Voyager has an option to “hide downvotes”, but not to disable them entirely, yeah.

Please do!:-)

Fwiw the image automatically shows up for me in PieFed.

I predict that one side will win:-)

And that a bunch of people won’t be happy about it. :-(

And if it helps, here is a reply:-)

Yes:-). Though if it is an isolated occurrence then it may not reflect the experience with the instance overall? Then again, if the software is being auto-updated, new problems seem like they would crop up constantly. I definitely doubt that “normies” are going to want to join an experimental server - they want safe and stable.

Which at this point, seems basically to be: Mbin (except I don’t like that UI), PieFed (the UI is better though not perfect), or being constrained to use one of only a handful of Apps that provide that functionality. All of those involve gaining a greater degree of independence from the Lemmy sourcecode, since it will not provide this functionality by itself.

He does seem very responsive - so on the ball in that sense. Plus somewhat knowledgeable about software maintenance on a linux machine.

Though perhaps you don’t want to refer people to a server that is always going to be experimental? Or at least put a warning about it, like there are positives (friendly and welcoming, one of the only ones that defederates from lemmy.ml), but also negatives too (experimental running a software beta)?

Oh no… that’s horrifying - is there no validation for that site?! Hopefully it’s a post-process that examines someone’s activities.

Yet another plug for PieFed: on piefed.social at least they refused to allow me to send a Message to someone when my account was still in its first week. As always that’s not a sufficient measure to block a determined attempt at trolling, but it is something to help make it more difficult for someone to instantly spin up an alt and wreak havoc until they can be shut down.

So if that rate-limiting is truly what lemmy.cafe is doing, then that is awesome!:-) Though it is quite sus that it merely gives you such an error without explanation:-(. Or it could simply be due to the use of the beta version? The last post from someone with an account from lemmy.cafe is 17 days ago, when I am fairly certain that the version was not yet BE: 0.19.6-beta.13, so perhaps that latest bump-up process from 9 to 13 broke something?

Well, we are learning and that’s fun:-).

Wow that modlog indeed is SUPER slow… but then again, others are fairly slow as well? Though to pull up lemmy.cafe’s takes ~13 s in one test whereas lemmy.ca’s took ~2 s. That indeed may be due to running a beta.

Also that beta version code keeps changing - e.g. I recall earlier (maybe a week ago?) it was BE: 0.19.6-beta.9, while now it is -beta.13. So that update process was not a one-off - I hope he doesn’t have an automated update process, that would make the instance quite unstable / experimental?

They recently increased their resources too.

If you got an account that quickly, that would speak positively to how responsive the main instance admin is? It is hard to tell b/c of how Lemmy hides precise dates starting at the 1-month mark, but before then the admin seemed to always respond to inquiries within a day?

Plus even beyond a month, quite responsive overall. That issue might be related to the common backlog that all instances are currently facing, or perhaps it is instead an indication that the server is not ready for thousands of new members to suddenly flock to it - yet the graybeard sage Illecors might be open to making some changes to help make that happen? (it looks that way at least)

That’s super weird that you cannot access the site. I’ve been looking it here off an on for like the last hour, plus I just now checked and I can access it from 5 browsers on 2 different machines / OSes. Though none of those are with an account, so perhaps trying from with a logged-in account is what is causing the issues? As usual I guess, try closing your program/app and starting it fresh in case it still has some hold-overs from when you lacked the account.

No matter what, thank you for sharing it then!:-)

Edit: for the lolz:

I am not sure how far we can take this line of reasoning but… ironically it is the same type of thing that we are talking about irl to “tankies on Lemmy” - like, does the presence of seeing one thing mean that you don’t want to go to a place? Kinda yeah… if that gives the place a bad impression.

Though I think you hit the nail on the head earlier: this case is somewhat special since lemmy.cafe is so extremely tiny that even one user - ironically someone from another instance entirely (rottenwheel@lemmy.zip) - forms what looks at first glance to be over half the posts submitted to that instance.

It is also odd that there are only 5 users of that community, which nonetheless still has <50 total users (even the Pokemon community below it in traffic that has only 4 active users has >100 total members). Mind you I don’t know how those numbers are calculated - does a “visit/view” count as activity, or what about a vote, or is it only a post or comment? Even this community !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca has had only 2 users last month, which I suspected may have both been me from 2 accounts, if a “view” were to count (if not, then it must have been someone else, or rather 2 other people).

But anyway, it’s an extraordinarily large amount of posts for such a tiny community. Which… kudos to that person then, for keeping such a niche community alive on the Fediverse? We don’t have to join it:-).

