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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Previous comments are spot on.

    One thing I would add is that Lemmy is a particularly sensitive case, because we really want to encourage activity and growth at this stage. It pains me when communities without much activity get a meme post or something that makes it into /all and the mods remove it for being off-topic.

    Overly strict moderation is one of the fastest ways to drive people away from a platform. Just follow your natural instincts and let people post what they want as long as it’s not harming anyone.










  • Interesting to see Lemmy from the perspective of a Mastodon user. I never used Twitter and I have no interest in Mastodon, but it certainly seems like a tremendous advantage to be able to cross pollinate with them, given their sizeable userbase. There is definitely more work to be done on streamlining federation between platforms, but its an inherently tricky problem so I’m not surprised.

    Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin are still at the stage where they are trying to complete their own core features, so there hasn’t been as much focus on bridging to the rest of the fediverse. Mastodon is a more mature software so they probably had more time to work on extra features like cross-platform federation.



  • I was going to edit my previous comment but I’ll just put it here.

    I understand your point, but I’m saying that private/public is not a binary concept. It’s a spectrum, and making votes visible on the Lemmy UI shifts the position much closer to the public side. It will have a noticeable effect on people’s behavior.

    But I agree that it’s probably possible to correlate the voting profiles in theory. Could potentially be prevented by randomizing the profile for each vote maybe.



  • I just had to type in the URL for your comment in the search bar and click the “Activity” field in the menu.

    Believe it or not, that barrier of entry is enough to dissuade 99% of people. People simply don’t have the time or inclination to do this. But if you put a button right in the Lemmy UI, people will check constantly, and it will cause arguments and potentially defederations.

    It’s not illegal to get your DNA, which is arguably the most egregious example I gave. They solve cold cases all the time nowadays by surreptitiously collecting DNA samples. You can see how heavy someone is just by looking at them. But that doesn’t mean they want to tell you their actual weight. I’m not sure about income and age, and it would vary by jurisdiction anyhow.

    I’m just trying to explain that healthy social interactions and environments are predicated on some degree of privacy, and abolishing that serves no one. If you remove the privacy of voting, you reduce the incentive for people to vote, or indeed to use this platform at all.


  • I’m well aware that they can be viewed from other platforms and by admins. But I don’t agree that this makes them effectively public.

    By that logic, everything is effectively public. Why should I be reluctant to share my age, weight, income, DNA? All of that information can be publicly available for someone who takes the time to sample a piece of my hair, check my birth certificate, etc. It’s not illegal or impossible for someone to obtain that information.

    But there’s a whole world of difference between something being theoretically accessible via workarounds, and being displayed prominently for all to see. As a result of human nature, I think that allowing people to easily check votes on any post would cause a great deal of conflict.

    Also, there are currently plans underway to build more privacy into the fediverse.


  • Cool solution. It’s great to have multiple projects in the fediverse that can experiment with different features/formats.

    For those who are concerned about possible downsides, I think it’s important to understand that

    • PieFed has a small userbase
    • Rimu is an active admin, so if you are attempting to combat brigading or other bad behavior and this makes it more difficult, just send them a DM and they will be happy to help out

    This is a good environment to test this feature because Rimu can keep a close watch over everything. We can’t become paralyzed by the hypothetical ways that bad actors might abuse new features or systems. The only way forward is through trial and error, and the fact that PieFed exists makes that process significantly faster and less disruptive.

    This is an attempt to add more privacy to the fediverse. If the consequences turn out for the worse, then we can either try something else, or live with the lack of privacy. Either way, we’ll be better off than having never tried anything at all.