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Hello m@teys,

I've been waiting for this a long time (half a year), personally. After seeing the surge in piefed instances, i.e. blahaj, .ca, .zip, quokk.au, and .world creating their own instances, and clients guaranteeing future piefed support, we've been thinking about potentially opening an instance in the future. Not a guarantee, just an idea. This isn't a voting thread, just a discussion. Later on we'll actually vote on this.

Do note that this thread will not guarantee an instance; we are discussing a hypothetical. Suggestions? Ideas? Criticisms? make your voice heard.

Have a good week!

pie picture comes from here

governance type: sense check

171 comments

  • I think that, for most dbzer0 users (and quite a few landlubbers like me), being able to choose between a Lemmy and a PieFed instances is only positive. What you need to take into account is the additional work this incurs towards you guys, the admins; you'll be maintaining two instances instead of just one.

  • I was hoping a dbzer0 piefed instance would happen sometimes in the future! I would totally use it, since it has some pretty cool features that Lemmy has been quite slow in implementing. For example, merged communities that cover one specific topic.

  • I think I'm for it, but I also don't know if I understand the implications. So, some questions:

    • Is there a downside?
    • Would this be in addition to lemmy or a replacement?
    • If it is in addition to, is that the permanent plan, would this be working toward an eventual switch-over?

    I should probably try piefed a bit so I understand it a bit better, but it's just a different Lemmy basically, right? Does it federate with existing Lemmy?

    If it doesn't federate with what we already have, I'd have to keep up with two things, and two is a big number, so I'd probably just pick one and stay there.

    Anyway, exciting nonetheless. I'll go eat some pie now and see what that's all about.

    • Piefed federates with lemmy, it's basically a clone written in python instead of rust, with advanced moderator tools, and developed by people who aren't braindead Stalinists.

    • Is there a downside?

      Not really, i think. We have the resources, and being an admin isn't too time consuming; surely we can make time for an extra instance.

      Would this be in addition to lemmy or a replacement?

      Addition

      If it is in addition to, is that the permanent plan, would this be working toward an eventual switch-over?

      Probably not. There would be way too many potential issues and it's risky.

      I should probably try piefed a bit so I understand it a bit better, but it's just a different Lemmy basically, right? Does it federate with existing Lemmy?

      Yep. Try https://quokk.au/ (anarchist instance, too!) which is basically the closest thing we have right now

      • Also if you do try out quokk.au, you can export your subscriptions and settings to dbzer0 in the future.

  • A comment I came across a while ago puts it quite well:

    I haven't used piefed myself but I wouldn't want to switch to it because I feel like it gives more power to downvotes and karma (or "reputation" as they call it):

    • Comments with -10 score are collapsed by default.
    • People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.
    • Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.

    Those are three of the twelve points listed as differences to lemmy on their features page.

    I also don't agree with some of the points in their article on "PieFed features for growing healthy communities".

    from: https://sopuli.xyz/comment/17119490
    the comments' thread is also quite interesting

    Plus it's written in Python and has only 1,6k MAUs, so we can only guess how well it scales

    Slightly edited from an older comment of mine:

    EDIT: as such I believe that operating a Piefed instance would be a waste resources and actually harmful considering the fragmentation it would cause for little to no benefit at all (also it seems much better set up for a new Reddit with all the .world'ers flooding over there and the anti-features)

    • I think rimu has made the karma system to be optional (i.e. in the admin settings, not hardcoded) so we'd just disable it anyway. I think the second feature should only apply to mods/admins, since its a very useful tool. #1 #3 i agree, they are not good.

      I'll address each point in the Piefed Features for growing healthy communities:

      Find people who have low karma

      This applies to admins, and while not really that effective, its okay to have.

      Find people who downvote too much

      This is a very useful tool, since this is a big problem on lemmy. Same thing; only for admins

      Spot spam easily

      Sounds like a good idea; but with feature #3 as you pointed out, this might cause some new-user shitposters to get falsely flagged, but we would disable it anyway.

      Don’t award karma in low-quality communities

      This is now opt-in, and we would disable it.

      https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/5-admins/topic/Low.20reputation.20communities/near/1872

      Warnings on unusual communities

      We would add nothing to communities, anyway; users are free to do whatever they want, themselves. (maybe to our own instance communities like /0 and governance? But not much honestly.

      Icons next to comments by low karma accounts

      As i said before, probably should only be seen by admins/mods.

      Icon for new accounts

      No problem here; most clients do this anyway.

      Automatically delete content based on phrases in user name

      Sounds very useful, and which is why piefed didn't struggle at all with nicole.

      Report accounts, not just posts

      Good idea.

      Instance-wide domain block

      We have this on lemmy too

      Automatic reporting of 4chan content

      Not a good idea imo. We'd disable it.

      Plus it's written in Python and has only 1,6k MAUs, so we can only guess how well it scales

      We'll always have this lemmy instance anyway :) but afaik it scales fine, and has some optimizations coming along soon.

    • Instagram is written in a much more heavy python framework, but it scaled fine.

  • Against this idea as it merely causes significantly more work the instance maintainers with (imo) quite limited benefits. I'd only be in favour if lemmy began crashing and burning for whatever reason.

  • Here's my two cents:

    Because there's no direct integration with Lemmy, and we start with an empty piefed instance. I'll have to create a user and all that, and I "just" quit Reddit so it's not very appealing to me, even if piefed has better features.

