all, using code is the only way to scan through millions of records.
Downvote abuse/harassment coming from PieFed will be countered by monitoring "attitude" and I have robust tools for that. I can tell you with complete confidence that not one PieFed user downvotes more than they upvote. I can provide 12 other accounts on Lemmy instances that do, tho. Lemmy's lack of a similar admin tool is unfortunate but not something I can do anything about.
What I've done with developing this feature is taken advantage of a weakness of ActivityPub - anyone can make accounts and have them do stuff. Even though I've done it in a very controlled and limited way and released all the code for it, having this exposed feels pretty uncomfortable. There were many many people droning on about "votes must be public because they need to come from an account" blah blah and that secure safe illusion has been ripped away now. That sucks, but we were going to have to grapple with it eventually one way or another.
Anyway. I'm not wedded to this or motivated by a fixed ideology (e.g. privacy über alles) so removing this is an option. It didn't even take that long to code, I spent more time explaining it than coding it.
That's nice of you to say. I've tried to focus well on certain areas that seem important but I really admire the breadth of https://join-lemmy.org/docs/ which I could never hope to cover.
Well.... Take a look at this https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
There are definitely values and opinions embedded in there. I would say it's a bit more "high control" vibe than lemm.ee. If you chose that instance because of it's more libertarian ethos then perhaps some of the features PieFed have would seem sinister or irrelevant to you.
The code of conduct for contributors is pretty vanilla IMO but would be seen as "left wing" by people from USA.
If you look in the sidebar of https://piefed.social you'll see a random collection of links (they change every page refresh) which are intentionally chosen to combat extremist ideologies and make PieFed instances uncomfortable places for cult-like groups (mostly on the right). That's a political decision which few projects would make.
Yes. You're going to have to trust someone, eventually. People can modify the Lemmy source code, too. Well, I can't because Rust looks like hieroglyphics to me but you get the idea.
I'd rather this than have to trust Lemmy admins not to abuse their access to voting data - https://lemm.ee/comment/13768482
Ahh, right, got it.
Let's keep an eye on this. I am hopeful that with PieFed being unusually strong on moderation in other respects that we don't harbor many people like that for long.
Elena put their finger on an especially weak spot for Lemmy and PieFed, where Mastodon integration is somewhat of an afterthought. There is some integration but it doesn't really work the way they expected it to.
The ideal of "everything talks to everything" still remains elusive.
These days I'm less sure it's even a good goal to have - content on different platforms doesn't always 'fit' in others. Mastodon posts lack a title so look awkward on Lemmy, Wordpress blog posts are often long, causing some Mastodon mobile apps to make their users scroll for days, Peertube videos often have a bunch of "here's how you can give me money" links in the body which look spammy out of context, etc.
Some platforms are a more natural fit for each other than others.