Oh yeah absolutely the app purge is why I’m here. I absolutely despise their mobile app; but on desktop I don’t mind.

The information density isn’t that important to me on desktop since my screen is plenty large and scrolling (or collapsing) comments is easy.

Once upon a time Reddit used to be just a single subreddit. And it was fine. Lemmy already has enough users for separate subreddits to be actually kinda viable, even if they are not too active.

We’ll be fine.

The fact that Bluesky is almost a 1:1 copy (which includes the dumb stuff like post character limit) is precisely why I don’t like it.

I’m an OG user and other than technical issues (most of which have been figured it by now) I prefered both the original redesign and the newest one (though I did like the previous one more, I think).

If you get used to the fact that it’s just a bit different it’s perfectly fine and actually looks better. Especially since it has dark mode.

There are definitely issues with Lemmy but these users specifically seem to just be complaining for the sake of complaining. They want Reddit without the parts they currently don’t like, not realizing that they also need to get rid of the parts that eventually made Reddit go to the shitter - because otherwise it’d just repeat.

It would help of Lemmy had a simple migration option like Mastodon. Then, picking an instance wouldn’t be a big deal.

That’s what PieFed changes though. You can still track how someone votes, but you can’t tie it to a specific profile (without doing some extra analysis and even then you can’t be completely sure).

Or, with my suggestion, you could track how that specific account votes, but it would be easy to obfuscate who exactly it is and (hopefully) impossible to track to the user’s other identities.

I think this approach kinda fixes that issue though, no? You can use it the way it is now, and others can be anonymous.

I mean it would be also nice if you could log into multiple accounts and easily switch between them for each vote and comment, but this is also good, IMO.

Looks like it’s kinda hard to spin up a piefed bot. Not impossible, but it’s a bitch without an API.

What you would actually want to do if you want to bot is take one of the existing apps and modify it to make spamming easy.

Either way, I want to be able to point to their behavior - without the extra step of having to de-anonymize their activity - and tell them to chill the fuck out or get the fuck out. Out means out. Totally and forever.

I can see why you would want that, but my question is is that such a big deal compared to people being harassed for their voting? I don’t think user privacy should be violated - especially en masse / by default just because of some (in my opinion fairly minor) moderation concerns.

And if they are a dick overall, then you will figure it out anyway, ban their “main” account and that will prevent them from voting, too (unless the instance is malicious, but then a malicious instance can do much more harm in general).

It’s very easy to find my IRL identity, and even my online pseudonym (well, both of them) have so much stuff tied to them that they are effectively my real identities. They are very much public, and definitely not anonymous.

Mass vote manipulation should still be easy to spot. It’ll only be hard to check whether the account voting is a real person.

Thanks for being so upfront about how you run your instance. I think it’s disingenuous when people claim that there is “no agenda” or “no moderation” or whatever, because there is always some - even if unintended - just by the pure nature of people running it. So being explicit and opinionated about it is great.

…and it still doesn’t solve the issue that literally anyone can run their own instance and just capture the data.

On one end, if it’s my instance and I want to ban a user, I want the whole fucking user banned – not just remove their ability to vote anonymously.

I mean, is that truly the case? If a user only engages in vote manipulation, but otherwise they have insightful comments/posts, is it really that big of a deal that you will ban only their option to vote?

It could be mitigated further by having a different Actor per community you engage in, but that is definitely a bigger change in how voting works currently, and might have issues detecting vote brigading.

When you comment you make a conscious decision to put your opinion out there and sign it with your “name” (or alternatively you switch to a “burner” account and do it pseudonymously).

But when you vote for stuff it’s often without much thinking, and it’s private on pretty much every other platform. Where it isn’t it’s usually blatantly obvious that that is the case.

What difference does it make that votes can be viewed, other than for transparency during discussion?

There are many reasons that have been stated time and time again; one is simply that people may wish to stay anonymous when supporting certain opinions.

To me it feels like comments are what you can actually stand behind publicly, while votes also show what you think privately. And not everyone is willing to stand behind all of their opinions publicly, often for fear of backlash or harassment.

This doesn’t solve it. I can still just make multiple accounts and vote multiple times.

I mean yeah, but you could already do that now. The point is to not make it worse, and to not allow malicious instances to vote as if they were other people.