    I would create an account if everyone migrates, or if I can click a "move to piefed" button that copies all my comments and posts.

    • Wdym no direct integration?

      Sadly those two are not possible for us to do now, but the lemmy instance will always be the top priority.

      • It would be direct integration (maybe I chose the wrong term) if piefed could share the database with Lemmy, then uses only had to start using the new features in piefed.

        Because they are two different activitypub implementations I would not expect easy migration to be possible in the near future or ever, most likely only if it becomes a part of activitypub.

  • I think this may be a good idea. The questionable performance/behavior of the core Lemmy devs does not give me confidence for the long term prospects of Lemmy as a code base and service.
    piefed seems to be growing rapidly while Lemmy has stagnated. There's obviously a reason for that.

  • I don't know a ton about piefed , but wouldn't that be more likely to divide the community?

    • No, it's compatible with Lemmy. There are some differences, but they are relatively minor.

      Lemmy users can partake in Piefed instances/communities and vice versa.

  • I am only tangentially aware what's going with the developments so far in the developer community. I'm thinking about it and so I'm going back to how I got here from Reddit myself. These are just my two cents.

    There some realities to deal with which are end user cases. I think the major push off of reddit to Lemmy was the closing of the third party apps. This is what provided Reddit usability for a large scale of its base. When developers left reddit their userbase went with them because that was the app they liked.

    The benefits were clear, safety from enshittification, freedom of speech, and the same advertisement free user experience from third party apps with responsive user interfaces. It's hard to admit there was a swath of users who probably moved because they used SYNC for Android and strongly disliked the mobile reddit UX. That whole period has cooled off now and people probably have less change energy in them now then before.

    I would think that that to make a successful leap from Lemmy to Piefed, there would probably have to be a clear migration path that is relatively seamless. All communities, post history, and app compatibility would have to come with it.

    Now with that being said, I wouldn't want to burden the maintainers of any instances with additional overhead however I do trust them to be more aware of the inner workings of the systems they host than myself. Sometimes it's worth standing up an environment to see if it's abilities can stand the test of your use case.

    For that reason alone I would be for standing up alternatives at least to try them out.

    Thanks

    • I would think that that to make a successful leap from Lemmy to Piefed, there would probably have to be a clear migration path that is relatively seamless. All communities, post history, and app compatibility would have to come with it.

      What you describe here is [kinda] possible, at least for the latter. The former is, but that would mean shutting down the lemmy instance and focusing on the piefed one; and we're not planning this

      Now with that being said, I wouldn't want to burden the maintainers of any instances with additional overhead however I do trust them to be more aware of the inner workings of the systems they host than myself

      No worries, we would be able to handle it fine

      Thanks for your reponse!

  • I think its a good idea, more choice is almost never bad.
    I might not use it too much if it happens because I'm too used to lemmy itself though.

  • I'm pretty firmly against this since Piefed has those same Karma and user score systems that made Reddit so toxic but with the bonus of being able to exclude communities from giving you upvotes (but not downvotes). Karma is literally a lighter version of social credit and I don't support it. Also pretty against the fact that piefed literally lets admins turn off modlog sharing which is concerning to say the least and should concern people here considering we've built a whole community around mod accountability.

    So yeah I don't support the move to piefed but since "everyone" is going gaga for piefed I'm sure this instance will end up getting a piefed instance to go with the trend and may even abandon Lemmy altogether, I really hope not I do kind of like Lemmy, but this seems the way things are going.

    • For one , we wont have karma. We will keep the modlog.

      So yeah I don't support the move to piefed but since "everyone" is going gaga for piefed I'm sure this instance will end up getting a piefed instance to go with the trend

      No, I've been planning this for more than half a year by now, more than most admins have thought of it. This is just a window of opportunity for us.

      and may even abandon Lemmy altogether,

      No we will not abandon lemmy.

    • Karma is literally a lighter version of social credit and I don’t support it.

      As much as I dislike karma, the recent lemm.ee shutdown still shows that there is a need for better tools to allow mods and admins to identify toxic users.

      Karma shouldn't be the end game, but for now it's acceptable

      • No, sorry. I don't agree. I don't think that users votes should be given power besides ranking in the feeds, vote manipulation is already a big problem if they think they can get people banned or limited over voting they'll do it even more aggressively. This isn't Reddit and vote fuzzing or throwing out votes won't work the same, federation makes this super messy and unreliable. People voting from remote instances can easily manipulate the score. Especially if they upvote everything else or randomly upvote a larger majority than downvote, while still targeting specific people.

        You don't seem to understand. Karma on Lemmy is ripe for abuse in ways not even dreamed on Reddit. There's a reason the Lemmy devs did everything in their power to hinder the ability of weaponizing score.

        Also since Piefed puts so much emphasis on voter anonymity so it makes that problem even worse since it makes it harder to catch if they take steps to hide their ratio.

        So no, this is not acceptable. Please don't try to use the shutdown of lemm.ee to justify harsher draconian measures, which themselves are flawed and ripe for abuse. The reason they shut down was ultimately because they tried to be something they couldn't with a team that couldn't handle it. They wanted to be THE Lemmy server, the one everyone goes to. Kinda like Lemmy.world but they were not cut out for it and they learned the lesson the hard way.

    • Most of the karma features can be disabled by instance admins iirc.

171 comments