PieFed looks so amazing! And it is fantastic how it continues to be developed more all the time.
Though it still lacks numerous features found on Lemmy - e.g. being able to search for users (I tried searching for one of my favorite people to talk to, lvxferre, and many variations such as @lvxferre@mander.xyz, but piefed.social came up with nothing - it seems to search only within the text fields, and I saw nothing in any of the dropdowns to look for a “user”, or a “community”, etc.). Likewise I tried to find existing posts in that search bar - e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/21055894 “Lemmy’s gaining popularity, so I thought new people should see this.” but again could not. Another one is that the frontend UI needs some polish, e.g. on this post I literally cannot see the name of the community (no matter how far I zoom out), only that it begins with “[META] Piefe…” (oh wait no, now I see, at https://ponder.cat/post/326806 - that’s the name of the post? but then why is it repeated like that, in tiny font, right next to / above the huge font, and also cut off - wouldn’t it make more sense to just stop the list at “Communities@ponder.cat”? or if it is important enough to add, then not to cut it off?)
Minor issues of polish aside, the USA election season is coming up so… this makes me wonder: can you block users from a given list of instances using PieFed? e.g. if I wanted to block users, and I mean all of communities, posts, comments, even voting if possible - basically I want a defederation action, but will take a user-level block if that is all I can get. People might be able to engender this behavior with keywords, but the key would be to allow things like a discussion of the firefox@lemmy.ml community name, while blocking the users from that instance name - and yet given the above issue of not being able to search for users at all, my guess is that keyword-based blocking would do the exact opposite of that? (cutting out posts that just happen to contain the instance name, while allowing the users free reign so long as their posts do not contain the instance name)
Either way, I do so look forward to the development of this fantastic Lemmy alternative, which nonetheless federates with it plus so much else besides!:-)
Ah yes, I keep crossing post replies with him. Very cool though.
Probably.
A major reason I went with hosting my own single user instance is that, for things like this, I can modify the code myself to do what I want. That is, I have the ability to develop whatever missing feature I want.
Here’s another example - kbin.social would show you who was upvoting or downvoting your posts and comments, but mbin removed the ability to see that. pyfedi doesn’t have it either, but I can easily add something quick & dirty to show that myself. Although that’s less useful now than it was in the past, because of another pyfedi innovation - private voting, https://piefed.social/post/205362
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.:-)