Piefed admin settings that allow to enable or disable content filters (they are disabled by default, see body for details)
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Those checkboxes have been there since version 0.9. Ages.
The problem with grabbing small snippets of code is a lot of context is lost. Don't trust anyone who does that. PieFed has 50,000 lines of code so anyone showing you 50 lines is leaving out 99.9% of the picture.
As I said a month ago, anyone with honest questions about how things work who wants to make PieFed better knows where to find us. You don't have to be a coder, we need translators, designers, documentation writers, bug reporters, community evangelists and all that.
The problem with grabbing small snippets of code is a lot of context is lost.
To me, it was obvious that these parts were configurable. There were literally boolean checks for it.
But these features remind me Reddit. And I'm pretty sure most users simply unaware about these things enabled on the .social instance.
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Edit about the 4chan image blocking, I asked Rimu directly:
I wrote a long message about how that checkbox only notifies about federated posts.
So the difference is for local posts it blocks the creation of the post entirely, but for federated posts it just notifies the admin.
https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/3-general/topic//near/10529
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Original message:A few people in the other thread assumed that it was required to fork the code to disable those filters. That's not the case, the filters can be configured, and are off by default.
To hide the reputation system, here's a line of CSS that admins can add in the admin area to hide it for every user
That CSS line can also be used by any user wanting to hide the score at the user level.
Link to the comment for more context: https://lemmy.ml/post/42339089/23619001
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Edit about the 4chan image blocking, I asked Rimu directly:
I wrote a long message about how that checkbox only notifies about federated posts.
So the difference is for local posts it blocks the creation of the post entirely, but for federated posts it just notifies the admin.
https://chat.piefed.social/#narrow/channel/3-general/topic//near/10529
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Original message:A few people in the other thread assumed that it was required to fork the code to disable those filters. That's not the case, the filters can be configured, and are off by default.
To hide the reputation system, here's a line of CSS that admins can add in the admin area to hide it for every user
That CSS line can also be used by any user wanting to hide the score at the user level.
Is there anyway for users to know which piefed instances have this and the other censorship settings enabled? I was trying to upload an image the other day and kept getting an error and now i realize it was because of the code itself?!
Like why the fuck wouldn't it tell me that image isn't allowed instead of giving me an error
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It's as if someone saw a federated social media codebase that enabled the free movement of users and expression online and though, "someone should fix that".
It isnt that the codebase 'forces' moderation decisions - it's that it's undoing the work done in the lemmy codebase to flatten moderation across instances and make them transparent, and introducing arbitrary metrics that can be used to limit the visibility of expression not just on the local instance but across many
You're free to use whatever software on your server you like, but IMO these 'filters' are petty, low-effort workarounds to features in the lemmy codebase that are what make it truely democraticand decentralized, and they degrade the health of the entire federated network by extension.
Honestly I don't mind if it would be visible to the users. Like how long would this be secret if it wasn't for the code audit.
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It’s one thing to empower admins with mod tools, it’s another to establish reputation ratings based on opaque rules, hide them behind fake error messages, and then enforce them using destructive workarounds that cause nothing but confusion to users and other federated server admins.
The reputation ratings of users are purely based on downvotes received, it's not really opaque.
The 4chan thing again, can be turned off.
Go ahead, be restrictive with who can participate on your server - that’s perfectly fine. But be transparent about how your moderation tools work and don’t hide punitive ranking systems in your codebase.
The reputation/attitude system is not concealed at all.
It 100% was! no one outside of the people who coded for piefed even knew this was a thing until the recent posts, if it is such an important part why isn't it stated clearly and upfront!!!
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It 100% was! no one outside of the people who coded for piefed even knew this was a thing until the recent posts, if it is such an important part why isn't it stated clearly and upfront!!!
Rimu literally wrote about it a long time ago. All instance admins would also know about it.
https://join.piefed.social/features/
Also, everyone can see the little exclamation points on accounts that are heavily downvoted from Piefed.
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It’s one thing to empower admins with mod tools, it’s another to establish reputation ratings based on opaque rules, hide them behind fake error messages, and then enforce them using destructive workarounds that cause nothing but confusion to users and other federated server admins.
The reputation ratings of users are purely based on downvotes received, it's not really opaque.
The 4chan thing again, can be turned off.
Go ahead, be restrictive with who can participate on your server - that’s perfectly fine. But be transparent about how your moderation tools work and don’t hide punitive ranking systems in your codebase.
The reputation/attitude system is not concealed at all.
That isn't true - the comment filters also dock users reputation points, and without any notification to users that it's happening.
None of this is presented to users - that's the definition of opaque. They've shoehorned these features into their code without any notice to other users or instance admins, and have provided no way of notifying anyone of what is happening on the backside that might effect how content is handled or federated.
All of this irreparably injures the reputation of not just the piefed implementation but of the broader fediverse.
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Rimu literally wrote about it a long time ago. All instance admins would also know about it.
https://join.piefed.social/features/
Also, everyone can see the little exclamation points on accounts that are heavily downvoted from Piefed.
This is like hiding changes in a 500 page TOS - is everyone who is impacted by this code going to know to look at this thread any time a new way of fucking with user reputation calcs is introduced?
Absolutely not.
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That isn't true - the comment filters also dock users reputation points, and without any notification to users that it's happening.
None of this is presented to users - that's the definition of opaque. They've shoehorned these features into their code without any notice to other users or instance admins, and have provided no way of notifying anyone of what is happening on the backside that might effect how content is handled or federated.
