this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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Fediverse memes
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Memes about the Fediverse.
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General
- Be respectful
- Post on topic
- No bigotry or hate speech
- Memes should not be personal attacks towards other users
Specific
- We are not YPTB. If you have a problem with the way an instance or community is run, then take it up over at !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com.
- Addendum: Yes we know that you think ml/hexbear/grad are tankies and or .world are a bunch of liberals but it gets old quickly. Try and come up with new material.
Elsewhere in the Fediverse
Other relevant communities:
- !fediverse@lemmy.world
- !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !lemmydrama@lemmy.world
- !fediverselore@lemmy.ca
- !bestofthefediverse@lemmy.ca
- !fedigrow@lemmy.zip
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Disclaimer: I checked into piefed shit again and this unexpectedly turned into a whole thing.
I found this here https://join.piefed.social/features/ :
Does that mean they can't be unblocked? And now I'm seeing:
That gave me pause, not because I want to promote authoritarian propaganda, but I'm concerned about someone else deciding what's authoritarian.
And:
This feels like karma. I'm alright with rule-breaking stuff getting deleted and people getting banned for bad behavior, but I don't think people should be flagged for consistently going against the popular narrative. If they're being assholes users can report them.
They can be unblocked. They're just blocked by default.
These are all tools that can be modified by server admins.
Fair enough. Thanks for the info!
Note how that link points to PieFed.social. Yes, those are defederated at the instance level, so a user cannot work around that - Lemmy defederation works the same way. However, PieFed.zip is a separate instance from PieFed.socual, and does not defederate from much at all.
I find that feature very helpful. It's merely a visual indicator placed next to the username, which is very different than the software making decisions for me on what content to show or not, and that indicator helps clue me in that responding to e.g. an argumentative person is unlikely to enhance my day. Also while I don't recall the details on how it is set, imagine if you will that someone receives 10x more downvotes total than upvotes. Such an account is usually a troll. Most people get downvotes occasionally, but that would not trigger the indicator to be shown (and again, even if it somehow did, it's just a visual icon, not a block or anything).
Lemmy is FAR more known for authoritative censorship than PieFed. Particularly those instances mentioned like hexbear and the infamous lemmy.ml where you cannot criticize Russia, China, or North Korea without being banned from every community on the entire instance including those you've never even heard of.
The link doesn't point to the instance, that's the main blog/info site for piefed.
Either way my question about blocking was answered, now I know the block list isn't baked into piefed itself.
I don't agree with the low rep feature. There are rules, reporting and blocking available moderate communities. If one user doesn't want to interact with another for non-rulebreaking reasons, they can block them, tag them, or just not respond. This just opens up new reasons to manipulate votes and downvote unpopular opinions.
I'm on Lemmy.Today, so I disagree that it's authoritative. This instance doesn't block/isn't blocked by any instance, and allows all opinions that aren't bigoted or insulting. There's a whole spectrum of vibes across the instances but there's nothing authoritative about the Lemmy ground rules.
For what it's worth, fedia.io does not federate with lemmy.today: https://fedia.io/federation
The only way to approach "talking with everyone" on the fediverse is to host your own instance - only even then you'll probably need to defederate ASAP from any instances that send you illegal material (as in child sexual abuse material).
What!? I'm going to send them a letter.
Yeah, I think OpenStars means the ruleset in lemmy.ml which is the equivalent instance to lemmy as piefed.social is to piefed.
However hypothetically authoritarian piefed.social might become, it doesn't reflect on the piefed software itself necessarily.
I doubt that a normal user would get themselves flagged with the low rep icon though. Even receiving twice as many, triple as many, quadruple or quintuple as many downvotes as upvotes would not do it. To receive ten times as many downvotes as upvotes is someone who is entirely ignoring the consent of users to have to read their ~~crap~~ ahem "offered opinions". That is Reddit-level hostility there, and something that your average conscientious Threadiverse participant will never experience - except unfortunately on the receiving end, as some very few people seem to take great pleasure in absolutely flaunting the rules in every community that they visit.
It would also take a MASSIVE vote-altering campaign to counteract that effect. Something which if only due to its sheer scale might be noticed. And at that point it would be easier to create a new Lemmy account - some instances require nothing to make that happen - or even spin up a new instance in order to skirt the effects of downvoting.
In short, reputation is a part of the normal human set of interactions. PieFed acknowledges that and exceedingly gently places an icon next to the usernames of the most egregious offenders. I for one do not think that is a bad thing, even on purely theoretical grounds. We aren't trying to recreate a new 4chan here (we already have Hexbear for that - seriously! 😐)
Skavau already covered the point about lemmy.ml being authoritative whereas Lemmy.today is not (in general there are 4 well-known tankie authoritarian instances and Lemmy.today is not one of those:-).
