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
– 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.
Yes, that’s exactly what i’m pointing to. Rather than implementing this in a way that’s non-destructive and transparent, they’ve created an asymmetry by dropping comments entirely. They could render comments based on block-checks and not create this problem, but instead they chose to say ‘fuck the lemmy instances’ and create hundreds of holes in the federated activity out of seemingly nothing but spite.
Not “other developers” generally, “the other developers”. I’m speaking specifically of the already existing lemmy codebase. Piefed was created as an alternative to lemmy - at least in part - because of disagreements over the developer’s political views. It wasn’t because lemmy was poorly written, it was because a couple of developers decided they wanted to fork the project into their own that they could manage independently from lemmy.
How could Piefed make this disparity of blocking philosophy mesh with Lemmys here? If Rimu thinks that a block is a block, and that users who are blocked should not be able to go on replying to the user who blocked them, then I don’t see why he would carry comments just because they come from Lemmy.
Correct. But even if there was no ideological dispute here (he also disliked the development cycle and choices - I don’t want to make too many assumptions here), rimu may still have made his own reddit clone or someone else may have - which would handle things very differently.
Without forcing every server to adopt the same blocking system universally? It can’t. What it’s doing now is functionally no different than if they hid replies on the user front end for users blocking others outside the home instance, except instead of doing this non-destructively (and preserving data pairety across instances), they’ve decided to blow huge holes in the federation service that are no longer mirrored on the other instances.
If the piefed method of handling blocking is to make it impossible for all users in every instance incapable of replying to a user who has blocked them, then every server would need to adopt the same method universally. Piefed has every right to hide content from their users that their users have chosen to block, but doing so by rejecting that content for the whole server while the rest of the network carries on ends up creating shadow forums on every instance.
That would be preferable to the ‘embrace, extend, extinguish’ path that they are currently on.
Right, so it should be on Piefed to accept Lemmy’s blocking system even if Rimu disagrees with it?
This doesn’t bother me that much primarily because defederation differences can cause this anyway.
If a hypothetical lemmy-alternative existed, regardless of why, it could still cause disruption in all kinds of ways if there’s a fundamental design contradiction ethos.
Which is why it’s important for users to reject attempts at splitting the network into different codebases in the firstplace.
That piefed and many of its users reject working with lemmy devs on principle over political grievance doesn’t change or justify the fact that they are destroying the democratic nature of the federated network they’re taking advantage of.
Which is why defederation is a last resort and usually requires some democratic discussion as an instance. Same with instance-banning users - that ability is limited to admins, which means users can hold them accountable if there’s abuse. It’s a reason why i consider users who go out of their way to foment division against other instances or users over petty disagreements to be caustic and unwelcome, but are at least still working within a decentralized and democratic framework. When any user has the ability to create the same kind of holes in the network, all accountability vanishes and it starts to look like swiss-cheese.
It is what it is. Mbin also existed before Piefed.
You’re assuming some hand has been offered that has been slapped away by Rimu. I’m not aware of this. I’m pretty sure they have shared information about things in the past.
I mean yes, and no (depends on the instance), that’s true but you know as well as I do three instances of note are heavy defederated (hilariouschaos being the third incase you were wondering). Plenty of smaller sloppy attempts also get defederated fast too, usually stuff like maga.place.
Mbin isn’t nearly as egregious as piefed in the way they introduce breaking changes to the network.
I’m not assuming anything, it’s been stated repeatedly. Rimu could implement his preferred features in ways that don’t degrade the health of the network but chooses not to.
I’m not sure what relevance that has, but you can count those instances on a hand missing two fingers (i’d note that dbzer0 does not defederate from 2 of the three that I assume you’re referring to, nor would I advocate for it). It would be interesting for someone to map out just how much of the fediverse is effectively being defederated for piefed servers with large user block lists - i imagine it’s quite a large chunk, especially when the most popular users to block are the ones producing the most activity. The larger those servers grow, the bigger those holes will become.
Is Mbin updated much?
Have Lemmy mods approached Rimu at all?
Just noting that there are already holes of communication due to defederation (hexbear/lemmygrad are pretty medium sized).
He chose to fork his own code rather than work with them - I think the better question is why he hasnt vetted his changes with the existing codebase better, or why he cant be bothered.