Let me teach why we call “cagers” cagers!

Do I need a cager to transport me to Berlin?

I moved onto piefed when the lemmy instance I was on shut down, and I don't regret it at all. It's a solid choice and promotes options in the threadiverse.

There were a few, not exaustive since it's been a few months since I looked through the source code, some of this might have changed and there's also a few other checks that I'm forgetting:

• 4chan screenshots (specifically anything that OCR identified as having "Anonymous #(number)" in it) were banned. Honestly this one is fine as a toggle but I think for a while it was just on by default in the code
• any community that had specific words in it were blocked at instance level. I think "meme" was there, a few swear words, and a few carryover reddit meme community names (196, I think nottheonion was also there, anything with "shitpost" in the name, etc.)
• There's a hidden karma/social credit score based on a user's interactions and net total karma hidden from them that gets impacted by any moderation actions, including some of the automated hardcoded ones (e.g. even trying to upload an image that gets flagged by the hardcoded checks). In some cases the user is not informed of any of these changes (the image upload will appear as a generic image upload error)
• users with a low enough net score can be automoderated at both a community and instance level

Edit: the other thing is, a lot of this hardcoded moderation isn't documented anywhere outside of the code, likely because a lot of the measures would be useless if people knew how they worked

Edit 2: updated based on Blaze's reply from another comment, I misremembered the shadow banning, I was confusing it with the federation errors that occur when one user blocks another

Honestly I would consider [user-obscured] hardcoded shadowbanning just as bad.

Just because I'm closer to agreeing with the PieFed dev's opinions a little bit more doesn't mean that I'd support shadowbanning someone because the trivially-evaded checks caught a false positive in the crossfire. Piefed's auto moderation/social scoring is pretty much textbook definition security-by-obscurity. The second anyone knows how it works, it's useless. It will pretty much exclusively catch people who just wanted to post a harmless meme or something.

At least (for now) Dessalines isn't hardcoding his tankie beliefs into Lemmy's source code.

Edit: Blaze is right, it isn't shadowbanning, but the rest of my point still stands, added the [] part to clarify

piefed is the way

Piefed doesn't shadowban:

The reputation system doesn’t shadowban content. You don’t get comments silently autoremoved for having a low reputation. You don’t get throttled either.

https://lemmy.zip/post/58102975/24342240

Thanks for clarifying, I guess I misremembered the shadowbanning part. I think I was mixing together the fact that reputation isn't really transparent (users' reputation can change by even attempting to upload an image that gets flagged, and the vague error means they'll probably try multiple times without realizing they're being moderated) and the fact the communities can autoban any user whose global reputation is low enough.

I still think the security-by-obscurity approach to moderation is inherently flawed though, and I hate to imagine how the dev approaches actual account security if that's their approach to moderation.

I assumed it meant machine learning or something, ty

The code is open source. Nothing is obscured. The main objective is to identify trolls and toxic users who won't bother looking at the code.

It's not a silver bullet, it's just supposed to grab the low hanging fruit, but it's fine for me

The code is open source. Nothing is obscured.

"Security-by-obscurity" is a phrase used for any measure that is useless once you know how it works. In this case it's hoping that a troll doesn't know about the specific hardcoded rules. None of the rules in PieFed actually work if you are at all aware of them.

Downvoted but correct, they used to admit it before the exodus, but after the exodus they started denying it to seem more "general" in an attempt to appeal to everyone that isn't stupid as shit.

Yet I still regularly see toxic users being flagged as such, with a 95% accuracy. Either they don't care or they don't know enough about the system to bypass it.

I think that is just how it is over there.

Where does that funding come from?

Hey its me, the real dessalines.

Can I have some money.

Thanks for sharing this, really appreciate the clarity. Honestly, the interface, which they themselves created, doesn’t exactly make it obvious. You’re absolutely right that the original post doesn’t fall under that rule 4 either. And while I can’t say your sentiment on its content is unreasonable, removing the whole post, despite the constructive comments that were being left, doesn’t actually change the minds of the overwhelming number of users who left positive votes on both occasions.

Thanks for the analysis but there is no indication that any video was posted more than once or that the creator is a Lemmy user.

Done, thanks!

piefed is the way

Piefed is just as bad and is designed to mimic the worst parts of reddit

My hometown have a few tower, but the most infamous is made in that ugly cheap brutalist style and is generally recognized as being an eyesore.

But one day i was invited to somebody who lived in the tower. And I was blown away, but I realized that the main advantage of living in the tower was that when you're in it, you don't see the tower.

My point is that on the so-called tankie instances, at least they're not constantly whining about tankies.

Neither are they on the instances that defederate from them.

It's also not like it's an ideological thing. The instances that get defederate from are just filled with obnoxious tankies.