Context: Admiral Patrick replied and included this gem:
And might I add that not one person complained until db0 went internet Karen with his hissy fit because I took his toy away from him.
“Not one person complained about my explicitly obfuscated blacklists! Damn internet Karens making a big deal!”
Don’t know the situation, but I’m a little confused after reading the linked post. In the link post, the dev says that it was always mentioned in the app’s settings with a “toxic mode” that turned off the filtering, yet everyone here talks about it as if he kept it a secret. What’s going on? Was that text actually in the settings or is the dev lying here? If it was in the settings, why is everyone claiming the dev hid it?
There is a second obfuscated blacklist that is always enabled even in “toxic mode”.
Looks like it was added a couple months ago, see e.g. https://dubvee.org/post/5865082.
The hidden file though was not included in the code repository as would be more standard for a FOSS project like this. This alternative web UI is thus making use of the author’s personal blacklist, rather than one shipped with the code and that could be modified by instance admins during installation of it.
Read more about that part here: https://lemmy.world/post/49817942.
Ah OK, that’s weird… Yeah, it’s only mentioned very vaguely in the changelog.
What I don’t understand is: where does it pull the blacklist from?
https://tesseract.dubvee.org/tesseract/api/system/policy
Full details in https://lemmy.world/post/49778353 including how to download and decompress (111KB of JSON).
From his server, where only he has control.
There is also some rumblings about the fact that this list, which is pulled in from his own server and compressed/encrypted so that using file search tools on it wouldn’t turn up any results, isn’t actually disabled by enabling “toxic mode”; but I can’t prove that.
Doesn’t matter, secret block lists that allow you to basically remotely moderate instances where your frontend is installed is some Temu CIA shit. That guy can take his hubris and fuck right back off to Reddit
Supposedly that second, larger & hidden list you can disable, it’s the first, smaller & reportedly hard-coded instance list that you cannot as readily do.
Honestly, it doesn’t reflect well on these kinds of projects that this is not the first such case. I remember the controversy when it was found Lemmy had a hardcoded blocklist and the dev refused to remove it for the longest time.
Do you mean Lemmy’s hard-coded slur word filter? Yes fortunately that was removed. I find it the height of irony how the Alternative Facts crowd keeps blaming PieFed for having hard-coded instance filters, which it does NOT do, while also shilling for Lemmy doing the same thing. But hey, Russia invaded Ukraine, you know? Whereas if you listen to certain people’s ah… uh… “alternative perspective on the matter”… then it was actually the other way around!! (Except again, it was NOT!!) So there’s nothing you can do about that except not feed the trolls the attention that they so desperately crave.
Or you might mean instead Lemmy’s choice to hard-code Lemmy.ml as the source of truth as to what communities are allowed to be recommended to a new instance just starting up. Not a neutral 3rd party webpage or service, but basically if that specific instance has banned it, then it does not exist in the form of acknowledgement to new instances. This also is something that they blame PieFed for doing, which here too it does NOT, whereas Lemmy truly did. Or rather, tbf came very close to almost doing - I think that decision was rolled back soon enough that it did not even make it into the official released codebase, the outcry & pushback was already too high maybe? It still exists iirc as something that now can be opted out of by modifying a configuration setting to use some alternate source of truth, though with Lemmy.ml still the default setting rather than a neutral 3rd party service.
I would think if Lemmy had actual hard-coded (instance) blocklists, that must have been like… at least four years ago?
Truly, Lemmy has gotten better and less opinionated over time - still not perfect (see attempt described in 2nd paragraph above), but better.
While PieFed unfortunately is getting more opinionated over time. Enough even to sabotage all hopes that it will be useful for both serious discussions a la Mastodon plus also funny meme scrolling a la Reddit & Lemmy. See the PugJesus incident. Perhaps this was inevitable? It began as a general-purpose software, but increasingly Rimu (while seemingly being burnt out from fighting against the tankies of Lemmy) looks to want to take on the next steps of remodeling the very underlying nature of social media itself. But… nobody is ready for that just yet, the subscriber numbers simply are not there, and damnit some of us actually DO want to look at funny cat photos and videos!!! (As well as a great discussion too.) More to the point, the roll-out was spectacularly poorly handled, as even admin teams of multiple instances cited having no knowledge of what was going on, even on their own machines after updating the software but then being surprised at the differences in how it handled things (to their credit, the ones that I heard of each handled the situation very quickly and quite professionally).