I guess that’s true. Then you could just ask the instance admins to check their users’ voting patterns / deanonymize them / whatever, and if they don’t comply defederate them.

introduces no new spam/brigade vulns which don’t already exist from a rogue instance

It does though. Now a rogue instance would have to have “believable” profiles for the accounts that vote, because an instance of just “lurkers” who seem to suspiciously vote is a pretty big signal of vote manipulation. If you only see a random identifier (or not even that, just a tally of votes) it’d be impossible to tell if it’s truly the instance’s users just passionate about something or actual vote manipulation.

In other words it would at least make the problem way worse.

Sometimes you might want to show support for something but do so privately, without others knowing it’s you in particular supporting that.

Votes could be publicly federated but tied to some uuid instead of the username. That way you still have the same anti spam ability (can see that a user upvoted these things from this instance at this time) but can’t tie it directly to comments or actual user accounts without some extra osint.

The issue with that is with malicious instances that could engage with vote manipulation by just generating new IDs and voting for whatever they want. If you can’t look back at the profile and determine whether it’s a real, non-spam account, it’s a pretty big issue unfortunately.

You also have an issue where someone could potentially vote with “your” ID without any way to detect that it’s not actually “you” who sent the vote.

Comparing to democracy doesn’t make sense, as democracy has mechanisms to ensure 1 person = 1 vote. The internet has no such mechanism. If we did, I’d be all for private voting.

I know, it’s an issue, but there are certainly ways to solve it, like having the vote identity split between multiple servers that can still confirm with each other that the vote is valid, but neither would reveal the actual identity to make it traceable back.

Sounds like those people doing the ostracizing should get moderated if they can’t handle being downvoted.

That’s unfortunately not how it often works. Small, ostracized and vulnerable groups often get taken advantage of. As an example, imagine I want to make a good faight argument around, say, a political topic like Russia. Or a sensitive topic like paedophilia. Or about abortion or trans rights in a religious subreddit. Chances are I’d get downvoted to oblivion, even if the consensus (at least originally on Reddit) was that downvotes should not be used to simply disagree with someone. But at least I “opt into” that, by putting myself out there, knowing that the comment will be attached to my name.

But that’s not really the standard with votes, and them being public has a chilling effect, makes it easy to harass people just for (dis)agreeing with something, etc. We should find a way to make votes more private, not less.

Besides, if a dickhead wants to see the votes today, they can find them - votes are public, Lemmy just doesn’t display them in the UI.

Yes, the votes are already kinda public, but there’s still at least some barrier to it, and most people either don’t know or care enough.

It leads to an even bigger echo chamber, people with unpopular opinions will get ostracized not just for their comments, but even for their voting. There’s a reason why any real democracy has secret votes.

“Removed by Reddit” implies admin action though.

…or maybe they just don’t want a busy looking logo.

They also assert that Bluesky doesn’t federate (it currently doesn’t, but the protocol is designed for federation!) when it’s clear that it now does.

I’m not surprised about the skepticism there though. These are just promises, and we all know that a for-profit entity will happily sacrifice any promies if it means they make more money that way. Also depending on how exactly that federation will work it might be practically useless as well.

Why not judge these instances on their own merit though? If what you say becomes true and is so problematic and rampant that it needs addressing, you can block that instance. But doing so preemptively seems petty and counterproductive at best.

What if there is an instance that selectively reposts from Threads only decent, thoughtful discussions?

Oh and as a side note; if you’re worried about stuff getting more mainstream, toxic and polarized that’s kinda inevitable if you want more people using the fediverse, that’s just how it is when lots of differently thinking people are in one place.

At least if you break something it’s just you who you have to deal with.

Anyone knows why Mastodon is so disk space hungry? Seems kinda stupid.

Didn’t know that’s the case, that’s neat though it doesn’t solve the redirect back to your home instance.

It’ll also probably lead to centralization because if you’re more likely to find a particular instance through search and decide to join Lemmy you’re probably going to do so on that instance.

The point of random GUIDs is that there are so many that it’s effectively impossible to generate duplicates just by random chance. They’d be perfect for this.

The initial instance picks it, and then the federated instances use it.

Yes, this would be possible (and not too hard technically either). But all instances would have to agree to link this instance as canonical.

You’d also want to add a feature where you can set you home instance where this canonical instance would redirect you (perhaps even automatically). Home Assistant does something like that.

What pisses me most about Lemmy is that each instance has its own post IDs which means that crosslinking and switching instances based purely on URLs is impossible.

IMO posts should have random GUIDs for IDs; that would help a ton with these kinds of issues. It’d then be trivial for Google to detect same content (if they wish) this way

I mean it’s more accurate and unambiguous. Definitely preferable overall IMO.