Btw here is an interesting recent exchange b/t that crypto poster and the instance admin: https://lemmy.cafe/post/8734571 - rottenwheel is definitely pushing for the site to leave the web and exist solely within the dark web, but the instance admin is having none of that (for one thing, that’s simply not how Lemmy works).

So no, I don’t believe that rottenwheel is a major force behind what is happening at lemmy.cafe - they are only posting a lot of content to a community that happens to be on it. But it is only one user, and one community, afaict.

But if people don’t want to join it - either b/c of the crypto posts or b/c the instance itself is so tiny - then that’s their prerogative. It’s so great to have choices is it not?:-)

Yes and as I wrote up the first draft for this I definitely included that disclaimer but it got too long and so I took it out (along with a bunch of other stuff). Whether someone wants to block any particular instance at all - whether hexbear.net or lemmy.ml or midwest.social or whatever - is up to them, and I covered that already in the previous post in this community.

Talking more about it now though: I agree that it is more than a little unfortunate then that such users would get lumped in together with the kind of “spam” that comes out to us across the Fediverse from inside that instance. It isn’t their fault, either directly, nor do they have anything to do with either the other users on their instance or the policies of their admins. I can well imagine having discussions entirely locally inside of lemmy.ml on communities such as !firefox@lemmy.ml or !linux@lemmy.ml or !privacy@lemmy.ml etc., but never once encountering such users as I have mentioned elsewhere here - and perhaps they have likewise blocked them even.

But for myself, and many others, the trade-off is worth it. It narrows our experiences of the Fediverse sure, but I no longer wish to participate in a community where their content and userbase are held hostage by the tankie philosophy. This approach increases the false negative / type 2 “misses” of federated content, while substantially decreasing the false positive / type 1 “spam” that can get blocked.

You for instance do not participate in political communities. What we want to do or not do is up to each of us, and may even change over time. Therefore what I am a HUGE fan of is the democratization of that choice: how can someone take matters into their own hands, even without support of an admin, and improve their experiences on the Fediverse?

And although I deleted from the OP, I would have loved to have included an entire section on why blocking is inferior to merely “labelling”. What if instead of the binary yes/no there was a third choice? PieFed already provides such btw, in the form of “reputation” labels that are put onto user accounts. e.g. if you have received more downvotes than upvotes you will get a label that, while not restricting your activities in any way, will alert users (of instances running PieFed) to that fact. Similarly there is a new account label, etc. The advantages are numerous - e.g. rather than taking equal time to parse every single comment that you see, only realizing at the end that someone is spewing propaganda (or gish gallop, reverse gish gallop, controlling the conversation, strawman, the card says moops - the list goes on and on and on and on), you can see the label and deprioritize it.

This is a fully game-changing advantage that restricts the users of an instance in no way, yet still allows for something in-between full defederation vs. full allowance, as if they were speaking in good faith when in fact they may not be. However, this sounds to people like it is “karma” - notably it isn’t, not really, b/c e.g. there need be no difference between +1000 vs. +10000 - so I don’t expect people to be a big fan of this. But still, it’s there if someone wants to use this rather than blocking.

And Mbin does similarly, by while still allowing upvotes, also adding “favorites” from people on instances running Mbin, which tend to be more pro-Western oriented, therefore the large number of upvotes for a post in something such as hexbear.net’s ChapoTrapHouse will not necessarily make that content appear high up in a list sorted by Hot or Top, and instead content gets sorted by the favorites / alternative votes.

Anyway, it’s a super complicated subject. Lemmy is in beta, and the entire concept of Federation is being tested right now, on the fly. And some people cannot wait for perfect solutions to come out and be vetted - so for those of us who simply want the spam to be GONE, I am glad that I finally found a way that doesn’t mean that, like all of my irl friends, I have to leave the Fediverse entirely to make it happen.

Oh I did not know that. Tbh the interface is a little confusing to me - but I suppose I could get used to it, and actually most of that affects the mobile rather than desktop. Anyway, every single thing I continue to hear about it continues to impress me still further - e.g. they now have “post flairs”, which act like the Reddit ones i.e. they are basically “tags”, which Mbin and PieFed also have but Lemmy lacks - and yet even while still running on “Lemmy”, Admiral Patrick made it happen. Plus it runs YouTube videos natively inside of it. It’s basically an open-source app that doesn’t need you to download it but instead runs inside of the web browser - not an easy accomplishment by any means. And then there’s this little gem:

I built Tesseract in my spare time as a hobby, learning excercise for Svelte, and to address my own personal annoyances with Lemmy and other Lemmy UIs. That said, I do not feel the need to accept donations for its development.

