I am pretty sure a handful of people are constantly making alts to cause discord on Lemmy/Piefed.
It does feel like something odd is up recently. The amount of comfort I’ve been noticing with people directly calling for specific individuals to be harmed, the anti-Isreal stuff leaning harder into more anti-Jewish talk, and the pot stirring between Db0 and World all feel a bit manufactured.
A lot of the shit stirring directly comes from members of the dbzer0 admin team, though. You can’t blame that on random alts.
The statements I saw didn’t really seem intended to diffuse the situation. It feels like one individual did something provocative and neither side liked it, but certain people don’t seem ready to let go and are keeping it going publicly.
I haven’t noticed any real public response from World, so the beef feels one sided, which I don’t think helps db0 look like the rational party. I appreciate them being open, but it looks like people just airing personal grievances rather than something that pertains to all users of db0 or World.
I’m not invested any further than not wanting to lose a sizeable chunk of subscribers, but the behavior doesn’t reflect well in the instances involved and certainly isn’t benefitting the user bases by being a public debate. But that’s just my opinion and how I would personally handle things based on what I’m aware of concerning the situation.
I was at a community that was supposed to be mostly for anarchists, and it wasn’t one of the major tankie instances, and yet I still met someone who insisted “zio” culture is just murder and rape. And their post history wasn’t any better.
Yeah, I was seeing it pop up in otherwise civil conversations and go straight to what I’d consider far right conspiracy stuff or outright hate for anyone Jewish anywhere. I don’t recall if they were new accounts, but they were people I was not previously familiar with.
There is much to criticize about the events going on, but this type of talk is not criticism.
Also how conveniently day old accounts from instances with open registration pop up to go on racist or transphobic tirades so that db0 or .ml members can pin it on opponents.
I don’t necessarily read too much into which direction the pot is being stirred, because it doesn’t even need to be from one side or the other when anyone can make and account anywhere and just be a malicious third party that wants to see the 2 other fight. I think all the public bickering is useless between the admins. I think airing all this stuff out just drags more people into the argument.
The call to violence stuff is also something I think should be real embarrassing to any admin of any instance. Allowing that stuff reflects badly on your whole community. There are plenty of people I wouldn’t miss right now, but I don’t want to live in a time or place it’s alright to hurt people we don’t like. The pendulum always swings back your way.
We have something really great going on here in the Fediverse, and it’s nice seeing so diverse a userbase getting along relatively well. I never thought I’d see one place mixing mainstream liberals, communists, socialists, anarchists, lgbtq, furry, and whatever else we’ve got going on here working so well. I’m going to be pretty upset if we let a single digit number of people bust this place up. Please get it together, people.
The thread in question, since it’s on the piefed.social instance.
There’s been a whole thing going on for a few weeks straight ever since db0 banned someone for Nakba denial.
Given how LLMs always try to please, asking them to find something specific is very likely to result in just that. A more neutral query would be to ask to simply summarize the history, though it’s weird that a purportedly anarchist group would be relying on a completely centralized corporate LLM in its moderation. Even then, you need to be careful not to be swayed by the LLMs suggestions and analyze each highlighted comment in an unbiased manner.
What is weird is that its clear they didn’t decide to ban because of an LLM output and they used local and FOSS models to summarize the explanation. The explanation provided, instead of just ‘Zionism’ or ‘Rule#X’ or ‘genocide denial’, is what used the LLM.
Their own caption says it was ChatGPT and I don’t believe it can be run locally. Either way, one of the many issues with LLMs is that they come across like a person and are convincing even when hallucinating. Couple that with the human psychology of generally taking people for their word, and you have created a perfect environment for being manipulated. Going by the linked thread, in one instance, the AI included a quote that wasn’t the exact quote. You could argue the actual comment wasn’t that different from it, but that’s more like confirmation bias. Even asking an AI to not comment on anything and just distill the provided content to the most important quotes would be affected by selection bias, but that’s not even how they used the model. They literally asked it to find what they were looking for.
Right, and the LLM output isn’t something I would’ve used either. The only thing I am noting as important is that the LLM stuff was an extra and unnecessary step, if that makes sense.
I don’t know anything about that banned user, but perhaps it’s that they didn’t want to look like the main characters of this community who essentially ban “just because” and needed something they believed would be convincing?
Uh sure, that’s a plausible way of looking at it.
That’s not a shadow lock. Lemmy doesn’t support this feature yet. The feature allow mod to lock part of the thread. I hope lemmy v1 will get it.
It’s very useful, because we don’t have to lock the whole thread but only part of the discussion. So other users can continue talking.
This tool can end heated debate rather continuing pointless discussion. I believe it should be expanded to users too and we desactivate the unlock feature with a warning message “it will lock the thread forever. You cannot come back, are you sure ?”
Lastly, there was no point in continuing discussion. The user found the discussion interesting but didn’t want to continue. And for him, reading book is important.