All of this irreparably injures the reputation of not just the piefed implementation but of the broader fediverse.
This can be turned off by instance admins who would see this in their settings. I agree maybe a public-facing form here could be of use though.
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This is like hiding changes in a 500 page TOS - is everyone who is impacted by this code going to know to look at this thread any time a new way of fucking with user reputation calcs is introduced?
Absolutely not.
Every single instance admin will know about it too. The reputation/attitude system did not just get quietly added a week ago.
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This can be turned off by instance admins who would see this in their settings. I agree maybe a public-facing form here could be of use though.
There's nothing in the code that I can see that indicates that any of the penalties are undone by turning off the filter - but that's kind of the point. They've introduced a new metric that thumbs the scale of content visibility that's hard-coded and inscrutable to everyone but those with knowledge of the codebase, and that makes the entire project and the devs who made those choices un-trustable.
Is there a version of their reputation system that's less objectionable? Sure. But it would need to be exceedingly transparent with clear documentation on how to configure, alter, and revert if there's a mistake made. But there's nothing here that indicates the devs of piefed are willing or capable of transparency or even just clear documentation.
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There's nothing in the code that I can see that indicates that any of the penalties are undone by turning off the filter - but that's kind of the point. They've introduced a new metric that thumbs the scale of content visibility that's hard-coded and inscrutable to everyone but those with knowledge of the codebase, and that makes the entire project and the devs who made those choices un-trustable.
Is there a version of their reputation system that's less objectionable? Sure. But it would need to be exceedingly transparent with clear documentation on how to configure, alter, and revert if there's a mistake made. But there's nothing here that indicates the devs of piefed are willing or capable of transparency or even just clear documentation.
Have you or anyone attempted to ask rimu about this? I don't ever recall any piefed instance owner asking this.
He has already altered or rolled back a ton of functions due to scrutiny.
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Every single instance admin will know about it too. The reputation/attitude system did not just get quietly added a week ago.
Is there any indication to users interacting with those instances that their content is being limited by metrics that may or may not be visible to them, and by rules that may or may not be documented anywhere but the piefed codebase?
These are wildly hostile features to anyone not using piefed, and it's feeling a bit like that's the point.
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Is there any indication to users interacting with those instances that their content is being limited by metrics that may or may not be visible to them, and by rules that may or may not be documented anywhere but the piefed codebase?
These are wildly hostile features to anyone not using piefed, and it's feeling a bit like that's the point.
The reputation system doesn't shadowban content. You don't get comments silently autoremoved for having a low reputation. You don't get throttled either.
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Honestly I don't mind if it would be visible to the users. Like how long would this be secret if it wasn't for the code audit.
I mean, I disagree, but that's my own preference.
Ranking/sorting/filtering systems should always be up-front and user-configurable, and their implementation should be instance-agnostic. Hiding it in the code is definitely the worst part of this, but far from the only problem.
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Previous threads about these filters were people complaining about them being hardcoded, completely ignoring that they are completely optional and off by default. It would go something like this:
Look at this awful thing PieFed does!
def do_the_thing(): # relatively simple code that does the thing
It completely ignored the context that the
do_the_thingfunction is only called if the admin wants to do the thing.Most of the issues people have brought up have been about why the snippets are even in the code not trying to obscure what the code does.
It completely ignored the context that the do_the_thing function is only called if the admin wants to do the thing
Again it's why is this a thing
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Simple != few lines of code, nothing incompatible about those two statements
Saying the simple code needs lots of context outside of the code block says it's either not simple or not easy to understand
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The reputation system doesn't shadowban content. You don't get comments silently autoremoved for having a low reputation. You don't get throttled either.
That's admin and community dependent - an admin or community can take that reputation metric and use it to automate moderation. There is/was an entire community whose whole gimmick was auto-banning users from every instance for activity across the entire federated network. But beyond that, piefed already drops content instance-wide for as little as a single user blocking another.
if parent_comment.author.has_blocked_user(user.id) or parent_comment.author.has_blocked_instance(user.instance_id): log_incoming_ap(id, APLOG_CREATE, APLOG_FAILURE, saved_json, 'Parent comment author blocked replier') return NoneThe codebase is riddled with shit like this.
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That's admin and community dependent - an admin or community can take that reputation metric and use it to automate moderation. There is/was an entire community whose whole gimmick was auto-banning users from every instance for activity across the entire federated network. But beyond that, piefed already drops content instance-wide for as little as a single user blocking another.
if parent_comment.author.has_blocked_user(user.id) or parent_comment.author.has_blocked_instance(user.instance_id): log_incoming_ap(id, APLOG_CREATE, APLOG_FAILURE, saved_json, 'Parent comment author blocked replier') return NoneThe codebase is riddled with shit like this.
There's no inbuilt system to automation moderating out low reputation accounts to my knowledge. Any instance that would do this would have to be using a third-party tool.
The Piefed system of blocking is more aligned with how most other sites do blocking. Lemmy doesn't prevent blocked users from replying, but Piefed does. So from Piefed, if it's working properly, you shouldn't be able to reply to users who have blocked you. Lemmy doesn't operate like that, so it just throws out replies. It's due to different blocking philosophies.
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Have you or anyone attempted to ask rimu about this? I don't ever recall any piefed instance owner asking this.
He has already altered or rolled back a ton of functions due to scrutiny.
I'm not collaborating with a developer who has it out for the platform I'm working to improve. If he wants to fix the shit he broke, he can.
