OpenStars

Oh okay, so not that they say “dot world” when referring to lemmy.world (bc almost nobody talks about Lemmy irl from what I can see:-), but in the general sense they say whatever comes after the dot out loud, I get you now (I think):-).

Democracy means allowing the people to decide, as opposed to authoritianism where a central group (mods, admins, facilitators or whatever) makes all the decisions for people. PieFed still allows for authoritian control, mind you, e.g. on PieFed.social (the flagship instance) both hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml are defederated. But in addition to that, this opens up a new possibility where someone who is perhaps controversial yet not over a hard line can be allowed to remain, yet merely labelled.

And then people can decide for themselves, rather than solely an authority figure, what they wish to do about it. You are free ofc to debate whether this is “good” or “bad”, but either way it does seem more “democratic” to me, bc it places the power and therefore responsibility into the hands of the user to decide.

Which is sorta how our brains work anyway all the time, so these icons act as a shortcut to help jog people’s memories or realize something about the target that they would eventually figure out anyway.

The point is that the icon means… whatever you want it to mean. A “new account”, a “potential unregistered bot”, a “noted controversial person” - the authorities no longer control these meanings, only the recipient. Hence “democracy”.

No not always. Just as “.world” I usually see called rather LW, so too ML works. And yours would be SJW:-). Maybe that’s mostly my conversations with Blaze but I’ve definitely seen LW used elsewhere, though I can’t recall ever seeing someone saying .world. Perhaps I simply wasn’t paying proper attention:-).

After kbin.social went defunct the smaller instances I kept moving to (StarTrek.website and discuss.online) had not defederated from those two instances yet at that time. They do now, but a year ago it wasn’t as prevalent a choice to protect people from such things happening to their users. The Lemmy community has matured a bit, the word has gotten out, a case built to do so, and admins became receptive to what they had once spurned - e.g. I petitioned discuss.online to defederate hexbear.net after it was revealed that the admins there were caught lying to admins of other instances. But it took a lot of effort and time to get to this point, and still today most instances remain federated with lemmy.ml, which is where a bunch of Hexbear alts (e.g. Cowbee) decided to continue their trolling efforts after so many other places defederated from Hexbear itself.

I hear what you are saying about PieFed, especially from just what is mentioned on that page regarding tools that community mods would have access to, but in practice what I’m seeing so far really is tons better. For one thing, mods on Lemmy right now have to choose between the binary options of removing content vs. allowing it to remain (similarly at the instance level it can either defederate from another instance vs. not do so), whereas PieFed offers additional options that will allow the content to remain and then place the choice of what to do into the hands of the end users. Some users may e.g. want to avoid controversial content, and so like a spam filter automatically collapse content with a certain ratio of downvotes to upvotes - which preserves the ability to see it, but putting it one step away exactly like a spoiler feature for the post. Or maybe the user will instead choose to have the content removed altogether, with the auto-hide feature? Some of my own content would have gotten removed this way, and I definitely see how things can get misunderstood by downvoters, but at the end of the day, it still gives choices to the user that otherwise would have rested solely in the hands of a moderator. Personally I have both the auto-collapse and especially auto-hide options turned off, but it’s worth noting that they are there if people want them.

There are also other niceties such as keyword filtering - so e.g. if the user wants to remove all posts with the keyword “Musk”, then they could. Perhaps they shouldn’t, but they can, if they wanted.

I find that user labelling really is different though, than any of the filtering options above. Examples include new users with accounts newer than let’s say a couple of weeks, a user who almost exclusively posts but never comments (likely an unregistered bot?), someone who downvotes 20x more often than upvotes, or receives 50x more downvotes than upvotes - again, their comments aren’t removed (currently I am not aware of a method to even make that happen), just labelled with an icon next to their name. These icons can help someone decide whether or not to respond, or how much detail to put into it if so. Essentially these are just measures of a user’s “reputation”, so this is the numeric version of the type of info that people use anyway? But at each moment the choice lies with the user to either pay attention to or ignore those icons. And yeah the precise formulas to determine these icons are constantly tweaked to improve them, so that’s a thing, surely.

