I mean, I literally am here - and any local instance policies are designed, or going to be designed to be transparent - and there’s no shadow-banning policy (and the ban system is being overhauled anyway)

Piefed is as decentralised as Lemmy.

piefed shadow bans to shape narratives like reddit does, but it’s next level that makes you unaware that you and your opinions have been shadow banned.

I am literally an admin on piefed.social. What shadowbans are you referring to?

Moreover, instance on piefed have their own policies - just like on lemmy. A badly behaved instance can be cut-off and isolated by the wider userbases.

Yes I’m aware the design of the fediverse makes things public. You’ve made that point.

Sorry, let me amend. Whether or not all of these things have to remain publicly visible based on ActivityPub, I don’t know - I’m just saying that I think its overall a good thing.

I think hiding your profile is worth the moderation trouble. Users report individual posts, they’re very rarely going through a person’s profile.

I don’t. And sometimes users identify patterns of behaviour, and as my example illustrated, sometimes you need wider context to evaluate whether or not a post is deceptive.

Mods banning based on activity in other places also leads to the opposite problem. Some subreddits do it and basically everyone hates it.

Those are usually done by autoban bots, which I very much oppose (and I don’t know if they could be blocked on the fediverse - but I am sure many instance owners would take a dim view of it, and suspect that the fact that the fediverse is a federated structure makes many community owners that might use them much less inclined to do so).

And that can still happen anyway on Reddit even with profile concealment if those bots scrape specific subreddits for activity, rather than profiles.

Admins would still be able to see it. Mods can maybe see for their comm.

Admins seeing it isn’t enough. A lot of the time admins and community mods rely on reports of user conduct, where people observe patterns and forward it on.

Moderators also sometimes need to see those wider patterns of behaviour. An example here could be a music self-promoter sharing their song in a music community that does not allow self-promotion. If a moderator could only see posts by that user within communities they moderate, they wouldn’t know if they’re disingenuously self-promoting - in violation of the communities rules.

This is the same argument used against all privacy. The EU wants to kill end to end encryption so they can catch bad actors. No thank you, I’d rather my messages were private and so was my lemmy profile.

I don’t think governments, or all applications should be forced to be public so state entities can go through everything. I’m just saying that the public presence of all content is foundational to the concept of the Fediverse specifically and having it remain as a high-trust instance (or collection of instances). This isn’t Facebook. This isn’t a Discord chatroom. Or a WhatsApp chat. Private voting, private modlogs and private profiles long-term corrode trust in communities like reddit and lead to long-term damaging trends that degrade the quality of content.

I don’t think any of this should be private. Allowing users to hide their profile creates conditions beneficial for astroturfing and for bots and trolls to obscure their history.

Sorry, so you don’t object to post history being public on the fediverse - but simply want it said plainly that “Post history is not private” directly to users?

I meant searching within subreddits (communities) - using it to find new relevant communities. Piefeds community browser is great for this, allowing filtering by activity, combined with the feed system.

Why is Piefed like reddit, but Lemmy isn’t?

Do you mean can feeds combine communities from different instances? My assumption would be yes.

It is, and I keep banging on about this whenever the topic is mentioned but Reddits current preparation timescale for the changes here are interesting. This isn’t going to be implemented until March 31st, 2026. This tells me that Reddit would have been unprepared for a complete mass-walkout of community moderators during the 2023 Reddit API strikes. A large chunk of Reddit during that period was genuinely inaccessible. But after a few token gestures and a few examples made of some especially rebellious mod-teams, most of the striking moderators returned.

A huge opportunity was missed by people running major communities to functionally degrade Reddit in at least the medium-term as a website. You can’t just hastily promote random people to replace moderators Reddit is either forced to remove or who leave voluntarily. The average person is likely too lazy, too arbitrary and too corrupt to effectively oversee communities of notable sizes.

People whine about terminally online moderators being power-hungry and garbage, but I can assure you hastily promoted randoms given the keys are far worse in most cases.

That would be one of those mandatory blacklists to which I referred. And now I’m repeating myself.

So a “mandatory blacklist” sounds an awful lot like just a admin ban which is no different to what exists now.

Just say, “bwaaaah! I don’t like it” and be done with it.

I don’t. But for many other reasons to.

It would be present on a guy’s computer and the network would block any communication with him. I think that’s as good as it gets.

No, from the way you have described it - people who have enabled a blocklist that block his account would block any communication with him and thus blacklist his child porn. But anyone else who enters the website new without any blocks up would see it.

I think you’re dead wrong there. I think that everybody hates being told what they can say and who they can talk to.

This debate has come up many times before on the fediverse. Most people do not support the site being turned into 4chan.

Many instances are run relatively stricter than other instances (such as beehaw and lemmy.blahaj) and specific communities require higher levels of moderation maintain a level of quality (particular subreddits not present on the fediverse function like this right now such as askscience, askhistorians etc).

No, it would still be present if someone wasn’t running any blocklists.

“It would be bad” and “it isn’t how it’s supposed to work” are not substantial arguments.

Yes, they are. The Fediverse is ultimately shaped by what the users want. If most of the users don’t want to lose the moderation tools because they find the outcome undesirable, then it won’t happen.

You are in a very small minority.

That is my argument. The Fediverse has to remove child-porn. Simply allowing to be filtered out by users isn’t good enough legally.

Moreover, the system you call for would degrade communities as merely being twitter hashtags. That’s simply not how this is supposed to work.

No, because the child porn would still be present. Not good enough legally.

There is no support for your ideas on the fediverse.

Yes, so you mean people can simply import other users block-lists. That’s the only difference. But if someone new arrived, and didn’t know of one - they would be met with a wall of spam and abuse.

Moreover, I’d also add that websites have a legal requirement to remove child porn.

Your system just converts communities into hashtags. It’s in opposition to what this site is.

people can already do this via blocking, but no-one regards that as sufficient.

It would effectively mean that someone new to a widely used community would potentially immediately run into spam, trolling, abuse and child porn and have to manually block a bunch of users before it looks normal.

This is just a block list system. You can already do this now.

How could it replace moderators developed further?