Which one is 4th?
the ever-expanding definition of "tankie" strikes again!
Midwest.social - the admin Seahorse famously banning people for downvoting them. Yeah definitely less well-known than the usual 3.
That was a one time occurrence, the admin apologized, reverted the decision, and I haven't heard of any similar incident since then.
I definitely recall multiple posts about that instance (and Seahorse in particular) in !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com. One example is the downvoting one (https://lemmy.world/post/18414833), another even more authoritarian example is https://lemmy.cafe/post/10511187 where Seahorse banned the person who reported a comment calling for violence, stating "someone please kill [this person]" - mind you, he did not ban the person making that comment, but the person who REPORTED it. Making reports is apparently a bannable offense, mind you with no text in the sidebar stating that, and subsequent apologies to the admin going un-responded to (according to that post).
I remember the second one with the libbity lib lib
The first one seems someone throwing a fit. I've had it worst on other instances, I don't equal them with the three ones.
2 posts seem light to put them to the same level as the three others
Oh it's definitely not on the same level, agreed. Just authoritarian and to be avoided by those not wanting to be constrained by having to exist inside such an echo chamber.
Edit: I want to add another point about the first post (https://lemmy.world/post/18414833). Even if it was merely someone throwing a fit, the response by the admin to ban people who merely downvoted one of their posts still seems inconsistent with democratic principles and rather 100% aligned with fascist authoritarian ones where Seahorse does whatever Seahorse wants to in that moment, rules and standards of conduct be damned. He can do as he pleases of course... and we can avoid that instance too if that is how he wants to run it.
'grad, .ml, and hexbear. What's the fourth?
... Surely not db0?
Edit: Apparently, this comment never showed up on piefed.social, so I'll probably never get a reply.
I see it from Piefed.zip
Good thing I'm friends with everyone. Maybe the maga instance? I've heard people call beehaw and blahaj authoritarian, strangely.
You can make an alt on some other instance that is federated with piefed.social and ask again with that one! :)
It's anyway useful to have alts.
🐳
(Just search for Tuuktuuk... I might have slightly been searching for the optimal instance for my use 🤣...but then again, I have actually had actual occassinal need for four of my alts! The other PieFed one when this one has been down, the Lemmy one for seeing how things look when viewed from Lemmy, Mastodon for viewing microblog posts, Friendica for writing longer microblog posts and boosting them with my main Mastodon account, mbin is sometimes useful when I want to share posts and comments between Mastodon and PieFed/Lemmy.)
Lemmy.ml is federated with piefed.social, Diva's comments can be seen: https://piefed.social/post/1533603#comment_9110585
So I don't know why my comment can't be, I'm not banned on there as far as I can see.
Also this is my "federation" alt.
Edit: My other comment in this post shows up: https://piefed.social/u/edie@lemmy.ml
I was responding to this comment:
I'm aware of the weirder instances. I was saying Lemmy itself isn't authoritative.
I'm not opposed to the reputation thing because I think manipulation will end in false positives, but because there are better systems to moderate users than popularity. Without knowing the details of it, seems like a straight ratio would disproportionately affect people who don't post as often. Some people have like 30 comments over a year, most with two or three votes. At that point it just takes one or two really unpopular opinions to shift that ratio drastically. But I donno, maybe there's a threshold.
Even so, right now I don't mind leaving my more unpopular comments up because the fruitcake of conversation is better with a few odd chunks, and it doesn't affect anything. The threat of a reputation label, no matter how unlikely it is to get one, is an incentive to please the crowd, and I think making votes mean anything was part of the problem with reddit. I don't want anything to get in the way of a passionate user and their rant, I'm here for the crazy.
Plus, In moderating my community I found a few people who just straight downvote everything. One of the accounts I checked had hundreds of hours of downvoting, like an insane amount of clicking arrows. Tens of thousands of downvotes. I don't want any kind of system someone like that can influence.
Regardless, I respect your argument and your points are valid. We might have to agree to disagree, and maybe I'll see you on piefed soon, despite my criticisms.
Originally I meant that the Lemmy ecosystem is generally speaking more authoritarian than the PieFed one. This is in large part due to the preferences of the devs.
I will now also add the new related point that I think the coding design of Lemmy lends itself more to authoritarian control. It seems geared and marketed more towards instance admins, then mods, then users only last. Tbf PieFed is the same way here, but with a different focus due to the preferences of the main designer.