I don’t like that as a “feature”. shadow-anything is a terrible excuse for poor moderation. feel free to block users at a personal or instance level, or simple defederate unwelcome/spam instances. Cant lock the conversation on other instances… Kinda feels pointless.
I disagree. You can lock conversation on piefed instance.
The moderation
It wasn’t perfect but both side brought their arguments. That’s what the most important thing for me. I’m not sure you would like to take my place and handle this mess. Nor spend the whole night on it.
Rimu posted it and he would post on other communities. I let this post so dbzer0 can reply with counter-arguments and defend themselve. You have both point of view.
There is also a post bellow on disinformation by users against dbzer0 below.
Locking post
Are you really sure it is a shadow-mod ?
Locking comment is, for now, a Piefed’s feature and if i’m not wrong, lemmy v1 will support it : https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5916
Lemmy were inspired by Piefed and us, the user :3
Shadow-mod is that when you have the intention to hide your mods’s action. On piefed instance, there is a lock under locked comment.
On lemmy, that’s not supported yet, so you don’t see them or there is a lack of information between those 2 softwares. So when you write a long text from lemmy and send it to piefed and you don’t see any warning…yes he wasn’t happy about it and another user.
However, that’s not piefed’s fault, nor his. He didn’t know, he discovered an issue. That feature was created 10 months ago and wasn’t used a lot. Those softwares doesn’t communicate about the lock comment yet, there is no lock and we will improve it.
For now, that’s what make Piefed different from Lemmy.
Let’s take another example, Mbin is the only threadiverse software that support microblog timeline. You can see mastodon posts.
Are piefed and lemmy shadow banning microblog ? No. There don’t support it, and that’s a Mbin feature. That’s all. Don’t try to imagine something else.
mod tools
You are speaking about several very different tools. Each of them serve a very different purpose :
- Blocking : i don’t want to see you again. We will never speak to each other.
- Locking post : i stop the discussion to every users. Everyone can’t reply. We change the topic.
- locking part of a discussion (piefed) : i stop our discussion. We can see later and discuss on another topic elsewhere. Other users can continue their own discussion. Dbzer0 use a similar way : “disengage” and i think we should expand it to any users.
- Filtering words (piefed) : mask content i don’t want to read.
And lastly, defederate isn’t simple…
I disagree with your way of moderation. Delete, ban…are bad tools. i believe we need more nuance in moderation and discussion. For example, the use of AI have there pros and cons. That’s not a black and white painting.
However, that’s not piefed’s fault, nor his. He didn’t know, he discovered an issue.
The issue that the piefed dev writes new protocols that break activitypub compatibility has been brought up before. It is not unintentional and was not unknown.
Do you imply that that was his long term goal ? Intentional. No, he made a choice. I’m not well versed on technical side. So maybe it was a bad choice from him or an alright choice because he thoughts it would work better that way. So be it.
Altough, we disagree on political side, Devs reach each other. They create a software that need communication between each other. You have to work together.
For example for flair federation, they will adapt (either piefed will change its code or lemmy) For emojis reaction they will also adapt…Another example, i reached iceshrimp dev team and asked them for the support of Piefed. Then Nutomic reached me and asked too add Lemmy too. I sent them all the info from Nutomic to iceshrimp dev team.
Admins and mods also talk to each other for banning spam, transphobia, solving issue…They are not probably on good term, there were a huge conflict but somehow they are managing the fediverse defence.
So…
Typically mods don’t get alerted until after theres a 40+ reply chain of ‘no u’.
Realistically it is mostly a tool for when a moderator is engaged in a heated debate, and needs a stop button. The thread in question being a perfect example.
Yep that’s why i think we should expand it to users :)
Tangential, but what’s the go-to mobile app for Piefed? I’ve long made an account, but I just log into Lemmy still because when I am at my PC, I have better things to do than laugh at tankies, and on mobile, there’s a button on my device that brings me to Lemmy. I’m not sure what shiny new button to replace it with, and realistically the sooner I can stop using tools created by fascists in socialist clothing, the better.
I’m currently using Jerboa for Lemmy, though I am not married to any of its features.
I’ve been using Summit, it’s pretty nice. I recommend you just try a bunch of them and see what you like.
I’ve tried blorp a few times, it was OK but honestly the browser experience is pretty good.
Blorp dev here. Is there any specific feature/improvement I could add that would bring Blorp from ok to great?
It has been several months, I just assumed whatever quirks were from piefed being relatively new, I’ll give it another go. So far I’ve noticed I can’t see the notes I have for users, like the tags feature but apparently different from the built in notes, also I can see emoji reactions but I can’t create them or click to add to the count.
Pretty sure Voyager supports most or all piefed features.
I’m not able to create an account due to a community being Piefed and not being a supported feature. Are you using Voyager on iOS or Android?
I’m on iOS but I’m using Lemmy. I just know from the Voyager community that it supports Piefed. Maybe you need to create the account on the web version first though.
Is this ibogaine in action?
Lol reading Proudhon XD
