Q: For those who haven’t been following the project, how would you describe Star Trek: Section 31?

I read this in John de Lancie’s voice.

lol yeah, that’ll do it.

Counterpoint: If you think you said something stupid, you’re entitled to delete it. Don’t feel obligated to hang your ass out there and take a beating for a cold take.

Wow, decisions were made with those new fonts. 😬

Okay, so, FOSS.

If WordPress doesn’t want WP Engine doing what it’s doing, they need to change their license. It’s not “Free Open Source Software Until Something We Don’t Like Happens.”

Whatever they have to do to shoehorn Tawny Newsome and Jack Quaid into Starfleet Academy or SNW.

Isn’t that what mbin is?

Gotify. Home Assistant. DDClient.

Amazing.

Ah fuck! I mistook the piefed docs for the pixelfed docs.

I swear there was documentation there.

No, the utility is to remove bad users.

I think you’re conflating my two separate concerns. One’s automated vote manipulation. The other is targeted harassment.

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

If I have an insightful contributer who’s going out of their way and outside of their normal communities to be a dick to another user, maybe they’re not so insightful after all. Or they’ve got a great reason!

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.

mods are just as capable of manipulation and targeted harassment when they can curate the voting and react based on votes

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.

I’m speaking as an admin, not as a mod. I own the servers. I have direct access to the databases. When law enforcement comes a’knockin’, it’s my ass that gets arrested. I have total control over my instances and can completely sever them from the fediverse if I feel it necessary. Mods are mall cops that can lock posts and deal with problem users one at a time.

On reddit, votes are only visible to the admins, and the admins would take care of this type of thing when they saw it (or it tripped some kind of automated something or other)

There are no built in automations. Decoupling votes from the users that cast them interferes with my ability to “take care of this type of thing.”

Wow your documentation is so much better than ours.

PieFed tracks the percentage of downvotes vs upvotes (calling it “Attitude” in the code and admin UI)

That’s cool. I wonder what my attitude is and I wonder how accurate the score is, if our federations don’t overlap super well. What happens if I have a ton of interactions on an instance that yours is completely unaware of?

(I think “Attitude” is a perfect word, because it’s perceptive. Like, “you say they’re great but all I see them do is get drunk and complain about how every Pokemon after Mewtwo isn’t ‘legit’,” sort of thing.)

Well, doesn’t that fly in the face of federated autonomy and privacy?

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. If one of my communities or users is being attacked, it’s my responsibility to react. If I can’t remove the whole problem with a ban, then I have to remove the whole problem with a de-federation. (A thing I fundamentally don’t want to do.)

On the other, if some other admin says, “one of your users is being problematic, please tell me who they are,” I’m going to tell that other admin to fuck right off because I just implemented a feature that made their votes anonymous. I’m not about to out my users to some rando because they’re raining downvotes on MeinHitler69@nazi.hut.

It’s a philosophical difference of opinion.

What about PieFed-based shitty humans?

It actually adds a tool for harassers, in that targeted harassment can’t be tied back to a harasser without the cooperation of their instance admin.

In reality, I think a better answer might be to anonymize the username and publicize the votes.

If the same account is voting in the same direction on every single post and comment in an entire community in a matter of seconds while contributing neither posts nor comments? Yes, vote manipulation.

If one user is following another around, down voting their content across a wide range of topics? Yes, targeted harassment.