rimu

joined 7 months ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] [email protected] 20 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure the basic appearance is intentional. I love that aspect of it!

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Lemmy and Kbin both got money from Nlnet. Mastodon too, plus probably other fediverse projects.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What is the relationship between NGI and Nlnet?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Oops, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

 

We had a really interesting discussion yesterday about voting on Lemmy/PieFed/Mbin and whether they should be private or not, whether they are already public and to what degree, if another way was possible. There was a widely held belief that votes should be private yet it was repeatedly pointed out that a quick visit to an Mbin instance was enough to see all the upvotes and that Lemmy admins already have a quick and easy UI for upvotes and downvotes (with predictable results ). Some thought that using ActivityPub automatically means any privacy is impossible (spoiler: it doesn't).

As a response, I’m trying this out: PieFed accounts now have two profiles within them - one used for posting content and another (with no name, profile photo or bio, etc) for voting. PieFed federates content using the main profile most of the time but when sending votes to Mbin and Lemmy it uses the anonymous profile. The anonymous profile cannot be associated with its controlling account by anyone other than your PieFed instance admin(s). There is one and only one anonymous profile per account so it will still be possible to analyze voting patterns for abuse or manipulation.

ActivityPub geeks: the anonymous profile is a separate Actor with a different url. The Activity for the vote has its “actor” field set to the anonymous Actor url instead of the main Actor. PieFed provides all the usual url endpoints, WebFinger, etc for both actors but only provides user-provided PII for the main one.

That’s all it is. Pretty simple, really.

To enable the anonymous profile, go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and tick the ‘Vote privately’ checkbox. If you make a new account now it will have this ticked already.

This will be a bit controversial, for some. I’ll be listening to your feedback and here to answer any questions. Remember this is just an experiment which could be removed if it turns out to make things worse rather than better. I've done my best to think through the implications and side-effects but there could be things I missed. Let's see how it goes.

 

Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

 

Probably better to post in the github issue rather than replying here.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4967

 

A new contributor, "JollyDevelopment" made some improvements:

  • Fixed a very annoying bug where enabling the markdown editor emptied the text input field
  • Changed the home page so there are now separate sorting and filtering options, making the 'Popular' and 'All' home pages obsolete. They have been removed from the main menu.
  • Added a 'dev tools' page so developers can easily create large amounts of dummy content to test with
  • Added a suggest a topic form

"wakest" created a very efficient SVG icon for PieFed that is 5x smaller than the old .png icon.

Also I did a few things:

  • Made wide tables scroll rather than overlap the sidebar
  • Communities can be blocked. Good if you regularly browse posts by 'All' which is bit of a firehose.
  • Some mastodon integration bugs
  • Wrote a guide about how to install the PieFed mobile app

As you can see we don't have a lot of really big news to share, lately. It nearly feels like a good time to call an end to the beta test phase of PieFed's development and formally release a version. With that in mind, over the next little while, we will focus on stability and bug fixes so the first release is something people can stick with without immediately getting back on the dev branch treadmill.

 

Just a quick note to recognize that the first lines of PieFed code were published on the 28th July 2023, just over a year ago. Since then there have been 1400+ changes made by 9 people, involving adding 88,000 lines of code and removing 28,000 lines. The issue queue has 98 open and 99 closed issues.

While join.piefed.social went live in October 2023, it wasn't until time off work over the christmas holidays enabled a big push to get it ready that piefed.social went live on 4th January 2024.

Since then piefed.social has federated 190k posts, 2.3M comments and 19M votes with 1900 other instances of various types. Besides piefed.social there are 5 other PieFed instances that I know of.

What a year it's been! I've grown significantly as a developer, had a lot of fun and hopefully contributed something meaningful to whatever the fediverse is becoming. Long may it continue!

 

Finally time to pull the trigger on this one!

EA has a big sale on lots of other titles, too.

 

NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio has released a video showing how wind and air currents pushed CO2 emissions around Earth’s atmosphere from January to March 2020. The video’s high-resolution zooms in and sees individual sources of CO2, including power plants and forest fires.

This global map of carbon dioxide was created using a model called GEOS, short for the Goddard Earth Observing System. GEOS is a high-resolution weather reanalysis model, powered by supercomputers, that is used to represent what was happening in the atmosphere — including storm systems, cloud formations, and other natural events. This model pulls in billions of data points from ground observations and satellite instruments – and has a resolution is more than 100 times greater than your typical weather model.

More at https://www.universetoday.com/167872/our-carbon-dioxide-emissions-have-a-mesmerizing-side/

 

In this paper the author highlights how both engineers and social scientists misinterpret the relationship between technology and society. In particular he attacks the narrative, widespread among engineers, that technological artifacts, such as software, have no political properties in themselves and that function or efficiency are the only drivers of technological design and implementation.

22
Untangle these lines (medmunds.github.io)
 

Move the dots until none of the lines overlap.

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