So yeah, I’m disturbed by the progressive death of the Threadiverse as our numbers keep falling (55k Monthly Active Users at our peak, down to ~35k lately iirc), and then all the infighting pushes people away still further, especially those least willing to read about the details of each incident.
I meant the slur filter. Honestly, I hadn’t heard about the other issues - but having seen what I’ve seen of Dessalines, I’m not really surprised.
Goddammit, I just want to enjoy some social media without the enshittifacation bullshit. And I know many people in my life who would also be interested - but I can’t in good faith recommend this in the current state. Why does it have to be so hard…
Literally every person that I’ve ever recommended this space to irl has outright chided me for having done so. And eventually I saw that they were correct to have done so.
It did not help that (1) a Google search (remember, I’m talking to mainstream normies here, okay?) for “Lemmy” at that time returned Lemmy.ml (nowadays it shows Lemmy.world iirc, but a year or so ago it behaved differently), (2) the default sort for Lemmy.ml is different than most instances, and instead of showing Global it shows only Local, (3) combine this with fluctuations that seems to occur just before any Western election and you get a feed that is very different from what 99% of us here experience for ourselves. Unfiltered Lemmy in this manner is truly bOtH sIdEs SaMe bullshit (of the kind that lets just say discouraged voting for Kamala Harris), and virtually nothing else (again, showing LOCAL rather than GLOBAL on Lemmy.ml).
Mainstream non-technical normal folks are never going to come over to “Lemmy”. It simply has too much historical baggage - and this on top of the continued toxicity still existing in the present. Just one conversation with a hexbear user… by a white, Christian, straight, centrist, “normal” (/mainstream) person is enough to send most of them back to Reddit (or sometimes Bluesky). Whereupon they bitterly complain about us here, warning others against making the same mistake. Oh and yeah they take their OC with them.
Some even stuck around here for a LONG time - like a year or more. Before they too succumbed and went back. I don’t even blame them, and presume that when (not even an “if” in my mind) Donald Trump refuses to step down and this place becomes an absolute shitstorm I am very likely to do the same. Tiny Reddit subs are not the same as the large ones, whereas there are virtually no tiny ones here - at least, not enough to take more than 5 minutes a day to fully catch up on.
Incels will never learn that no means NO, rather than that they simply need to push forward even harder. At which point the issue wraps back around to us, who thereby have to answer what we will actually DO about it.
I’m not a fan of the slur filter but all it does is replace slurs with removed, which is different then hiding entire posts/users/communities.
Does this number include accounts from those who, like me, interact with the threadiverse from non-threadiverse platforms? I mean, Misskey, Friendica and even Mastodon are able to interact with Lemmy/mbin/kbin/piefed threads and comments, although they wouldn’t be considered as threadiverse I guess?
!fedimemes@feddit.uk
No it would not, and that I would expect to mostly grow over time, while remaining low in the absolute sense. These are Monthly Active Users (MAUs), as reported by places such as https://fediverse.observer/, which not every instance reports to although the vast majority do. Your reply would count towards your particular instance, and in its particular software category - you can see 30 Active Users reported on it at https://catodon.fediverse.observer/list, and graphs for how that has changed over time for all catodon instances at https://catodon.fediverse.observer/stats, showing it stably hovering at ~100 MAUs over the past year, even rising by half again compared to a year ago (though still only double to triple digits total, nowhere close to Lemmy or even PieFed numbers, or especially Mastodon ones).
Catodon is not typically considered Threadiverse, although nodeBB is and flarum iirc would be if it ever gets around to implementing the ActivityPub Protocol for itself, but perhaps that situation would change to become more inclusive! The concept itself may start to get fuzzier as messages are able to be passed between Fediverse platforms, though it also makes sense to me to have names that provide distinction as well - like Loops is for videos, and Friendica is user-based, so even if you could view that content from software like PieFed or Mbin, the community-based topical (aka threaded) discussion format still warrants a name.
The microblogging format could use a name as well except right now Mastodon is pretty much considered just the default, so that Fediverse==Mastodon to a first degree of approximation, to most people who aren’t informed.
I love the fact that we might need new names for these, if the concepts outgrow how they are currently being used! (Sadly, Lemmy has a very toxic userbase, especially Hexbear, and this will severely limit growth from Reddit users who see no reason to join here - or who leave after giving us a chance, while complaining to others how bad their experiences here were while they were here.)
OK, that’s fucked up. Man, I wanted to believe the dev because I legitimately understand the problem he’s trying to face, but being so opaque about how it’s handled is not OK.