Also, he will switch the back-end from Lemmy to Sublinks when that becomes available. Or maybe Sublinks will use something more like Tesseract natively, I have no idea (I never hear about Sublinks anymore these days - I seem to be the only one that continues to mention it, that I see at least).

But anyway, it’s impressive AF. And yet it might disappear at a moment’s notice - well, dubvee.org might, whereas Tesseract is open-source code so anyone could take it up and continue that if they wanted. In terms of blocking a custom instance such as Lemmy.ml, I would naively guess that what it took to implement that would be a combination of both Tesseract (the software making it possible) and dubvee.org (as the instance admin) - i.e. if someone else were to run Tesseract then they could decide differently, as admin of their own instance.

I have never not enjoyed any conversation I have ever had with Admiral Patrick. Others hint that they have seen differently but nobody will respond with any details or links to anything so… I can only go by what I see, which is impressive.

Ah, another downside to trying to work with a single-admin instance - if they ever get sick or go on vacation or some such, you’re screwed. I see that it self-reports only 3 active monthly users, and only 12 users total? Lemmy.cafe has 10x that and is still considered very tiny.

I finally figured out how to see activity stats for dubvee.org: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list says that there are only 5 active monthly users. Even then I strongly considered joining it, it’s kinda impressive, especially irt multimedia support, and the admin is very active on the Fediverse himself and seems quite friendly. He would not be so friendly with e.g. a tankie, but that’s kinda the point isn’t it?:-)

PieFed.social reports 107 active users, of 400 total.

The largest Mbin server has 439 active monthly users, of >5k total (though their signups are either closed or else https://fedidb.org/software/mbin is falsely claiming that fact). The next largest is 119 and all the other instances have <50 monthly active users.

There are only 9 instances that have >1k monthly active users, and none of those defederate from Lemmy.ml. And people have been talking about this issue for months now, so if I missed a mid-sized instance I would have hoped that someone would have mentioned it by now.

Basically there are no “great” options, only ones with varying degrees of complexity to implement. And ofc you could just block every user individually, along with every community, and avoid discussion about either politics or Fediverse drama - that would work as well:-). For us I mean, whereas every single new user to the Fediverse will continue to have to discover such afresh on their own.

I see it: Settings -> Appearance -> Display Votes, set to Hide.

The votes will still be there, affecting e.g. how your content (posts and replies) will be sorted, you just would not see them anymore.

Although that might (I don’t truly know) be how instances that disable downvoting work anyway? Or at least when interacting with other instances even if not internally.

I mean, if they choose that for themselves then sure. Or perhaps a top 20 instance will choose to defederate from lemmy.ml (and some also from hexbear.net too). There are lots of things that could theoretically be done - e.g. sh.itjust.works is currently the #4 instance wrt monthly active users, so if those admins were to implement such a block, and also make sure that it affected the view when looking at content as a guest without an account, that would be an even more major solution. Though some people may avoid it purely for the name alone:-).

And yet that applies to so many of them - Lemmynsfw.com, lemmy.ca (implies it being regional, which tbf… it is!:-), feddit.org, lemmy.dbzer0.com (not everyone, especially mainstream, may be comfortable with anarchy), lemmy.blahaj.zone (I for one find it very welcoming but not everyone is gender diverse or comfortable with that I suppose), programming.dev (also other issues there with their database I guess, plus not everyone is into programming), discuss.tchncs.de (wait that’s… not even Lemmy, that’s PixelFed - why is that in the Lemmy list at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list ?), and so on and so forth. The best from a “URL name” standpoint with high MAUs may be lemmy.zip, but it is focused on gaming, which not everyone is into, and they remain federated not only with hexbear but also lemmygrad as well, so don’t seem amenable to want to defederate from lemmy.ml on top of that.

Nothing is perfectly suited for the goal of becoming the next Lemmy.World as a general-purpose instance that could absorb Reddit refugees, but split the traffic at least moderately so that it does not all currently reside on one instance. And even if some solution could be found - like if lemmy.cafe were to decide to take on a new admin - could they even handle a large influx of thousands of users, and continuously maintain that down the road? That particular admin seems on the ball (not that I know much about such things, and as you pointed out previously, running a beta software version may actually cause issues with federating with others instances), but that has indeed been a limiter for many other instances like programming.dev and startrek.website. If they want to and they can handle it, then that’s great, but it’s up to them to make those calls.

Which is why that conversation with the admin of sh.itjust.works was so exiting to me - they are already set up to handle that kind of traffic, they already are the #4 highest-traffic instance, and they have already defederated from hexbear, plus have expressed sympathy for doing at least something about showing Lemmy.ml content to their own users. Yeah the name may turn people away, but what other options are there? Though it’s up to them if they want to aim for such, just like it would be up to Lemmy.world to decide similarly how to handle content coming from Lemmy.ml.

