Web developer. Lead developer of PieFed

  • 252 Posts
  • 1.32K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: January 4th, 2024
  • Rimu@piefed.socialMtoPieFed Meta@piefed.social•Lemmy engage with you in meaningful conversationEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    a vision towards atmosphere and quality

    Yes, it does, that’s why I’ve put the emphasis I have on blocking and moderation features. Some of my ideas, like filtering out comments that just say “This”, later proved to be kinda oppressive in some people’s eyes so there’s a difficult balancing act there when we start to do social engineering. As if the technical engineering wasn’t hard enough already.

    It might be interesting to tweak the ‘Hot’ algo to boost posts where the OP is involved in the discussion on the post…

  • Rimu@piefed.socialMtoPieFed Meta@piefed.social•Lemmy engage with you in meaningful conversationEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    There are so many different factors that go into the size and vibe of a community. Some of those we can influence by making certain software features but there are so many things that are up to admin, mods, and everyone else. Teasing out all those things and deciding what to do about each would be a monumental task and I’m not equipped to tackle that. So what follows is just a few scattered thoughts about my piece of the elephant

    One of the factors, for sure, is a lack of posts. Not a lack of comments, a lack of posts. I’m glad we don’t have that problem. Comments can’t exist in isolation, they ride on the back of posts. Posts come first and there’s just no way around that without becoming Mastodon. The high-volume posters don’t always hit the mark but overall I think their contribution is positive.

    We have a mechanism for making low quality posts go away, and that’s downvotes. There is a taboo against using them but IMO people need to be more liberal with dishing those out. Think of a downvote on something as a weak upvote on everything else. Downvoting is just curation, it is not a moral condemnation.

    It would be interesting to see an instance that banned the flooders and then found out if that is an attractive environment to others. But that can’t be a big instance - if you think about it systematically, there needs to be a relatively free-for-all ‘marketplace’ or clearing-house for all kinds of content by all kinds of people, which more specialised instances can provide a filtered lens of. We can’t have a consistently high standard everywhere all the time because it’ll choke the life out of the ecosystem.

    Many communities have a ‘must link to a recent news article’ rule which I feel does limit the scope of discussion quite a bit. I intentionally did NOT have that rule in [email protected] for that reason.

    On a hopeful note - it is so wonderful that we are in a position to try to build the kind of communities we want, with human values underpinning them rather than commercial interests. It does mean a certain amount of groping our way forwards in the dark because there are less examples to copy but I’m glad to be here with you all on this journey.

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