Ultimately though, whether the end-user makes proper usage of the tools given to them or not, either way, I think it’s awesome that these tools are given to the regular users, rather than constraining them to work solely when in the hands of a mod. That’s “democracy”! I guess whether democracy itself is a good thing or not is a whole other discussion altogether…🤣

Edit: also the tools are definitely in their infancy - e.g. to avoid karma farming, communities should be able to use community-specific metrics so that actions taken outside of a community do not necessarily affect filtering options inside of one. Which iirc is coming or at least people are aware of this issue. PieFed itself is still mostly in the works:-).

Thanks, it seems there was a lot here I was missing.

Edit: e.g. I missed that this is Jeena himself, who I generally enjoy reading his comments, and if made a month ago rather than now definitely makes this all make a ton more sense than it would have otherwise.

Yeah I’ve rarely seen it for .ee and .ml.

Unfortunately it’s still a very weak type of blocking, for you on Lemmy.ca unless you are using an app like Sync or Connect. It’s basically a “community mute”, equivalent to unsubscribing from all the communities there individually, but unlike user blocking, the users from that instance will still show up in other communities, they can still send you replies, which will trigger Notifications, and therefore they can harass you by continually sending you replies for WEEKS and WEEKS at a time (this actually happened to me twice, once with hexbear.net and another time with lemmygrad.ml).

Anyway, it’s better than nothing!

You may be interested to read some of the ways that PieFed is advancing democratization of moderation.

Well that answers one of the questions about it at least. This post is only 2 hours old and the cross-post chain likewise less than a day, so thay raised even more questions about why this month old video is being spread across several instances despite being invalid now, even if it still was at the time it was made (which it may not have been, the reversion of the announcement was made extremely quickly due to the enormous uproar against it).

Gotta ride that debt wave - what else is there to do in life? (“Helping people” is somehow not an option, nor is simply leaving well enough alone, we apparently “need” to have his face and name and one arm raised in nearly every conversation taking place on planet earth)

At the top of the announcement post:

There will be a new announcement soon to clarify.

29 days later…

Also, who calls LW “dot World”? He said that in the video, but I’ve literally never heard it called that, ever?

Also the communities are not locked anymore? One example is https://lemmy.world/c/unpopularopinion, which at one point was locked, and might have remained so for one week (out of the past month) but e.g. in the last week there’s been about one post per day, so most definitely not locked anymore, and hasn’t been for 20 days.

There’s a LOT of inaccuracies in this video. Which makes me legit wonder if this video was a trap to collect the IP addresses of people who commented on this post. Oops… but fyi, that’s a real thing that is possible to dox people irl. I hope people are using appropriate protections!

Humans seem not to be great planners - we are too short-sighted and selfish, but like in a bad way where we first lie to ourselves, and then also to one another.

This allows us to get out of local minima as we spread to new areas, but that same trait seems equally likely to lead to our extinction when all areas have been found and we need rather to switch to a more stablilzed society, yet won’t bc we don’t feel like doing so.

I’m not sure how it is possible to produce merely average people though? Anyway, even if humanity itself were to not change, the world around us still does. Perhaps one day aliens will show up, assuming that climate change doesn’t kill us all in the moderate term future. Just like all those species of animals and plants and such that we’ve driven extinct: they lasted so long, but then could not survive us.

So I would argue that we always should remain strong… it’s just that the definition of what that even means will constantly keep changing, in response to our circumstances.

But, Stoicism, yeah - it’s literally all that we can do, so let’s do that.:-)

I would argue that journalism is necessary, just not sufficient, for moving into the future.

Ironically this is true for every one of the myriad sides in this conflict.

I recall a sci-fi book from CS Lewis… anyway my point is that this was well known after WWII, and probably often had to be rediscovered throughout history. Strong societies produce weak children and so on. We’ve had our Yin, now time for the karmic Yang to brutalize us for being so extremely negligent.

It’s normal to want to avoid being abused and insulted for, say, having an opinion which is marginally different to the in-group consensus.

Sadly, I see that irl as well - perhaps text social media enhances the effect, maybe by virtue of being anonymous, but it’s definitely not an effect solely restricted to here.😢

Source: me who it just happened to an hour ago.😑