In the meantime, I wanted people to know how they could take matters into their own hands without having to spin up their own instance. None of which is terribly easy unless they are okay to switch to using a limited set of apps or PieFed or Mbin. There are also many other benefits for doing the latter as well, including to further become less dependent upon pro-authoritarian developers. At the end of the day, it is what it is.

I sorted by New and see what you mean, but I also noted that while the most recent post on the entire instance is from 2 days ago, the second most recent post is 17 days ago. And yes both are crypto, but they are a weekly newsletter, which even in the titles reflects that it skipped a week. Anyway, that instance seems to routinely go days to weeks without posting anything at all. So that’s not really the purpose of the instance.

My previous instance Discuss.Online is similar: there are no communities with more than 50 monthly active users. Instances like these are meant more as on-ramps to the wider Fediverse than as destination spots on their own. Others like yours and StarTrek.website are more of a mixture, offering both - although even so, all of the communitied on StarTrek.website combined still only represents a third of the monthly active users compared to the singular !tenforward@lemmy.world community featuring Star Trek memes. Therefore the StarTrek.website instance “has content”, but it is likewise tiny, even for content specifically related to Star Trek ✨.

So then I’m not sure: why are people taken aback? The default sort for someone without an account is not Local but rather All, for that reason. Someone would have to specifically switch the default to Local in order to see that? At a guess, it is just mismatched expectations - presuming that in addition to using that instance to access the Fediverse, that it would offer content of its own. Which it does but… barely. I am not sure why that should be a default expectation though?

Still, I hope you don’t feel like I’m picking on you, it’s definitely a valid point that if people feel taken aback about the instance, for whatever reason, then it is less likely to be used by them.

I think you underestimate how many mainstream users want political news, but otherwise yeah all good points. Though also a user not logged in does face quite a different experience than one who has e.g. realized and blocked ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆. That one action alone can make such an enormous difference in terms of what posts are shown to a visitor to the site, with multiple posts per hour and spread across many many many communities, and sometimes cross-posting in Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml.

This post appears in !memes@lemmy.ml, despite being explicitly political. I suppose it must be “funny” bc the West does wars, but China in no way has threatened any nation ever (Ta…), or offered aid to another nation that is actively doing genocide (Ru…), or even done such activities directly by themselves (Uy…).

Or what about I’m sick of liberals pearl clutching over January 6th, claiming that:

the whole thing as an absolute joke, but they’re treating it like it was an actual terrorist strike or something. “An AtTaCk On DeMoCrAcY”, fuck off, it was some people wandering inside the Capitol because the cops let them in.

I found such things as these by browsing by All, especially since I had not subscribed to any communities yet. It’s a toss-up what you’ll see in All for sure, but that’s the point - to see what’s out there. And then mainstream people don’t like it and leave Lemmy. It would be nice if there were at least warning for this. Because it’s not just about seeing content - when someone makes the mistake of replying, oh oh! right directly inside of Chapotraphouse, wow, that’s when the fireworks begin, and the replies just keep rolling in for WEEKS and WEEKS.

So, yeah it’s possible that someone will manage to avoid running into someone from LG or ML or HB long enough for them to get to like this place and decide to stick around, but it’s also entirely possible for them to do the opposite and walk right into one of these places immediately. Likely even?

Here is a interesting conversation I had with an admin at sh.itjust.works 5 months ago. What makes it interesting is their suggestion to make:

something like autoblocking the instance on user creation… which might make more sense than outright defederation. A bot could probably be made to do that and send them a DM with instructions on how to change it off they so wish.

This is exactly what I was hoping for - making such posts opt-in, rather than have to opt-out! However, I don’t know if it was ever implemented, and even if it was, it would only affect new accounts on that one specific instance. Though it could serve as a model for others to follow, to provide an alternative to either defederation (not going to happen, not with ML) or retaining what we have now which is to treat their bad-faith posts the same as all the good-faith ones.

Yeah and right now the web UI lacks significant polish. e.g. in the deeper threads, it is easy to get “lost” and not find what you are looking for, especially with all the collapsing and Continue thread elsewhere stuff going on.

But wow it does give me strong hope to see what it’s doing already.:-)

Responding separately to provide an update on this matter in isolation of others, here is an example of PieFed adding a label regarding an instance: https://piefed.social/post/307766 adds at the end:

This post is hosted on beehaw.org which has higher standards of behaviour than most places. Be nice.

So this isn’t some hypothetical future thing: such labeling is already being done.

PieFed.social has defederated entirely from Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml though, so no need for a label in those cases.