Oh ahem <cough> I mean uh… “yes”:-).

Plus it gives you room to “play”, which could feed back onto the codebase too if you wanted. Either way, definitely a plus to have the ability to make use of the software, not only as a service, you will get no argument from me to the contrary:-).

Really!? MBin removed that!?!?!? Oh wow, yes I see that - here is a political post (https://fedia.io/m/news@lemmy.world/t/1342007/Harris-says-of-course-her-team-is-prepared-if-Trump) showing 58 “favorites” (names and everything) and 7 “reduces”, but you can no longer see the names of the latter.

I saw that post but honestly I am not sure that I agree that private voting is good, and in fact my naive first thoughts are that it could well be the opposite. Mind you, private polling is good, but for simple up and down voting of a post, I think the anonymity will lead to abuse. Much as people may behave as an asshole when they get behind the wheel of a car, or we see numerous places online such as YouTube that when anonymous comments are allowed they tend to bring out the most vile and spiteful words from people.:-( Studies even of Chimpanzees show that they are perfectly happy to play by the rules… but only when they believe that they are being observed and possibly rewarded for such. Humans hopefully can do better (morally) than chimps… though ofc we do not always choose to be thus:-P.

So I preemptively concede that there are times and places where fully anonymous voting is a good thing - and perhaps among people that are all engaging in good faith behavior that may always be the case? But in that scenario then… why even would there be a need for the anonymity in the first place? I so rarely downvote people to begin with, and more often I do not and rather offer a message explaining whatever particular problem I may have with what they said (unless they seem beyond any hope of reproach and then I’ll simply move on) - unless such already exists and then I’ll add my downvote to the existing pile, for the additional weight. I fully would hope for such in return, in which case the anonymity seems superfluous?

But also, voting is inherently an unequal activity. Someone who goes to great time and expense of effort to write out a post has to “expose” themselves to do so - their username is there for all to see. Similarly for a comment / reply. However, voting can happen in a second, even possibly by accident. Issues of “manipulation” aside, consider this hypothetical: I make a post of my favorite rock music, to a community for rock music. Someone downvoting bc they dislike my particular music post is one thing, but someone downvoting bc they don’t like “rock music” is quite another - in that case they should have blocked the community in the first place. Or maybe I said something in another community, and they take it upon themselves to downvote everything I said recently, at least until they get tired of the exercise. Actually, I expected much more of this on Lemmy but have rarely seen it, and never directed at myself, despite how extremely common it was on Reddit - probably retaliation for someone who got banned and they made an alt, a bot, and decided to go on a power trip (but not to help anyone, and instead to inflate their own ego by trampling that of everyone in whole entire communities of hundreds of thousands of people, even gaming ones where many are literally children, and even those who hadn’t joined the community before all the banned person’s drama - mind you, this is all a hypothetical illustration / guess, not from deep research or studied confirming it or anything:-).

So bc voting is an inherently inequitable activity, I am not a fan of hiding the votes that would at least have done something to balance it out more. Then again, I am only today learning more details about how the “reputation” scores work, so perhaps so long as it is PieFed doing the privateering of the votes, and yet if someone’s downvoting still has a karmic feedback to their own account, then perhaps in that scenario… it makes more sense? Ultimately I guess I am saying that in case these thoughts were of interest then I wanted to offer them, but I could be very wrong there… or not, who knows - only time and practical experience with the experiment will tell.:-)

So is PieFed.social open for signups? https://fediverse.observer/search?query=PieFed.social says it is not - if you are wanting more people to join then you may investigate how to get that changed.

I guess I should measure ping for PieFed.social vs. feddit.online, which I note is geographically close to me, but then again it probably has a longer delay for software updates that PieFed.social would not - except it lists you as an admin there too, do you deploy updates to both frequently?

I used to be proud of how I could talk with anyone on Reddit. Now… I know better, that some people are simply trying to waste your time (like sea lioning), whether they even are aware of that themselves or not. So now I’m switching to the good fences make good neighbors approach:-).

Even Dessalines is doing some great work that is highly useful to the worldwide community, to help break people’s dependency upon corporate Reddit - so in that sense, an ally in that fight against misinformation. Although… there are downsides to those efforts as well, both in the Lemmy.ml instance itself and the codebase pushed out, which makes it hard to avoid the nonsense spouted by its users across the Fediverse, among other things. Almost nothing is fully good or fully bad, afaict, though bad-faith trolling seems the closest to the latter.

I love (from https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/) PieFed’s focus on not simply banning an instance or two or three (they’ll simply spread as a result of that anyway), but on using algorithmic approaches to identify the patterns that bad actors tend to take, and then provide labels based on that. Which preserves freedom of choices while also allowing maximum guidance that anticipates what someone would eventually choose, if only they had the time to research each individual item in as great a depth as would be needed to accurately judge.

Tbf the fact that it doesn’t look very searchable is shared in common with Lemmy, but at least it works in the latter, and it sounds like it works in PieFed as well, though only for people who have accounts. The ideal ofc being to have clickable links that take federation into account, just as with user accounts and communities, but even Lemmy does not have that yet so it is understandable that PieFed does not yet.