Piefed has promise, particularly in the way it makes a serious effort to make votes private, but it’s got a ways to go. It’s missing some features Lemmy provides, and better third party app support is needed, too.

My kingdom for another instance with admins like this one.

This is a non-answer.

What matters most is the type of people in charge of the instance, why the decide to do certain things, and the types of decisions they’re likely to make in the future.

Not all instances are the same in that regard.

Problem isn’t so much defederation policy in and of itself, as much as it is just the general level-headedness of the admins

Lemm.ee’s lead admin had exactly the type of philosophy towards managing this platform that I want to see in wherever I go next.

This post alone is what convinced me to create a primary account there. It’s professional, level-headed, nuanced, well spoken, and you can tell they’ve actually thought a lot about the big picture in an unbiased way. Not aggressive, preachy, standoffish, snarky, snobbish, and above all, not reactionary. Seeing the instance as infrastructure is what I want to see more of, but I also just want to see admins with this attitude overall.

You mean the thing they just shut down?

The images might be missing because of other people moving their accounts. I’m still seeing images, though.

Not sure if that’s a joke but you replied to a comment from lemm.ee, and I’m replying to you from it.

That doesn’t explain the hostility. Nothing Mozilla has done recently warrants anywhere near as much aggression and rage baiting as these people have been doing.

There’s a bizarre and extremely hostile subset of users who seem to have some kind of vendetta against Mozilla and Firefox. They’re not above criticism, obviously, but these people inflate literally everything with unnecessary hostility.

Problem is, if it’s visible to mods, it’s effectively public.

This also presumes mods are, by default, inherently non-biased, held to a standard, and never have vendettas of their own.

Of all the many things reddit did poorly, choosing not to let mods see votes was an excellent decision.

Yeah, agreed. The more consolidated a thing becomes, the more entrenched it becomes. When alternatives, exit ramps, and escape routes are needed, they won’t exist or require too much effort to take.

A lesson everyone should have learned 2 years ago.

The latter. It’s basically emerging as the alternative to Lemmy, but it federates with Lemmy instances. You don’t necessarily need to join a piefed instance for this feature when many Lemmy apps will do it, but there’s a lot of movement to piefed for other reasons.

Votes are private as well.

It’s not happening. The company had to make a statement after the dailymail posted it’s bullshit the other day. Daily Mail had to publish a follow-up about it:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-14742311/Standing-seats-designer-comfort-tested.html

It’s still bull. This has been resurfacing routinely for years.

The Daily Mail had to post a followup to their own bullshit, where the designers states plainly that these are prototypes and not being used anywhere any time soon.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-14742311/Standing-seats-designer-comfort-tested.html

Okay, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that these two developers, with their decisions in moderating that one instance, have dragged down the reputation of the entire platform. They’re asking for donations because they lost the donations they were already getting.

And instead of questioning why that is and addressing it, they’re asking for more.

This doesn’t inspire trust in them. I trust their ideology not to mess with the platform, what I don’t trust is their competence if they can’t stop hemorrhaging donation money by refusing to deal with the biggest wart on the platform. They have all of these people saying they would donate if they would just deal with this conflict, but they won’t. How badly do they need the money to keep developing if they’re not willing to separate?

Here’s the better question: do they even want to keep developing if they had to separate from it?

More importantly, just from a straight development perspective, this whole operation is a way too flimsy if it’s depending on these two people, alone, forever. There have been a lot of really clumsy mistakes and lack of best practices.

What happens if they finally get another developer that really knows Rust and wants to join the project but doesn’t “fit in”? How are they actually going to expand the team so this project can grow and not be so dependent on them when they have the reputation they do?

If the community were going to fork it, they would have forked it by now. I don’t think there are enough people around that can manage a fork of this platform as it exists, so we are tied to them. And I don’t think I like that. I would like to see this platform expand beyond them, but the current course doesn’t seem to indicate that will ever happen.

Alternatives are not even close in quality.

Yes and we can go donate to those alternatives instead and help build them up.

Completely divorced of their political views, I don’t think I want to donate to them simply because I don’t believe they’re doing a good job managing the platform. Donations aren’t just down, they lost those donations. And when confronted with this fact, and told that they should probably change some things if they want to keep getting donations, they’ve staunchly refused.

This does not inspire faith in the development team.

Meanwhile lemmy’s development is either too guarded or too complicated for anybody else to join the team and assist. It’s still just these two. If the platform is growing, it cannot just be these two.

Freeloading where? They can be donating to the instance they are on.

It is not impossible, it’s just difficult. You do not have to keep everyone satisfied, only enough of them. All you’re doing here is making arguments for why they shouldn’t change because they will never get 100% approval rating. That’s just idiotic. No one is expecting perfect, they just expect better.

More importantly, neutrality in moderation is generally seen as more acceptable than swinging fully towards one direction. People will complain that you are allowing x or y, but you get much further by permitting that balance to exist naturally and moderating it at its most extremes, then you do buy stamping out one and promoting the other, which is absolutely what they do on .ml

Whoever said that you had to be a free speech absolutist, either? You can believe in free speech and also not be okay with Nazis on your platform.

It’s really not that hard, many internet forums have been doing this for decades. It’s kind of telling, frankly, how the very notion of it seems to elude some people around here.

All of which ignores the point the top comment made: that they shouldn’t be moderating at all. Let whoever they choose moderate that instance, and separate from it entirely. Focus only on development.

But the fact they’re apparently more concerned about the content on that instance than getting donations to support development of the platform is very telling, too.

Also, if they can’t make enough money in donations to keep doing this full-time, why don’t they let other people into the project on a volunteer basis? Reduce the workload on themselves so they can get part time jobs or something. All I’ve heard is how controlling they are, but it feels like this is too big of a thing to be on two individual developers in the first place.

If more people than just them could be involved, I’d happily donate. I would like to donate to something that’s going to grow and get better over time, not to two individual developers treading water. I get it’s difficult to find people that know Rust, and I sympathize, but my point stands. This entire project is operating very precariously on two individuals and if it’s going to grow, that has to change at some point.

And as Arotrios said in another comment, the reason they’re asking for money is because they lost the money they were getting. The way they operate, and allow that instance to destroy the reputation of their project, is what led to this. And it will continue to lead to this, unless they do some radical changes. I’m not putting my money back in until I see them doing something different and showing they’ve learned the lesson.