Lemmy is even more authoritarian than Reddit itself in many ways: Reddit at least sends a user a notification whenever their content is removed, plus users (and anyone who commented or otherwise has a direct link) can still see their content even after that. Reddit users may also contact the moderators via mod mail. In contrast, despite how Lemmy has the modlog, again there are no notifications for removal, and the modlog just says that the action was done by a "mod" (it used to always have the username, but now it can just say "mod", so over time Lemmy has actually moved in the direction to become MORE authoritarian than it used to be, not less).
To be fair, PieFed also lacks a mod mail or notification upon removal of content, but I feel like for Piefed it is simply because it is new and new features being added monthly, even practically weekly. Whereas for Lemmy it gives an impression at least that it is a design choice that seems unlikely to ever change towards more democratic principles. We will see how they each develop over more time I suppose.
For now, many Lemmy instances are very free and open, subject to the software constraints, while others are extremely closed down, most especially lemmy.ml that the main Lemmy developer seems to spend an inordinate amount of time moderating rather than tweaking the codebase. That's fine btw, it's his code and he can do whatever he wants with it, although for me I choose PieFed instead, for all the above reasons and so much more.
Speaking of, none of what you said sounds to me like it should result in someone receiving a visual icon due to poor reputation. I've had some massively downvoted content myself, but if the system is implemented properly then it will consider more like a median downvoting rather than maximum or even average. Theoretically someone who only made 10 comments and >=9 of those were downvoted heavily, yeah they would get that icon. However, the icon does not cause filtering of their content (there are other things that can but those are entirely separate and not based on the user account), it's merely a visual display. I've upvoted, downvoted, and replied to people's comments even when I can see that icon - so it in no way blocks me from doing so or from seeing it in the first place. But it does (helpfully imho) label it, so that I have a better indicator going in what I am getting myself into.
Like I said, I see your side and I don't agree with it, fundamentally. I only gave one hypothetical, btw, the rest was on the unreliability of votes as a metric. And I just don't see the point on an open forum where anyone can respond at any time. Plus, there are reasons and recourse for mod actions, but no one has to justify a downvote.
Lemmy isn't my tribe and Piefed isn't my enemy, I'll probably end up using both, or whatever ends up working better for me. The point of decentralization is having places like .today, .blahaj, .ml and .hexbear all doing governance however the hell they want, and being able to freely choose between them. An authoritarian platform would be obligatory, not federated with the competition, non-transparent, and centralize power to one or a few individuals. I don't even think it's possible for .ml to be authoritarian because participation is a choice.
However, I can see which mods performed what action and from what community, granted I use the web apps with more features. But I agree, not getting a notification should for sure be fixed and mod mail for big communities would be cool, and I wish there was a way to see deleted content, but the mod actions definitely aren't a secret and anyone can send them a message about it.
Not if the modlog merely says "mod". Note that the ability to hide the username of the mod is not universally utilized - it is a community setting that can be turned on or off as the mod sees fit. When on though, someone would have to DM every single mod in the entire list in order to get an explanation for a ban that was surprising to them. So yes definitely a highly anticipated feature to offer a modmail.
Of course participation in any Fediverse communications is all optional. That said, many people complain in r/RedditAlternatives that Lemmy is too authoritarian for their liking, so addressing their concerns may help enhance the Threadiverse by welcoming a wider variety of people. Which is now being done by PieFed more than Lemmy. I am not trying (anymore) to convince you to make an account on a PieFed instance, just relating that fact as part of the wider conversation about matters happening in relation to the Fediverse, because I think it is good to know about and an interesting subject!:-)
You were trying to convince me? I was already into it, hah, just looking for clarity. We were probably both just enjoying the debate (I hope.) I'm not trying to get anyone to switch sides.
Communities should be responsive to their userbase first and potential users second, so given that Lemmy isn't inherently authoritarian, the real issue is image. Then again, since we know Reddit uses bots, they supposedly censor lemmyganda, and they shut down r/lemmy, I question how authentic those opinions are. I mainly hear it's too complicated for people. But still, may the best platform win... or may people use whatever the hell they want because the fediverse is neat.
I have two communities on two platforms, I don't see any way to hide my username. On the site I think they all show up as "mod," but I can see all the mod names using lemmy with an app. But a user can still see what's been removed or what community they've been banned from, so they could contact anyone in that community for an explanation. Or, failing that, an admin. It's clunky and annoying, but doesn't seem intentionally obfuscating. Looks like the next update is going to fix the notification thing anyway.
Regardless, best of luck to both of us. The fediverse is still fun.
Notifications for mod actions are already implemented for Lemmy 1.0. Mod mail would take a lot of work to implement, and we have plenty of other things to work on. Being able to view your own removed posts makes sense, will note that down.
Speak of the devil.
Hello, and thanks for the heads up.
That’s just the anti-propaganda links on the side.
Correct, and an admin can even disable those if they want to run a propaganda piefed instance for whatever reason.